Leaky Abstractions: How Complex Systems Break Down When Their Details Are Exposed

Alex Danco explores how critical infrastructure abstractions—from ecommerce checkouts to paper checks—are vulnerable to political and regulatory interference that exposes their hidden complexity. Using examples like government attempts to eliminate paper checks and privacy regulations affecting online commerce, he argues that rational actors respond by hardening their defenses, creating costly second-order consequences. The article frames this as a subtler form of societal concern: not collapse, but widespread system leakage.