When Readers Bite Back
HAVING RECENTLY READ WHY THINGS Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences , and having assigned the book in my undergraduate course “Society and Technology,” I was delighted to see an interview with its author, Edward Tenner, in the Spring 1997 issue of American Heritage of Invention & Technology . Because the book leaves the reader with some key ambiguities, I looked to the interview for clarification. I am afraid the interview only reinforced these ambiguities.
Despite the claim in the book and the interview that it’s important to recognize when unanticipated consequences of knowledge are beneficial or otherwise positive, Tenner’s argument suffers from a lopsided asymmetry. His apparent zeal to reaffirm his clever terminology (biting back and revenge effects) not only gives short shrift to unanticipated “feasting back” and “serendipitous effects” but forces him into an awkward logic. Unanticipated technological positives become in Tenner’s terminology “reverse revenge” effects, a phrase whose meaning and logic are challenging.
This is not simply a carp about terminology. Rather, it leads to deeper issues that mar a book with an idea of tremendous potential. The fact of the matter is that we are equally ill equipped to predict positive or negative unintended consequences. As a result, to know “why things bite back,” the claim of the book’s title, we need to understand not only bad bites but good ones too. Furthermore, the idea of unanticipated consequences itself was anticipated by a parade of historical giants, including Sir Francis Bacon, Bernard Mandeville, Adam Smith, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and was developed by such diverse modern scholars as Robert K. Merton, Peter Medawar, and Jacques Ellul. Indeed, Smith’s The Wealth of Nations , the first explicit formulation of our capitalistic system, explains the emergence of society’s welfare as the outcome, via the invisible hand of the market, of the unintended consequences of the myriad economic actions of members of society. In the modern era the idea was codified by the sociologist Robert K. Merton, who extende’d it with his perceptive notion of the “self-fulfilling prophecy.”
In neither his book nor the interview does Tenner seem fully mindful of the importance of understanding positive surprises as a part of our overall feebleness at making precise predictions about technology. Nor does he seem mindful of our forebears who contributed to the development of the powerful idea of unintended consequences.
Eugene A. Rosa
Edward R. Meyer Distinguished
Professor of Natural Resource and
Environmental Policy
Washington State University
Pullman, Wash.
Edward Tenner replies: Professor Rosa’s points are important, and I appreciate the chance to comment. My book does emphasize the negative, or at least the disconcerting. Why not more attention to the unintended positive? It was partly the need to keep the book to manageable length, partly the existence of a successful television series and book, James Burke’s Connections , that deals with strange but positive linkages.
I am gathering material for an eventual sequel that will include much more of the positive unintended side of technology—for example, the story of how Weimar decadence in the form of goldtipped cigarettes (and the need to bind the gold particles more firmly to the paper) led to magnetic tape recording technologies. Then there are the contributions of nuclear weapons engineering to the development of automotive air bags. But these are a different kind of unintended effect. They reflect the ability of human creativity to respond to the unexpected, not the limits of human imagination in modeling the interaction of technical, biological, and social systems.
As for social unintended consequences, I originally thought of writing a whole book on them alone. But it began to look like a book about everything. Conservatives say that welfare programs perpetuate poverty, and their opponents charge that their market economics promote monopoly. I would be refereeing dozens of debates and no doubt be unpopular with both sides. There are a number of excellent books by social scientists. And then there are all the theologians’ reflections on the place of evil in God’s plan.
Why Things Bite Back is a broad but necessarily incomplete look at what I think is a neglected set of questions. I’ve only begun the really hard part, which is responding to the challenges that revenge effects raise. Reviews by engineers and computer professionals have been encouraging, as indeed Professor Rosa’s letter is. I agree that there is a lot more to be done.
