To be fair, this is basically how the actual New Deal happened as well https://t.co/6cYh9WFVsH
— Steven White (@notstevenwhite) December 11, 2018
Exactly. The New Deal wasn’t some grand scheme all planned out in advance, handed down from on high. It was iterative, provisional, experimental and uncertain.
Which, you know, was one of the reasons it was successful! Criticizing someone or some group for not having a plan for a society-uprooting undertaking that has literally never been done before anywhere by anyone is facile. It’s a way of shutting down debate and forward motion and it’s extremely ahistorical. We don’t know what will work, politically, environmentally, or technologically. We just don’t, nitpickers, dilly-dalliers, naysayers and dawdlers aside.
There’s an old saw in the IT world: don’t do premature optimization as it’s just wasting time. The same applies in the case, because we don’t know nearly enough to optimize. That doesn’t mean just wildly do whatever comes to mind, but it does mean be flexible, be pliant to the vagaries of circumstance, and responsive to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.