The Cost of Distance: Why Reality Still Matters in IT

We recently bought a second-hand car that seemed perfect. Clean papers, smooth engine, convincing seller. For a brief moment, it felt like a smart deal. Then came the slow unraveling: a hidden accident, a rolled-back odometer, and a trail of vanished owners. When we finally tracked the former owner, the truth emerged: the car had a story the dealer never told. Beyond the betrayal, the danger was real as we have been driving something unsafe, and we could not afford another mistake.

That experience was not about cars. It was about distance . How losing contact with reality breeds false confidence, and how trust without verification turns into risk.

In IT, the same dynamic unfolds at scale. We trust vendors we barely know, cloud providers whose systems we never touch, and compliance certificates we never question. Trust becomes abstract, managed through dashboards and contracts instead of judgment and contact. Yet every technical decision, like every mechanical part, carries a chain of dependencies, and a single weak link can turn confidence into catastrophe.

When Distance Scales

When a CIO discovers that a supposedly compliant SaaS vendor has been leaking personal data, the damage spreads like oil in water. A single false assumption cascades through customers, partners, and regulators. The breach does not stop at the border of one organisation. It travels silently, exponentially.

We have seen this pattern before: Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, SolarWinds, Equifax. Each began with misplaced trust and ended with systemic damage. What enabled them was not just technical failure, but cultural distance . The comforting illusion that contracts, metrics, and PR statements could substitute for truth.

Why Reality Hurts (and Heals)

In the physical world, the price of failure is immediate. Faulty brakes, failed trust, instant feedback. Pain teaches caution. But in software, abstraction cushions us from consequence. Damage is delayed, hidden, or outsourced to users. That insulation breeds complacency and a moral numbness that no policy can repair.

Real empathy grows only through contact. People who cook, repair, or drive for themselves understand what trust means, because they have felt the sting of its absence. Life, with its frictions and small defeats, trains perspective. Negotiating an insurance claim, arguing over a healthcare bill, or watching a child struggle at school, all these experiences anchor us in the real. Buying a bad part, eating spoiled food, or driving a car that fails inspection, these are equally harsh teachers. They forge humility. They teach stewardship.

Famous Detachments from Reality

• Boeing 737 MAX: Software written without cockpit context cost hundreds of lives. Optimisation for cost replaced engagement with truth.
• Volkswagen Emissions Scandal: Engineers knowingly coded deceit into their systems to meet performance KPIs. They optimised for dashboards, not air. That is what ethical distance looks like, the moment when numerical success eclipses moral responsibility.
• Toyota Unintended Acceleration: Millions of lines of opaque, unreviewed code controlled throttle systems without proper safety isolation. When engineers abstracted risk behind software layers, reality fought back, with fatal results.

These are not isolated moral lapses. They are symptoms of a culture that rewards abstraction over integrity. The further we move from the consequences of our work, the easier deception becomes, intentional or not.

Lessons for Builders and Leaders

1. Touch the System. Sit with support, shadow operations, and read unfiltered customer tickets. Real systems speak in friction, not slide decks.
2. Verify, Do Not Assume. Demand reproducible evidence, not glossy claims. Run your own audits. Test the lie before it tests you.
3. Close the Empathy Loop. Connect every decision-maker to human impact. No spreadsheet captures the cost of a broken promise.
4. Design for Breakage. Assume trust will fail, and decide now who absorbs the shock when it does.

When Systems Amplify Distance

In technology, distance does not stay local. It scales. Each abstraction, once coded or containerised, becomes replicable across millions of users. A careless assumption embedded in one API can ripple through thousands of companies. A design that ignores reality multiplies its blind spots at digital speed. What was once an ethical lapse between two individuals becomes a systemic breach between entire industries.

Software is a moral amplifier. It extends not only capability but consequence.

The Cost of Detachment

Abstraction seduces. It lets people believe they govern reality when they only govern symbols. Dashboards become substitutes for discipline, and KPIs become ethics by proxy.

As Jean Baudrillard warned, when symbols replace the real, the system begins to implode under its own simulation. Modern IT lives inside this illusion. The dashboards we celebrate do not describe the world. They describe a model of it, curated and sanitised until only comfort remains. Teams optimise for the graph, not the ground. The simulation becomes the system.

The longer we operate through models, the harder it becomes to feel the cost of being wrong. The simulation numbs responsibility. It is not only systems that degrade under abstraction, but also the people within them. Every repeated compromise, every ignored detail, corrodes our sense of reality until apathy masquerades as control.

But truth does not vanish because we stopped looking. Every layer of abstraction adds blindness, and blindness accumulates debt, moral, operational, existential. When reality finally breaks through, it does not ask for permission. It crashes in, demanding repayment with interest.

Closing Reflection

“It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you'll do things differently.” — Warren Buffett

If we learned anything from that second-hand car, it is that trust without verification is not trust , just hope disguised as competence. Hope will not stop a brake line from failing, nor a database from leaking. The only real safeguard is proximity: the courage to look, to question, and to stay in touch with what is real.

And proximity is not just a safeguard. It is what makes work meaningful. When we touch what we build, we remember who it is for. When we face reality, we rediscover purpose.

Systems inherit the moral weather of their builders. Stay close to the truth, or it will find you the hard way.