>>But sometimes you can clearly illustrate harmful side effects in fiction by postulating evil conspiracies that do things for the sake of the harmful side effe

>>But sometimes you can clearly illustrate harmful side effects in fiction by postulating evil conspiracies that do things for the sake of the harmful side effects. I'd say that by postulating an evil conspiracy that does things for the sake of harmful side effects, you are obscuring the mechanism that produces the harmful side effects in the real world. People have a tendency anyway to see agents that execute plans instead of faceless systems that happen to produce certain effects. Of course, evil conspiracies might still make for good fiction, but stories like that usually don't do as well at offering insights as they could, because a large portion of readers will be misled into thinking there really is a conspiracy.