Dystopian visions: The Snowball Effect

It seems to me that even fairly benign-sounding inventions and innovations can have profoundly disturbing effects or implications. Indeed, I wonder if the benign intentions sometimes blind people to the possible unintended consequences. In this week’s ‘Dystopian Visions’ story there are both ethical issues and frightening potential outcomes. Enjoy, if that’s the right word.

Unusually, the first link below takes you to the entire story, so you don’t need to buy or borrow a book!

In The Snowball Effect, by Katherine Maclean, the focus is on mathematics, or an innovation called “social mathematics” to be accurate. This probably sounds rather dry, but it was really quite prescient.

Published in 1952, the plot is that a professor of Sociology has taken the mathematical model devised by Ludwig von Bertalanffy to explain the growth of organisms, and applied it to organisations. (As a side note, it’s interesting that Maclean cites two real scientists in the story: I checked!) As an experiment, his model is applied to a small town sewing circle with 30 members. It involves identifying a strong leader, and getting her or him to apply the methods specified by the model.

So, does the approach work?

After a few months the growth graph of the sewing club has almost gone off the page vertically. It swallows up other sewing clubs by merging with them, changes its name, and devises recruiting techniques which sound a lot like the sort of thing an organisation might do to convince people that this is the club everyone should belong to. The professor and the dean of his university work out that at the current rate of growth, the “sewing club” will have become a world government within 12 years. What happens after that, nobody can even guess.

Far-fetched? Perhaps. But think of the psychological tricks that large social media organisations and app-designers use to grow their user numbers and usage. True, it’s based on psychology and dopamine hits, but what their approach, and that of Nudge Theory, have in common is that they use cold science to effect changes in people’s behaviour.

Is this ethically ok? If, as in the case of Nudge Theory, you hope to change behaviour for the greater social good, does the end justify the means?

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For other articles in this series, please refer to the index.