GOVERNANCE · qaeda:concept:institutional-memory
Institutional memory of means
Organizations learn habits from how they exercise power; temporary secrecy, paternalism, emergency control, or suppression can harden into permanent structure.
Definition
Means have institutional memory. Mechanisms built for a supposedly temporary purpose can become routines, incentives, technical architecture, and inherited expectations long after the original justification expires.
Also used here as: means have institutional memory, path dependence of control.
Why it matters
A control mechanism should be judged not only by today’s operator but by what it would permit a future operator with different values to do. Reversibility and review therefore belong in design from the start.
Relationships
Source basis
This public definition is a reviewed synthesis derived from:
PUT IT TO WORK
Compare systems against the graph.
Use the local-only comparison framework to evaluate multiple AI systems across ten cognitive-liberty dimensions without sending your scores to QAEDA.net.
Compare AI systems