In software, we can generally agree that too many layers of abstraction introduces many issues since it is difficult to ensure each layer is perfect. For this imperfection we often pay a price: performance, maintainability, etc. However I think that often this imperfection is unintended and is a consequence of trying to make things better.

In the finance world, and particularly with mortgages, there are similarly many layers of abstraction but each layer has an imperfection built in: money.

Your mortgage, after its gone through all these layers and after everyone had extracted their pound of flesh from its value along the way ends up looking nothing like the original product. It might end up as a resecuritized security based on only the interest portion of a pool of loans or some other abomination. Just like a JavaScript application is a completely different beast from the the x86 asm executing on your CPU.

However, in software these layers exist to try to make things better. In the finance world these layers exist to only make money. To extract value from one place and move it to another. These layers don’t need to exist in this form but they do because they make people money. This is the lie.

Despite this, we can’t just remove all these layers at once but maybe we can remove one layer. Just like you wouldn’t rewrite your nodejs server in asm but might drop down to Go or something.

Alternatively you can say, “hey I don’t need this website so badly so I’m just going to not build it” and not play. Or maybe you have the time and inclination to build it “from scratch” from assembly.

Starting with a plot of land and only the money in your pocket reminds me of the true hacker spirit! :)