Unfulfillable expectations generated by communication media destabilize their own codes.

Evidence

Accordingly, one can say that all communication media have in common this differentiation, generalization and functional specification which serve to increase the discrepancy between the possible and the actual. This applies not only to the sense of increasing selectivity in the processes, but also in the structural creation of exaggerated expectations and claims on the capabilities of the corresponding communication systems, which, in fact, cannot be fulfilled. In an economic context the much discussed revolution of disproportionately rising expectations is a good example of this. These discrepancies can also be conceived of as cases of complexity, as differences between the complexity of the possible and that of the actual. They are, as such, a real factor which feeds back into the conditions of possibility, and leads, for example, to code-symbols being discounted, or becoming transformed into ideologies, or being used in a purely opportunistic fashion. — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 757

Categorization

• XREF: The mechanism where code-symbols ‘become transformed into ideologies’ directly maps onto Stevens’s transformation of butlership/service into a moral-ideological identity — relevant to the reader’s Luhmann-Ishiguro synthesis. Also echoes the reader’s ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ article’s theme of symbols converting into ideology. — connects to: Media act as a genetic code mutating the real into the hyperreal. — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 112
• QUESTION: Does Luhmann elsewhere elaborate how power-as-code specifically gets ‘discounted’ or turned ideological — a potential chapter to chase in this very book?