PU #256 - BUT WHAT IS IT FOR? - On The Purpose Of Doing Things
I was surprised, after acknowledging last week that I had been too busy to write a new post for Monday morning so wouldn’t be posting one, that several readers got in touch with me to congratulate me for my inaction. An “act of rebellion” one person called it, not only to prioritise rest in the face of a culture obsessed with constant productivity, but against AI slop.
I am old school. I’ve been writing blogs since 2004, and essays, articles, and even books (albeit unpublished ones) since before then. I am a writer, and enjoy the process of writing. So, although I spot them more and more frequently, it had sort of escaped my notice that, in 2026, a weekly Substack/ newsletter/ post/ blog (whatever you want to call it) has been more about regularly scheduled content releases than about any genuine desire to write anything. And for such clockworkery, it has become the norm to just let AI write the thing for you.
I’m sure these “authors” don’t see anything wrong with using this “tool” to, as someone I spoke to who does just that put it, “re-organise my scattered thoughts and research notes into something more like what I really wanted to say on the page”, but to me that process of putting your ideas into some kind of order is the entire point of writing something. That’s the magic. That’s totally not the thing to outsource elsewhere. However, my mistake is assuming that such people are writing because they feel they have anything important to say. I realise that, more likely, they are writing simply to produce content, to drive subscriptions and plug their product or personal “brand”.
I see it all the time in the education sector, especially from our so-called “leaders”. The professional social media hellscape that is LinkedIn has become a particularly terrifying slalom of weekly AI-generated missives from headteachers and assorted assistant heads across the country, telling us the one thing they think (this week) is “fundamental”, “non-negotiable”, or their “core value”, when it comes to education and what they do in their schools. (The same generic AI tone creeping out from each of them). I feel bad for the colleagues and kids who probably had to sit through a verbal performance of the same slop that week in an assembly or staff meeting. But it didn’t occur to me that the same empty grind of content generation would also be hollowing out the work of former bloggers and “writers”, now tied to the treadmill of frequency demanded if you want to stay relevant and viral in the modern attention culture.
Because I have only ever written because I wanted to express myself, even when writing to a deadline, I have never dreamed of giving that job to a LLM to churn it out for me (unless, a few specific times, intentionally and explicitly doing so to write around and make a comment about the poor quality of what the AI ultimately produced). But this is because I am writing because I feel I have something to say. The purpose of a Philosophy Unleashed post (or anything else I write) is to craft a self-expression of some sort. What troubled me about the reaction I received for not writing, for not just outsourcing the effort so the deadline could be met, was the realisation that those who do this are merely writing for the purpose of fulfilling some external obligation to meet a deadline with some content. It doesn’t matter what that content actually is, or why it exists. All that matters is that something is there for subscribers to click on in their inbox. Or, in the case of education professionals, so that the school you are marketing looks like an active place run by a thoughtful and reflective leadership team.
It is my position that getting AI to move around ideas, and then moving around those organised ideas from AI yourself into some final sequence you are happy to stick your name on is not writing at all. (Though it is, perhaps, the inevitable consequence of an education system which, for decades, has replaced teaching deep skills that take time to develop, such as extended writing, with short-term activities for gains in “visible progress” such as card sorts and jumbled paragraphs to be put in order by students.). It is an activity which has completely missed the point and purpose of writing as communication. And it has forgotten that we are not required to say something, unless we have something to say.
The purpose of having a website or newsletter like this, where you get to say something to subscribers or readers, used to be that you can use it to share the things you want to tell them when you have something worth telling them. Even when I meet my self-imposed deadline here on Philosophy Unleashed of Monday morning during term-time at 6am I have only ever published something at that time that I managed to find I actually wanted to say. Unfortunately, for many, the purpose has instead become, simply, that their posts are regular. That they fill the space. That they are content for content’s sake.
Which is probably why readership of this stuff drops. Actual proper readership — reading every word, right up to the end. And why it is replaced with a quick skim and a “like”. They didn’t write it, why should I waste the time reading it? Devaluing the very act of reading for those who bother, and deskilling us as readers the more we find there’s little point in trying.
For those of us actually writing ourselves, from the heart, it is a depressing thought. To be throwing out authentic pearls into so much artificial swill and knowing that most of them will sink in the apathetic bilge, likely unnoticed for what they are and assumed to simply be more slop.
