You've just outlined the formative principle of bureaucracy. Bad things happen, and the organization tries to make it so that the same bad things never happen again.
I stumbled across this in college when I tried to pay a fee at the registrar using a card. They told me they needed cash for the $19.50 payment. I tried to give them a $20 and they said they couldn't accept it because they couldn't make change - because they had once had a change box but someone had robbed it. Then I told them to keep the extra fifty cents and they couldn't do that either becuase more reasons related to legal lines they didn't want to cross.
In the end I had to walk all the way across the campus to make change, to come back and pay the fine.
It's funny you write about this now because I've had similar conversations with friends over the past few days about media bias and how it erodes our sense of confidence in the truthfulness of the information we recieve. I've also read an interesting article recently by Cory Doctorow ("The Last Days of MySpace") that talks about a similar principle in MySpace - the creep factor, where the slow buildup of of unwanted social contacts (including, but not limited to, the titular creeps) takes a social media platform that was once a good thing and turns it more toxic until it suddenly collapses once it ceases to serve as a comfortable forum.
At the core of it all is the principle that things start off genuine and organic when the initial “movement” (whether it’s a political movement, a new media form, etc…) kicks off, because everyone is acting in good faith. Then others see a vulnerable channel to “hack” for their non-genuine purposes and start to corrupt it. You can see the effect play out in places like Medium too.
The theme of corruption and renewal and how those things affect the basic forums we live our lives in is interesting. I've been thinking that it would make a good piece - or an entire series of them, really. How do you protect against it, or build renewal into a corruptible system? Trying to figure out how to write it now tho; it's a complex one, and I have to work it in to a long list of other pieces.
