Unintentional Legislation
I found the tesugen
weblog a few days ago, lots of interesting
programming-related discussions.
His blogroll neighbors links
led to
wasted bits ...
... which led to
this O'Reilly-net article by Cory Doctorow ...
The Street Finds its Own Use for the Law of Unintended Consequences
About the way new uses for things tend to emerge,
often surprising the creators and inventors of those things.
Cory's article had a pointer to
this fun "Wacky Uses" site.
Indeed, this kind of ingenuity is pretty cool, though
I usually hear it called "serendipity" rather than
"unintended consequences".
The more insidious place where the Law of
Unintended Consequences raises its ugly head is
in legislation. Far too many laws have unintended,
counterintuitive, and dangerous consequences, and
far too many politicians ignore this, preferring to
keep the public distracted from this fact.
Examples: in the 1920's prohibition of alcohol led
directly to the rise of an extremely powerful
organized crime culture that still affects us today.
Similarly, the inconsistent attitudes towards drugs,
and the treatment of drug use & distribution as a
criminal matter instead of a medical one, have led
to powerful South American drug cartels and have
essentially funneled money into the hands of organized
crime here in the US.
Unfortunately, the DEA's self-preservation instincts make
it an ally of those drug cartels: the DEA has no more
interest in truly curing the problem than the drug lords do.
I believe that the dinosaur-like thrashing of the RIAA,
MPAA, and other old-media organizations is having and will
continue to have similar unintended consequences, as they
try to get laws passed without thinking about what the
real effects of those laws will be.
9:02:58 PM
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