• jsomae@lemmy.ml
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    1 day ago

    Wow! An easy answer to every problem. I think you might actually have a semantic stop-sign; an answer to everything that suppresses curiosity. Why isn’t the hospital curing more patients? “That’s not its purpose!”

    The purpose of the hospital is to cure patients as cost-effectively as it can. We don’t have enough doctors in Canada, not because that is by design, but because we are failing as a country and could do better.

    The internet was obviously not created with that intention, but social media may have that purpose.

    Anyway, what I love about this phrase, the purpose of a system is what it does, is that it implies there’s no point in trying to fix anything. There’s no point in even checking if there is anything that can be fixed or improved; there is no point in separating the good stuff from the bad when we burn everything down; the only way to improve anything is revolution. That’s different of course from my perspective – revolution can fix the worst problems but there still exist other problems that can be solved without such a dicy method.