surveillance can turn a democratic government despotic
There are more failure modes than this.
In general, it’s fairly complicated because to discuss what’s good or bad about X you need a fleshed-out value framework which will allow you to make explicit what “good” and “bad” means and which will also allow you to specify shades of grey and talk about trade-offs.
It’s possible to ignore this issue and just attempt to discuss what kind of situations and consequences will X lead to without evaluating things as good or bad—but that discussion will still be colored by the values and the preferences. Having these values “invisible” and unexamined tends to… complicate discussions :-)
There are more failure modes than this.
In general, it’s fairly complicated because to discuss what’s good or bad about X you need a fleshed-out value framework which will allow you to make explicit what “good” and “bad” means and which will also allow you to specify shades of grey and talk about trade-offs.
It’s possible to ignore this issue and just attempt to discuss what kind of situations and consequences will X lead to without evaluating things as good or bad—but that discussion will still be colored by the values and the preferences. Having these values “invisible” and unexamined tends to… complicate discussions :-)