deathmtn

I frequently complain about there being too much bad abstraction in software development, meaning that the abstraction is either unnecessary, misleading, faulty or all three. There's a lot of cases in which something is packaged up for software engineers such that they do not have to think about a problem – until the abstraction breaks. At that point – under pressure – the software engineer has to understand both the abstraction and the original problem.

A guest on this Talking Politics episode about the ways in which oligarchs and criminals can legally hide and move money using elite financial institutions says this at one point:

There’s this great line in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, which I’m sure you’ve all read intensely, when Mr. Weasley scolds his daughter Ginny at the end because she’s been possessed by a diary which was sort of inhabited by the spirit of Lord Voldemort. And he says ‘How many times do I have to tell you. Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can’t see where it keeps its brain.’

And that’s the thing about dark money, offshore money, is it’s acting, it’s influencing our politics. It’s buying assets. It’s buying houses. It’s paying for the media. It’s paying for, you know, political campaigns, but we can’t see where it keeps its brain. And I think this is a problem because obviously the owners of dark money are many and they are various and they are all over the world, but they all have one interest in common which is they don’t want to be exposed because if they get exposed they might have the money taken away from them. And that is a threat to democracy because the core function of a democratic government is to tax its citizens. And if a democratic government can’t tax its citizens then is it a democratic government anymore. So I do think that this dark money is a threat to democracy I think it’s a growing threat to democracy and I think that it will be never easier to do something about it than it is right now because the amount of money is growing and the more money there is the bigger threat this malevolent poltergeist is.

It occurs to me that this is a similar problem. We have abstracted things in such a way that most people do not understand some workings of the world that are incredibly critical to our well-being.