Sometimes legacy is thick — arriving with detailed instruction manuals about how it should be applied to everyday life. Sometimes it is thin — weightless suggestions drifting through generations without context. This variation creates what can be referred to as "consistency gradients."
These consistency gradients make it impossible to examine any period with clarity. Did something happen as emergent phenomenon or continuation of past legacy? The startup founder breaking convention — is she innovating or unconsciously performing patterns inherited from her grandmother's merchant traditions?
Why do we need to know this? We don't. If we had civilisation-wide stenographers documenting who did what and why, we would. Recording who followed legacy and who experimented with their own ideas. But we do not have these chroniclers, and perhaps their absence is merciful.
This idea of consistency gradients extends beyond inheritance. Every category of content operates as a gradient. News shifts from verified reporting to speculation within the same article. Academic disciplines blend from methodology to conjecture across invisible thresholds. Social media oscillates between documentation and performance without marking transitions.
Each category maintains its own gradient signature. Economics runs from mathematical precision to behavioural poetry. Technology slides from deterministic code to emergent behaviour. Our identities flow between inherited scripts and improvised responses, never announcing when we've switched modes.
Generalisations and adjectives mislead because they assume uniform consistency. We label something "traditional" or "innovative" as if these states were stable. But everything exists in gradients, bleeding across boundaries we've drawn but cannot maintain.
What if society transitions to liquid architecture — architecture without categories? Not rigid taxonomies, but flowing classifications acknowledging their own inconsistency. Systems expecting gradients rather than fighting them. Structures bending without breaking because they never pretended to be solid.
This liquid architecture would represent the world as it is: not sorted into compartments but existing in continuous spectrums. Where legacy thickens and thins like weather. Where innovation and tradition swirl in patterns too complex for stenographers to document.
Perhaps the question isn't whether we're following legacy or creating something new, but how we navigate these consistency gradients with grace.