From the Editor | Legacy: A Twist and a Dagger

We are always walking in the wake of countless legacies we’ve inherited from the past—great, terrible and meh, most of them invisible. I am always straining to catch a glimpse of them, curious as to how they have shaped the world we live in. But as a legacy-sensitive person, I am troubled by a twist in the meaning of the word “legacy.” It’s no longer just a noun that describes something transmitted from the past, although it’s still used that way; it’s also become an adjective for something outdated or obsolete, something that has survived longer than it should have. I have no interest in being the language police—my mission is to unpack words that muck up discourse. Legacy is now one of them. Its new usage has become so entrenched that few of us pause to ask what happened. I worry that if left unexamined, this small linguistic anomaly—loaded with dismissiveness—has the potential to sink civilization.

Legacy arrived in the world innocently enough. It comes from the ancient Latin word legatus (ambassador or envoy) and the verb legare (to send an envoy or deputy with a commission). It first appeared in English in the 14th century as “legacie,” meaning a group of people sent on a mission or the office of a deputy. Legacie evolved to mean property, gift or anything transmitted from an ancestor. Later it expanded to encompass the lasting influence of leaders, artists, institutions and cultures.

Its modern semantic drift began in the tech world. In the latter decades of the 20th century, software engineers and IT professionals needed a practical term to describe systems that were still operational but had been built with older architectures or technologies. They settled on “legacy systems.” Originally this term wasn’t derogatory—a legacy system was simply one inherited from an earlier generation. But because these systems could be difficult and costly to maintain and modernize, the adjective “legacy” gradually acquired a negative charge. Enter management consultants, CIOs and tech journalists who glommed onto the term and coined expressions such as legacy code, legacy databases and legacy infrastructure. As the lingo spread, legacy became a synonym for obsolete. Soon the new usage escaped from the tech box into everyday language.

One of the earliest and best-documented examples to enter the zeitgeist is my least favorite, “legacy media.” According to journalist and media critic Jeff Jarvis, he and others used the term in the mid-1990s to distinguish traditional newspapers, television and radio from emerging online media. Its usage was deliberately provocative—implying that conventional media belonged to an earlier technological era. “As news outlets first began to establish an internet presence apart from their print incarnation, and popular early blogs like the Drudge Report began to emerge, they faced an uphill battle to being taken seriously,” Jarvis writes. “Print and broadcast media were widely considered legitimate; anything published exclusively online might as well not have been published at all.” The “legacy” label came from a desire to reframe this distinction. “Because legacy media was sneering at us, we sneered back at them,” he says. “It was our way of saying, ‘You’re old farts.’”

This small linguistic anomaly has the potential to sink civilization.

On a fundamental level, the new twist on legacy denigrates the usefulness and importance of any human creation that was around before the 1990s—no matter its value. Take Moment. For nearly two dozen years, I’ve been the editor-in-chief and CEO of this 50-plus-year-old magazine. Moment carries forth a great legacy of journalism, thought and cultural criticism in what is a beautifully constructed piece of art printed on sheets of paper and distributed by mail. Moment also has incredibly innovative digital content presented in a multitude of formats, but we can easily be written off as “legacy media” with its suggestion of irrelevance and inability to adapt to an ever-changing world. Moment is none of these: We are entrepreneurial and exciting.

If we were to dismantle Moment and replace it with something completely new, decades of valuable accumulated knowledge, traditions and networks—visible and invisible—would vanish. In fact, Moment works precisely because it is a system that embodies tens of thousands of intangible historic decisions and relationships, not all of them remembered.

The new meaning of legacy, with its implied preference for replacement, sends the message that novelty is superior to accumulated human wisdom. Of course, language, law, music, science, mathematics, education and democracy are all systems based on accumulated knowledge. New knowledge is built on old; new theories explain where earlier ones worked or failed. And many supposedly “new” systems rely on older technologies, systems such as the internet, the electric grid, mainframes and airplanes, and established institutions such as banks, insurance companies and hospitals. Every system is, at its core, an inheritance—one generation’s accumulated experiments entrusted to the next.

In his 1962 essay “Rationalism in Politics,” the British political philosopher Michael Oakeshott emphasized that traditions are repositories of practical knowledge acquired through long experience—and warned against “rationalists” who try to design society from scratch using abstract theories, ignoring the accumulated wisdom of existing practices. Every generation has its so-called rationalists—individuals, movements and technologies jockeying to replace the past. But with the acceleration of technological change, much of it promoted by Silicon Valley titans for personal financial advantage, the new twist on legacy is suddenly in the vanguard.

