Dash: Unlike physical machines, the institutions that make up society are never broken. They always do precisely what they were designed to do.
… when our carceral system causes innocent people to be held in torturous or even deadly conditions because they could not afford bail, we must understand that this is the system working correctly. It is doing the thing it is designed to do. When we shout about the effect that this system is having, we are not filing a bug report, we are giving a systems update, and in fact we are reporting back to those with agency over the system that it is working properly….
In my own life, I’ve found the greatest reluctance to embrace this idea, and strongest rejection of its obvious truth, comes from the politically moderate, centrist-leaning suburban folks…. “
Accepting the principle of POSIWID is “a prerequisite for optimism that actually has impact. Mindless optimism says, ‘this system is supposed to have a good output, therefore if we support it hard enough, it’ll do the right thing.’”
