I probably trust banking the most on a locked-down phone. It is in fact the interests of the state and its monetary system that these systems that implement it are secure.

At the same time, the state has its flaws and I'm questioning whether a top down system can ever really work, not out of some kind of "fuck the man" point of view, but more of an engineering and systems design perspective. If the system is perfectly factored, there are no cross-cutting concerns. But in such a system there is no need to communicate or coordinate laterally, only up and down. This sounds very lonely.

And if this system has a flaw, not a specific flaw, but rather a flaw in the assumption that tree structures with abstraction are a good way to organize systems, it might be impossible to change from let's say a tree with a single root to multiple interacting trees, with multiple roots of authority. Or maybe this is possible if people can learn to exist in multiple seemingly incompatible realities simultaneously?