POSIWID.
I’d like to bring this term to your attention. It means, “[The] Purpose Of a System Is What It Does.”
POSIWID is a way of looking at a system and determining its purpose by ignoring all the claims about what a system does or should do, and focusing instead on what it actually does.
I ran across the term in the context of reading The New Jim Crow: Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2010), by Michelle Alexander. The term might not have been directly in the book (it might have been in a review about the book?), but the book definitely takes a POSIWID approach to the mass incarceration of Black males in the U.S.
No single law states that Black males should be incarcerated at a higher rate than White males, and yet the combination of laws produce a system that does so, not because Black males commit crimes at a higher rate (whether or not you take poverty into account), but because each law tends to leave loopholes that racist assholes can use to leverage harder against Black males than White males, without being held to account.
The purpose of the criminal justice system in the U.S., argues the author, is to metaphorically serve as the new Jim Crow laws, that is, to enforce segregation (and negative systemic outcomes in general).
I’m sure you can think of lots of examples of systems that are supposed to do one thing but—oops!—reliably do another.
(HOAs supposedly existing to help support a neighborhood and instead being used by assholes to pressure some residents to move elsewhere comes to mind…)
Let’s go back to the example of marketing emails.
What is the system of sending marketing emails supposed to do? It’s supposed to connect you with products and services you actually want.
What does the system of sending marketing emails really do? It tries to pressure you into buying products and services you don’t really want, by sending you emails you don’t or no longer want, that are sometimes difficult to get unsubscribed from, and using manipulative techniques like social validation (saying that people like you like this sort of thing), association with things you actually do want (like sex, food, thrills, validation, and status), and repetition (because telling someone something is true three times tends to make people believe it’s true, even in the face of evidence to the contrary).–And clickbait titles where you think you’re going to read an interesting article and instead run into a sales pitch.
There ARE ethical ways to send out marketing emails (that is, giving readers what they actually want instead of pressuring them into what they don’t want).
Ethical methods of sending marketing emails don’t convert as well, but run into fewer issues over the long run.
The POSIWID of marketing emails is sales, not connection. Or consent.
Now let’s go a little further back to the example of busyness.
The POSIWID of busyness is to prevent you from taking stock of what is going on around you and thus taking effective action.
When you are too busy to do something you supposedly value, it is on purpose.
I have no doubt that a) you can think of a dozen people who run into obstacles almost by magic whenever they’re about to accomplish something they say they want to do, and b) struggle to apply that principle to yourself and/or to a few people around you.
Why is that? Why can you see something as being common in other people but not in yourself or people who have a powerful or close position in your life?
I think it has to do with the feeling that starting over is more expensive somehow than maintaining your current habits and social connections.
When people come up with excuses for their busyness—or for not unsubscribing to marketing emails—or for not blocking relatives on social media who are harassing them—what they are doing is maintaining the system because starting a new system feels like too much work, or would otherwise disrupt how they see themselves.
Ourselves.
We tell ourselves stories—narratives—about how the cost of maintaining the system is low, and the cost of starting over is high.
We participate in systems whose POSIWID is damaging to us because we can’t envision anything else: to do anything else would “violate our principles” somehow.
The POSIWID of an unmitigated asshole is to exploit you.
Let’s leave it at that for now and not poke too deeply at it. Just push that idea to the back of your mind for now.
Instead, take a look at the screen you’re (presumably) reading this from, or the nearest screen around you.
Is it clean?
Or is it smeared, spattered, covered in dust?
Do you know how to clean it?
You can find the first post in the series here.
