We often talk about abstraction in software: hide the complexity from the user, make the interface user-friendly to the point that it becomes simple, and let everything underneath bear the load. But perhaps the best job we have ever done at abstraction is civilisation itself. We have hidden the convolution so well that, somewhere along the way, we have hidden our progress from ourselves.
Its disappearance has a strange ramification of making the extraordinary achievements of the human race slowly feel mundane. They become dull, merely ordinary, and slowly blend into the background, as though they were simply the default settings of the world. Our perception of this long journey becomes increasingly lacklustre, stripping away the thrill of seeing just how far we’ve come.
Never did my stupid brain ever give a thought to how much sits behind an institution as ordinary as a university. I go, attend classes, submit assignments, sit for exams and leave. That is more or less what’s there for me.
A microcosm of the point I’m trying to make is fundraising. At the University of Michigan, for instance, more than 550 people are involved in it. They spend years building relationships with donors… meeting them, taking them to fancy restaurants for dinner, bringing them into VIP boxes during high-stakes games. Over time, they learn what the donors care about and bridge those interests with something they would passionately fund.
This translates to more than 1.1 million hours of work annually, collectively spent on just one function. I would’ve never imagined that an institution that is mostly understood as a place where students and teachers interact, requires so much invisible labour. But that is exactly what abstraction does. It hides the machinery so well that we start thinking of the application layer as the whole system, as though WHAT YOU SEE IS ALL THERE IS.
Knowledge is abstracted in much the same way. We see the application layer and rarely look underneath it, unless our academic or professional interests give us a real reason to.
I was reading Code by Charles Petzold, which briefly touched upon the Hindu-Arabic numeral system. We use it everyday without ever stopping to think about how incredible it is. The elegance lies in how little attention it needs to be understood. It feels so intuitive now that we forget that it was an invention in the first place.
The apparent simplicity really masks the depth of what it allows us to do. Somewhere, far, far downstream, it enabled the invention of the computing machine through which I send this emoji combo “🫵😂”.
The same phenomenon also exists in the physical world. A sidewalk looks nothing more than a gray slab of concrete. You can walk on it, maybe skate on it or sit on a bench beside it. Yet underneath this plain slab sits the drainage, maintenance schedules, pedestrian flow and planning decisions, and accessibility standards that are pivotal for it being there in the first place. It could be broken down further into an even more complex system, but the better the sidewalk works, the fewer reasons there are to notice any of that.
Despite how different the above microcosms are in nature (institutional system, intellectual progress and physical infrastructure), they gel together around the same idea that we’ve become stupidly good at vacuum packing complexity into something that feels really simple on the surface.
ABSTRACTION ALLOWS ONE GENERATION TO START WHERE THE PREVIOUS GENERATION LEFT OFF. This is its colossal strength. But it also makes us lose sight of how large and coordinated the machine really is. A skyscraper is there because it has always been there. Clean water is dispensed from faucets as that is what faucets do. We begin to mistake the accumulated achievements of civilisation for the static background of our lives.
I am in no way arguing that we should dig everything back down to the bedrock. That would defeat the entire purpose of abstraction. Things are working precisely because none of us needs to understand everything, nor trace every causal chain back to its origin. But perhaps, every once in a while, we should care to look underneath.
Because underneath lie centuries of blood and sweat poured into engineering, institution-building, scientific discovery, and coordination. Some of it was deliberate progress. Some of it came through yak shaving, accidents and weird detours that somehow leapfrogged us ahead. Either way, what now feels obvious was nothing more than a blob of imagination in someone’s mind.
Perhaps this matters a lot now, when the world feels a bit more fragmented and more people mistakenly view progress as a zero-sum game. Looking beneath the abstraction gives us different reference points. Seeing how far we’ve come and what we’ve achieved gives us a taste of what we are capable of and the electric jolt needed to keep us brimming with curiosity.