I was already thinking about purpose when I received those messages across the week, because the original post I was going to write last week if I had had more time was about a conversation I had with students about the football team, Manchester City.
For those who don’t know, Manchester City have been found guilty by the Premier League on 115 charges of violating their financial regulations, including the use of “sham” contracts to funnel prohibited money into the club under the guise of commercial sponsorship. I asked the attendees of Philosophy Club a very simple question in light of the charges: what should be done about it?
A range of punishments were offered by my young philosophers: relegating City down the football pyramid immediately; erasing their title wins from the history books; disadvantaging them for all future seasons with a hefty points reduction each season; transferring star players to the wronged teams who lost out because of their unfair advantages between 2009 and 2018… the list went on.
Which was when I pointed out that I had asked them “what should be done about it?”, not “how should they be punished?” Because we had found issues with all of the proposed punishments — namely that the people the sanctions would be punishing would largely be innocent people: the fans and players who had no knowledge of the club’s wrongdoing at the time, or future players who were not even there. Essentially, even with the most punitive sanctions placed upon the football team, the same economic conditions and frameworks of club ownership that incentivised the violations in the first place would still remain. Meanwhile, you can’t change the past. Telling the runners up from a season where Manchester City won a trophy due to their unfair advantages that the outcome of the match was now null and void does not actually erase the feelings from the moment it actually happened. The disappointment, the despair. Nor does it retroactively award them a victory. And if it did, what sort of victory would it be? Could a fan of a rival team now told they had actually won the league in 2014 celebrate this “victory” in any meaningful way?
So I asked my students to think about what we are doing something for. What would be the purpose of any action taken now?
If it is to punish — then who are we punishing, and are they the right people? And if no punishment seems to work that targets the right people, why are we punishing at all? After all, we do not need to punish. If punishing, again, we have to ask why? What is the purpose of punishment? In this case (as in most cases) it cannot change the past and restore justice to the wronged at the time. It might, perhaps, deter other clubs from doing the same thing in future to do something punitive, but, again, if we sanction the wrong people whilst keeping the structures and economic and power relations that led to the wrongdoing in the first place intact, it would be no deterrent at all. Merely a reminder to do better at getting away with it next time.
If, however, our purpose is (as it should be) to prevent such a thing from happening again, then perhaps it is those structures and incentives which we need to look at. Perhaps, even, dismantle? And if we pull on that thread we might have to ask what the purpose of professional sports should be? Is it to preserve the integrity of authentic competition, or is it simply to make as much money as possible for the owners? Because it seems to me that the current framework presents the purpose being the former while, in reality, being the latter. And it is the incompatibility of the two very different aims that has led to the issues with Manchester City.
What are we responding to their offences for? What makes the violation a violation? Because it somehow went against the ideas of fair play that seem integral to the purpose of sporting competition?
But can fair play truly be said to be a core element of any entity with the purpose of making as much profit for their brand as possible, and at any cost? After all, isn’t the entire aim of a football club, even within the financial regulations, to spend wisely so that they can have the advantage over their competitors? Fair play in defining the conditions under which inherent unfairness will ultimately operate is no fair play at all.
Just as punishments which fail to prevent or undo the crimes they are purported to prevent or undo, also fail in their justifying purpose (and therefore fail to be justified).
Ultimately, both of these things have reminded me how frequently we accept ideas, or ways of doing things, without remembering the underlying purpose of why we are doing the thing that we are doing. And how, if we neglect the question of purpose, we can end up producing outputs (actions or content) that are empty gestures, bereft of the meaning we believe that they have. The statistically probable string of letters, sentences, and paragraphs churned out by the LLM that communicates nothing but your own disinterest and lack of creativity to your readers, or the ineffective knee-jerk responses to a wrongdoing that miss the mark entirely and change absolutely nothing.
Why do we write these posts?
Why do we need to do something about Manchester City?
Why do we do anything that we do?
What is its purpose?
What are we actually trying to achieve?
The less we ask ourselves these questions about the things that we do, the more we hollow out the world into an empty pantomime of vacuous appearances, void of substance, meaning, and sense.
Author: DaN McKee (he/him)
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