[bee_rider]

After all, Chesterton’s fence most importantly is about a fence that we don’t know the purpose of. We (in a collective sense, not me personally) know everything about the phone system, it isn’t even really all that old in the grand scheme of things and is actively maintained. We know how it is supposed to work and can see that it isn’t working.

This is more like “Chesterton’s radio with a broken antenna,” a thing broken in an obvious way that we just haven’t gotten around to fixing or replacing.

[mulmen]

The PSTN is working. That’s the point of the corollary. You mistakenly think it is broken in some fundamental way because you misunderstand the benefit.