If you run a widget factory, and are contractually obligated to sell all your widgets to Jeff Bezos, Jeff Bezos has a lot of control over you.

However, if you sell your widgets to whoever wants them, you may be doomed to produce widgets you hate, but there's no single person to blame for you having to do the work that you hate. You'd starve if your customers stop buying widgets, and are thus controlled by them, but it's hard to identify the locus of that control (so we don't perceive it in the same way we do Jeff Bezos controlling us).

This kind of customer/mob control is most dramatically expressed (for me) when content creators are audience captured: #278856.