I enjoyed this quote from Casey Newton on today's Hard Fork podcast:

Even as somebody who generally likes technology, I think some of these tech oligarchs have this extremely know-it-all attitude that "our tech is better than your tech, yours sucks," and they sort of bluster in and they say, "all of your aging legacy systems, we can just get rid of those and move on to the next thing." And then you wake up after Signal-gate and you're like, "oh, that's why there was a system. That's why there was a protocol. It turns out it was actually protecting something." This is the Silicon Valley story over and over again. We are going to come in and try to build everything from first principles. We're going to be completely ahistorical. We're not going to learn one lesson that anyone else has ever learned before because we think we're smarter than you and Signal-gate shows us that actually, no, sometimes people have actually learned things and there is wisdom to be gleaned from the ages.

Like Casey, I'm a big fan of technology. Seriously, if you've known me for any amount of time, you know I'm an enthusiast. But just like Casey, I'm less eager to think that everyone who came before me was an idiot and we need to throw away the past. Sometimes the past does need to be expunged, but there is often a reasonable reason that things are the way they are. In either case, it's always good to understand the existing system before making radical change.