During a crisis, it seem like a good idea to grant more power to police and security services. But that power always gets used to subvert democracy and silence dissenters.
This is not a new problem. There's a bunch of literature about this, starting with Robert K. Merton's 1936 paper The Unanticipated Consequences of Purposeful Social Action [1].
Maybe the best way to counteract the perverse outcomes of feel-good social policy is to acknowledge these mistakes and teach future policy makers how to anticipate the second- and third-order effects of their actions [2].
Stross shows this in his hypothetical Labour Party communication:
The party recognizes that that our own legislative program
of the late 1990s and early 2000s established the framework
for repression which is now being used to ruthlessly suppress
dissent.
> During a crisis, it seem like a good idea to grant more power to police and security services. But that power always gets used to subvert democracy and silence dissenters.
In France, the currently in power socialist party seemed well aware of the "unintended consequences" when the conservatives were voting their own think-of-the-terrorists laws. One has to think that they either think this doesn't apply to them, or that they in fact don't really care.
During a crisis, it seem like a good idea to grant more power to police and security services. But that power always gets used to subvert democracy and silence dissenters.
This is not a new problem. There's a bunch of literature about this, starting with Robert K. Merton's 1936 paper The Unanticipated Consequences of Purposeful Social Action [1].
Maybe the best way to counteract the perverse outcomes of feel-good social policy is to acknowledge these mistakes and teach future policy makers how to anticipate the second- and third-order effects of their actions [2].
Stross shows this in his hypothetical Labour Party communication:
[1] [PDF] http://www.d.umn.edu/cla/faculty/jhamlin/4111/2111-home/CD/T...[2] [PDF] http://www.au.af.mil/info-ops/iosphere/iosphere_summer06_mil...