Unintended Affordances (or why I believe encrypting everything is a bad idea) | Armin Ronacher’s Thoughts and Writings

In psychology there is the term of affordances. It’s the concept that an object affords different actions for someone interacting with it. Most objects in this world have a plethora of things you can do with them, many are not even intended by the designer of that object. … What I find interesting about that concept is that most of the time the actions that you can perform on an object are heavily shaped by your state of mind and environment.

A similar thing applies to the enforcement of rules.

I’m not going to discuss whether digital enforcement is a good thing or not, more that when you take such a strong stance on an issue it’s important to not just consider the situations in which everything goes by design. … When implemented properly, encryption is a very binary enforcement: there is no way around it.

Source: Unintended Affordances (or why I believe encrypting everything is a bad idea) | Armin Ronacher’s Thoughts and Writings