The Sorting Function is a political-economy paper by Lee Sharks about mediation at socially consequential scale.
The paper asks whether harm comes from the existence of a third-party sorting function or from the extractive conditions under which current sorting systems operate. It argues that the question cannot presently be answered because no large, durable, non-predatory mediator exists as a comparison case.
Search engines, social platforms, publishers, peer review, catalogs, credentialing systems, and AI composition layers are examined as mediators. Community libraries, open archives, federated networks, and the early web provide partial counterexamples but do not resolve the scale problem.
The paper distinguishes reform work from meta-reform. Better evaluators and transparent filters may reduce current harms, yet they do not test whether centralized sorting should exist. The author provisionally favors non-predatory mediation as possible under different political economy, while acknowledging that the stronger anti-mediation position remains open.