Arkayar

I was reading this Lawfare article on CDBCs (Central Bank Digital Currencies), and among other things it says that CDBCs could potentially challenge the dominance of traditional systems like SWIFT, which for the first time I find out, is an acronym that stands for “Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications.”

Wow, okay.

I don't want to say anything about whether CDBCs are better than SWIFT, but it struck me that I know almost nothing about the world's plumbing, i.e., the financial, political, institutional backbone of the globalized society we live in. I don't know how SWIFT works. For that matter, I don't know how IPCC is organized. I don't know how treaties are negotiated.

In short: I know zilch about the infrastructure on which the world works.

And it seems so strange we invoke this infrastructure all the time without knowing anything about it (guilty as charged). We may say, “the latest IPCC report says that the world is about to end in three years,” but we don't know the mechanics through which they arrived at that conclusion.

This is as true of national systems – I don't know how inter bank transfers work in the US or how GST is accounted for in India. We are alienated from these vast systems that regulate our lives. Which, effectively, hands over power to a typically unaccountable bureaucracy or sometimes worse: when a Trump comes to power and DOGE subverts this plumbing system to snag money back from our bank accounts.

I wish there was a way to educate ourselves on these systems that are hidden in plain sight.