Speculative Harms and Anti-Goals

Most risk review is project-centric: premortems, risk registers, and launch checklists all ask whether the plan survives. They are structurally blind to the harms that arrive precisely when the plan succeeds - when the feature ships, works as designed, and reaches scale, and in doing so externalizes harm onto people who never chose to be users, or hands a weapon to someone who exploits it on purpose. Speculative harms and anti-goals exists to reach those harms. It assumes success, narrates the concrete near-future in which that success hurts people, casts the third-party victims and the bad-faith misuse actors (the stalker, the scammer, the data broker, the abusive ex, the authoritarian buyer), and then converts each speculated harm into an anti-goal: a named outcome the design commits to prevent, carried as a standing constraint on what the product must never do, enable, or optimize for.

The durable move is not the dystopian story. It is the success anchor (not failure), the cast of non-users and exploiters (not the project team), and the binding of each harm into a design constraint (not a monitoring control). The output is an anti-goals register: per harm, the narrative in brief, the harmed parties, the misuse actor and pathway, the anti-goal it implies, and the design implication that operationalizes it. The popular framings are called "Black Mirror brainstorms" and the "Black Mirror Writers Room"; the skill ships de-branded, because "Black Mirror" is a trademark of the television series' rights holders, and the move itself is community design-ethics practice (Mauldin 2018; Fiesler's writers-room exercise, studied by Klassen and Fiesler 2022).

When to Use

• A feature's success case could externalize harm: recommendation and ranking systems, location and presence features, data collection and inference, targeting, content amplification, or automation applied to vulnerable populations.
• The team's risk apparatus is entirely project-centric and nobody has yet asked who outside the customer relationship gets hurt, or who would weaponize the feature on purpose.
• Abstract ethics principles are failing to bite, and a concrete narrative is needed to make harms specific and discussable.
• The decision is consequential and hard to reverse, and the anti-goals produced will actually be bound into requirements, acceptance criteria, or a review gate.

When NOT to Use