In 2023, a year after he purchased Twitter, now X, Elon Musk wrote on the platform: “I almost never read legacy news anymore.” (That the former co-leader of DOGE wants to jettison anything he considers “legacy,” including Earth itself, is no surprise.) In his recent book, Alex Karp, the CEO of Palantir, the big data and AI behemoth, criticizes the U.S. government for continuing to focus on “legacy infrastructure” such as planes, ships, tanks and missiles instead of AI weapons. Balaji Srinivasan, author of the 2022 book The Network State: How to Start a New Country, freely wields terms such as “legacy country” and “legacy nation-state” to describe geographically bound states with governments that he views as stagnant or in decline. He argues that it is better to build new online and physical societies from scratch than reform existing governments through conventional politics or voting. (Srinivasan has valiantly tried creating new small-scale communities but has not yet succeeded.)

Most concerning to me, legacy used this way often papers over a very real struggle that is as old as humanity: intergenerational conflict. Caught up as we are in the battles of our time, we tend to forget this isn’t new. From Abraham smashing his father’s idols in the second millennium BCE to Moses ceding power to Joshua in order for the Israelites to enter the Promised Land, the Torah is filled with stories about the fraught transfer of authority, knowledge and obligation from one generation to the next. Greek poets grappled with these same themes: In Homer’s Odyssey, Telemachus struggles to become himself beneath the almost unbearable weight of an absent father’s reputation. Hesiod laments the moral decline of young people and worries that a time will come when they cease to honor their parents. In the 5th century BCE the comic playwright Aristophanes portrays older Athenians struggling to understand a rapidly changing society. From Cicero to Shakespeare to Sholem Aleichem, intergenerational conflict has been great fodder for writers.

Some of our current culture wars are understandably intergenerational. Each generation is formed by a unique cultural and technological environment which it wants to or needs to reshape. The new legacy twist insidiously couches this natural friction in the seemingly neutral language of technology. This makes it easier to criticize the past without directly criticizing the people who built it. It sounds more objective to say legacy media, for example, than “old” media, and less ageist to say legacy leadership than “old” executives or clergy. To be clear, there are times when change is needed; new generations have to adapt to changing circumstances and powerful institutions and people need to be challenged, but using coded language unnecessarily shuts down genuine communication.

This coding presents in slightly different ways throughout American society. In higher education, there’s “legacy admissions,” the euphemism for the practice of giving preference to the children of alums, which was originally created in the 1920s by some Ivy League colleges as an intentional tool to exclude Jewish, Catholic and immigrant applicants. (In the “nothing is simple about this” department, some minorities now benefit from legacy admissions.) Today, the expression “legacy admissions” is tarnished, and the elite universities that coined it are branded “legacy institutions,” with all the new negatives that connotes.

In politics, legacy can read like “dinosaur,” as in “legacy parties” or the establishment wing of any political organization. In the Democratic Party, progressives sometimes say they are at loggerheads with “legacy” Democrats, i.e., centrists. Since traditional legacy has more luster in conservative circles, Republicans are less likely to use legacy in its pejorative sense. When MAGA activists attack the pre-Trump-era GOP, their preferred proxies for “old” are “the swamp,” “RINOs,” “Bush Republicans,” “neocons,” “the McConnell wing” and “the old guard.”

The new meaning of legacy has also invaded sacred ground. A “legacy church” today does not mean one with a glorious heritage but one assumed to have declining membership. Mainstream Protestant denominations are frequently labeled legacy, insinuating that newer nondenominational worship spaces are more dynamic. The same applies in the Jewish world, where references to legacy organizations usually are code for federations and long-established national Jewish groups. The implication is not always hostile, but the judgment is there whether deserved or not.

The tension between old and new is built into the Jewish “system.” Judaism is a civilization of inheritance, built around the transmission of memory, l’dor v’dor, “from generation to generation.” The Torah repeatedly commands: “Remember…,” “Tell your children…,” “Teach them diligently…” and “Do not forget…” The Hebrew word masorah (tradition) literally refers to “that which has been handed down.” But transmission is never mere replication. What is inherited is repeatedly interpreted, selected, contested and sometimes transformed by the people who receive it. The rabbinic Judaism that forms the basis for much of traditional Jewish practice today was an innovation that preserved Jewish continuity after the destruction of the Second Temple. And this is but one example. The competition between traditionalists and innovators has always been messy, but it is this creative tension—this balancing act—that has allowed Judaism to adapt, survive and thrive. Change is informed by the memory of what came before. Legacy, in its original sense, encompasses all of this.

Do we really want to use language that sweeps away the complexity of human systems as if they can easily be replaced by Humanity 2.0 or 3.0? We can’t go back in time to before the new meaning of legacy arose, but we can be cognizant of the words we use and their dangers. Moreover, how long will it be until AI absorbs and understands the vastness of human legacies better than we do, and we become legacy humans? And through which meaning of legacy will AI view us—worth preserving, or obsolete?

(Top image credit: Carol Guzy)