There has been a lot of talk of "legacy" systems and "legacy" technologies lately, talk which I've taken up and thought about some and worked in here. I thought it might be useful to briefly address that concept and get a better idea of what we are looking at.
Basic definitions of "legacy" establish it as something received from the past, or bequeathed as some sort of gift, or even given as some kind of special status in terms of social relations extending to the past. Broadly speaking, you could say that everything that exists came about as a sort of legacy of an unfolding from something in the past. But to narrow down the concept, and get at the particular sense of it that has been getting a lot of usage recently, and which is quite useful to our purposes, I want to run through another simple metaphor.
Let's say someone with some help builds a house themselves. It takes a lot of energy and time and know-how to build that house. The appropriate materials have to be sourced and there are a whole set of conditions that need to be in place for that house to be built to last: a good foundation needs to be laid with knowledge of the proper foundation materials, of grading and leveling, establishment of lines and dimensions of the footprint, and so on. For a modern house in the developed world, plumbing needs to be put in, floors and walls go in with electrical wiring weaved in, door frames and doors, window frames and windows, various layers of roofing, punched through with vents and chimneys, and what have you. There are so many special types of materials that go to particular functions such as waterproofing bathrooms and kitchens that I'm leaving out, but you get the picture. Hopefully if the job is done well, the house will carry out its manifold functions as it should for quite some time.
So then eventually that builder passes on, bequeathing the home to the builder's children as that builder's legacy. The children grew up in that home, and now as adults establish their own household within the sanctuary of its hallowed walls, assuming the house's many functions to maintain a continuity of the production of their lives, and their lives' eventual reproduction. And this is where things get interesting.
Over time, environments change and materials undergo weathering and wear and tear. Houses settle, undergoing subtle changes structurally. So when a door no longer closes right, or the roof starts leaking, or a beam develops a crack or starts showing signs of rot, do you tear everything down and start all over again? Hell no! That kind of decision would be considered wasteful and preposterous.
Instead you address the problems where they occur with localized expenditure, working within the confines of the existing structure, engaging in what we call "incremental reform" in the realm of politics. The nature of the house is such that various parts of it degrade at different rates on different levels, and that for most structures it would be reasonable to assume that the structure itself will stay composed for decades or more, and that the finer and more fragile components of the whole may degrade in a couple of years, in which they could safely be separated from the structure and replaced, and indeed buildings are typically intentionally designed with this purpose in mind.
With our modern capabilities, you can even replace the more structural, load-bearing elements of the house if need be. Structures could be supported with temporary scaffolding or jacks as whole beams are removed and new ones are inserted in. Lasers could map out correct levels on foundations, with problem areas slowly jacked up and shored up and reinforced. And houses undergo remodeling projects minor and major all the time. Theoretically, you could very well have a House of Theseus of sorts in which most of the substantial components are replaced entirely, piece by piece, over a longer period of time, while the integrity of the whole is maintained throughout.
All of this is assuming certain ideal conditions though. There are certain foundational and structural issues that are more serious or more difficult to solve. Or various sections or features of the house could be neglected for too long, for reasons of carelessness or lack of resources or lack of time, with the damage becoming more and more severe and extensive as time passes. There are economic concerns, in which the time and resources required for renovating a house may be much more than simply demolishing the house and starting again. Or the house could simply be demolished in a storm or some such. File any of this away under "all things come to an end sometime."
What else is happening as one lives in a house over time? Our builder's children are enjoying this legacy house bequeathed to them, but unless they are themselves contractors, they didn't build the house, and in their lifetime will probably never engage in such an activity. Remember, building a house takes a lot of time and resources, and not just simply in the actual act of building, but in all of the hours and resources put into practicing the many trades and crafts that together produce housing in its entirety. So those not building the housing have all kinds of time and resources freed up to be doing many other things, and so long as the housing holds up, each subsequent generation can drift away in collective activity from the original iteration of the housing itself, especially as those functions are further contracted out in a widening and deepening division of labor and professionalization.
A sudden loss of a house in this context then is an incredibly traumatic and shattering experience. One personally lacks the skills to produce another one, and one suddenly finds oneself in living conditions outside of a house, a radical departure from a particular set of conditions which may have held for generations.
If we start to scale this concept out from our simple metaphor of the house, we can start to see the legacy resource in just about everything, and the more you scale up and out, the more things are connected to that greater resource, and the higher the stakes of that resource's continued functioning, as we saw earlier with the treasury payment system.
There are urgent conversations taking place about everything from legacy material infrastructure, legacy military weapon systems, and legacy manufacturing systems and products being hollowed out by crapification and financialization, to legacy Internet structures being hollowed out with tech consolidation and enshittification, as described on the brilliant This Machine Kills podcast. They want to inject AI technologies into every aspect of our labor organization and intellectual production for example, like one might squirt glue into the cracks of some failing hunk of timber. But what happens if the same processes of financially corroded political economy - which rotted and hollowed out the metaphorical timber, weakening it and cracking it - are producing the metaphorical glue, which is itself no longer effective a binding agent as it once was? And indeed, the very metaphorical process of injecting the glue into the cracks could itself be inappropriate and inadequate.
So that a greater society as an organic whole, losing the remaining stores of its collective creative vitality and dynamism as it ages - as Spengler put it - can no longer maintain an entire field of its legacy structures and processes, which are degrading simultaneously at wider and wider scales, until a greater rupture threatens the whole of it.
We see this in extreme form in the more highly stressed societies, in which an entire array of supporting legacy systems are suddenly compromised at once. This is part of the nature of totalitarianism, in which traditional systems, which may have built up somewhat organically over generations, suddenly start to fail all at once for any number of reasons, and in their desperation, a distressed people must build up radically new structures very suddenly, which appear as alien and alienating entities emanating from a sharply delineated point of power, which must be strictly enforced with brute force and terror.
We can locate in the historical totalitarian impulse a desire to strip everything currently existing away entirely, with a paranoid suspicion of the corruption and decadence - the rot, the disease; they have many names for it - which has set in at the foundations, threatening to topple the superstructure, and which could be lurking within every inch of the constructed culture, which must be sniffed out and torn out and eradicated wholesale, starting anew and fresh. And how do these projects typically end?
I'll follow Hannah Arendt in drawing metaphysical similarities between the Nazi and Soviet systems for example, but then depart from her analysis and follow the contemporary historians of the Nazi and Soviet systems, who say that actually these systems were very different in their specificity and character and were conceived for very different reasons, which had very different effects and consequences.
But for our immediate purposes, one commonality to both systems was that they contained within them some fundamental tensions and contradictions which made them both ultimately unstable on a shorter timeframe, and which left a bad taste in the mouths of their peoples and the peoples surrounding them after they eventually collapsed, a taste which was memory-holed and suppressed, with the surviving elements of those societies unearthing various legacies and structures that had not entirely disintegrated - while accepting those elements flooding in from the outside to rebuild their societies after the flames of immediate rebirth had died down.
Nevertheless, over larger scales and timeframes, these cycles of dramatic birth, decline, and rebirth can recur again and again for quite some time. It is hard to say what the decline and fall of the US and the greater West will actually look like, and whether it will look like anything coherent at all really, save for looking back in a century or two through the lens of revisionist hindsight. And that is setting aside the greater decline and fall of industrial civilization as a whole for that matter. But these processes are certainly interesting to look through the lens of "legacy," to be sure.
