The Purpose Isn’t What It Does

“The purpose of a system is what it does.” Such a neat little turn of phrase; it makes you sound wise and cynical and like a person who sees through things. But it’s mostly wrong and almost always counterproductive. A bit of background; the phrase (and let’s just say “POSIWID”) was coined in 1979 by a British management consultant. It’s thrown around heavily; a search on my Mastodon server turns up plenty of examples. Most of which, instructively, are lightweight arm-waving. Try it on yours. Rhetoric It means “the art of persuasion” and more specifically, the category of language used in an effort to convince, to make a point, to help another human understand your point of view. POSIWID, if it’s to have any currency at all, should be useful as a rhetorical tool. Which matters. Because we are currently embedded in a torment nexus around values and humanism and antifascism and tolerance and late-stage capitalism and AI and AI and AI and AI. We need good rhetorical tools. And we need to…

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