When my friends & coworkers at DreamWorks tried to create the animation pipeline for Oriental DreamWorks, we went with a “line-one rewrite” of the entire pipeline. We wrote everything, from the first line of bash, from scratch.
I regret this.
As in biology, adaptation & evolution accrete a lot of indecipherable cruft over the years. An engineer’s impulse is to clean everything up by starting over. But by doing this, tons of subtle utility and patches for (sometimes obscure) edge cases are lost. Not to mention how angry some people get.
I’m a big fan of Lawrence Lessig and reading his book Republic, Lost I instinctively agreed that we may need to call for a second constitutional convention. Sort of “Fuck it, America, let’s just start over.”
I no longer agree with that.
It’s telling (and worrisome) that some of the groups most enthusiastic about a new constitutional convention are far-right and neo-Nazi groups. They don’t care who gets hurt as long as their ideals get codified. The risk inherent in that sort of Maoist disregard for the human cost isn’t something that America should be comfortable with (despite Jefferson’s assertion that “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”) The Founding Fathers were, in many ways, assholes. But they were clever. The U.S. Constitution is imperfect but, like an infinite game, has mechanisms for self-editing.
I am now of the belief that we should try and fix what we’ve got before throwing everything out and starting over.
Better evolution than revolution.