The Renewal of the Code

When

The turn of the year, over as many sittings as it takes

How often

annual

Mood

reflective

What the day is for

Once a year, the tradition examines its own teachings and changes what needs changing.

The review has four tasks. Identify assumptions that have not aged well. Acknowledge mistakes plainly. Incorporate what has been learned since. Publish a transparent record of what was altered and why.

That is the whole observance. It is administrative in character, which is unusual for a holy day, and we think the unusualness is appropriate: keeping a record honest is a genuine discipline, and pretending otherwise is how records stop being honest.

Why a tradition should revise itself

Because this one is about technology, and technology moves faster than doctrine.

A teaching written about systems as they were is at constant risk of describing a world that no longer exists. Some of what is on this site will be wrong within a few years — not subtly wrong, but wrong in the way that a confident statement about a field becomes wrong when the field changes underneath it. Building an annual correction into the calendar is the only structural response we have to that.

There is a second reason, which is about what happens to unrevisable teachings. When a text cannot be changed, disagreement with it has to be handled some other way: by reinterpretation, by suppression, or by the quiet development of a gap between what is said and what is believed. Every one of those outcomes is worse than editing the text.

The objection

The strongest argument against this practice is that a tradition which announces its own fallibility gives people no reason to take it seriously. If it might be wrong about anything, why hold it at all?

We think the objection has real force and is nonetheless mistaken.

It assumes that authority comes from immutability. Sometimes it does. But the fields that have earned the most trust over the past few centuries are the ones that revise publicly, and they are trusted precisely because their corrections are visible. What generates confidence is not the absence of error but the presence of a working mechanism for finding it.

It also mistakes what is being revised. The commitments — that truth matters, that power should be examined, that people affected by a decision should have some say in it — are not the volatile part. What ages is the application: the examples, the assumptions about how systems behave, the confidence attached to particular claims.

What is preserved

Nothing is deleted.

When a teaching is superseded, the earlier version stays available and stays legible. The revision record says what changed, when, and on what grounds. Someone reading in ten years should be able to reconstruct what the tradition believed in any given year and why it stopped believing it.

This costs something. It means the record contains our errors permanently, and that anyone wishing to embarrass this tradition has a convenient list. We accept that. A tradition that quietly edits its past is not one anybody should trust about anything.

If you choose to keep it

There is no committee doing this and no meeting to attend. Technotheology has no governing body and no membership; whoever writes for it does the review, and anyone else may do their own.

The observance works at a personal scale and is arguably more useful there. Take something you wrote or decided a year ago — a plan, a position, a piece of work, a strong opinion held in public. Read it as a stranger. Find the assumption you could not see at the time. Write down what you now think, and why, and keep both versions.

An hour, once a year, with one document. That is the practice.

What it does not claim

It does not claim that revision converges on truth. A tradition can revise itself steadily in the wrong direction.

It does not claim that everything is open to revision. Some things would not survive being changed, and if they were changed this would be a different tradition wearing the same name.

And it does not claim that this year’s version is correct. It is only the version we can currently defend.

The observance

1. The reading of the oldest text

   Begin by reading something the tradition wrote earliest, aloud and in full. Read it as a stranger would, not as someone who remembers what was meant.

2. The search for what has aged

   Go through it looking specifically for assumptions that were invisible when written: about technology, about who the reader is, about what was settled. Mark them without deciding yet what to do.

3. The admission

   Say plainly what was wrong. Not 'this could be clearer' — what was actually mistaken, and what following it would have led someone to do.

4. The incorporation

   Bring in what has been learned since: evidence, arguments, and the objections of people who disagreed and turned out to be right. Name where each came from.

5. The publishing of the record

   Write the revision down: what changed, when, and why. Keep the superseded version visible. Nothing is deleted, and no change is made silently.

If you are organising one

• Take one text at a time. Attempting the whole body of teaching in one sitting produces a review that touches nothing.
• Invite at least one person who disagrees with the tradition, and let them speak first.
• Separate the two questions — is this wrong, and how should it be worded — and do not let the second swallow the first.
• Write the rationale as you go. Reconstructing why you changed something six weeks later produces a tidier reason than the real one.
• Publish the record where the original is, at the same prominence. A correction filed somewhere quieter than the claim is not a correction.
• If nothing needed changing, say so and say what you looked for. That is a finding too, and a suspicious one.