The US has taken a centrist approach, essentially letting private companies decide what they want to do. Demud and his co-authors wanted to investigate these markedly different approaches. So they developed a computational agent-based simulation that models how individuals navigate between the desire to express dissent versus the fear of punishment. The model also includes how an authority adjusts its monitoring and its policies to minimize disagreement at the lowest possible cost of enforcement.
“This is not some kind of theoretical learning thing,” Demud said. “And it’s not rooted in empirical data. We didn’t go out and ask 1000 people, ‘What would you do if faced with this situation? Would you dissent or self-censor?’ And then build that data into the model. our The model allows us to establish some assumptions about how we think people behave broadly, but then allows us to explore the parameters. What if you are more or less adventurous? What if the punishment is more or less severe? Is any regime more or less tolerant? “And we can make predictions about what’s going to happen based on our fundamental assumptions.”
a hundred flowers bloomed
According to their model, the most extreme case is an authoritarian government that adopts harsh punitive tactics, effectively suppressing all dissent in the general population. “Everyone’s best strategic option is to say nothing at this point,” Demud said. “So why doesn’t every authoritarian government on the planet do this?” This gave them a chance to look more closely at mobility. “Maybe the authoritarians will start out somewhat liberal,” he said. “Maybe it’s only through small changes over time that they can be allowed to reach that extreme endpoint.”
Demud points to China’s Hundred Flowers Campaign in the 1950s as an example. Here, Chairman Mao Zedong initially encouraged open criticism of his government, but when disagreements got out of control he suddenly took an aggressive stance. The model showed that in such a case, self-censorship of those who disagreed gradually increased, culminating in almost complete compliance over time.
but there is a problem. “The opposite of Hundred Flowers is that if the population is adventurous enough, this strategy doesn’t work,” Demud said. “The totalitarian can’t find a way to be completely cruel. People keep disagreeing stubbornly. So every time he tries to increase the seriousness, he’s going to have to make up for it every time because the people are still there, they’re still going to disagree. They’re saying, ‘Catch us if you dare.'”
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