Revenge of the Machine
It’s nearly 30-years since Tenner introduced us to the Revenge Effects and with the pace of technological change, we are not lacking for examples. The rapid adoption of low carbon technologies is providing many real-life examples. To me, the value of the Revenge Effects is the reminder that we do not operate in a vacuum; everything we do is within a system and, like Newton’s Third Law, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. There is more to Tenner’s idea that perhaps first meets eye. Below I explore the depth of his idea, providing some examples. Please do share your examples of where you see technologies Revenge Effects.
Revenge, a play of four parts
According to Tenner ‘Revenge effects are ways that technologies can solve one problem while creating additional worse problems, or create new types of problems, or shift the harm elsewhere altogether’. In short, technologies ‘bites back’. I love the image Tenner conjures of technologies ‘biting back’, like a vengeful snake. My world of safety and environmental risk management is full of examples.
Tenner helpfully provides four categories of the Revenge Effect:
Unpacking the idea
Tenner offers a number of reasons for the Revenge Effects. He argues that isn’t technology itself at fault, but rather our tendency to “anchor it in laws, regulations, customs, and habits,” coupled with an inability to anticipate the unintended and unpredictable interactions between individual components acting as a system. The individual component of a vehicle, factory, computer, airplane or power grid are understood easily enough, but the parts combined form systems and subsystems that behave randomly. So this is actually a critique of technological determinism and the managerial faith in predictability and control. Now here’s an interesting alignment with James C Scott’s critique of ‘Authoritarian High Modernism’, Charles Perrow’s ‘Complex tightly-coupled’ and latterly John Downer’s notion of ‘Rational Accidents’. So this is really a critique of technical rationality and determinism, our belief that we can control everything through rational, logical and empiricism. In his seminal work ‘ Thinking Like a State’, James C. Scott puts it well:
“A recurrent theme of Western philosophy and science, including social science, has been the attempt to reformulate systems of knowledge in order to bracket uncertainty and thereby permit the kind of logical deductive rigour possessed by Euclidean geometry”
Tenner advises that if we learn from revenge effects we will not be led to renounce technology, but we will instead refine it: watching for unforeseen problems, managing what we know are limited strengths, applying no less but also no more than is really needed.
The Revenge Effect is not new. In the great DisasterCast podcast series, Drew Rae reveals how the introduction of the Safety Lamp in the early 1800’s, which was invented to create lighting without invoking a methane explosion, initially led to an increase in mine explosions and fatalities. Believing that the Safety Lamp had addressed the risk of pit explosions, owners reopened mines that been closed due to concerns on excessive danger. Over-confident in the technical solution, the mine owners also ?encouraged faster and less cautious mining, but the newly adopted Safety Lamps were not fail safe and could, if damaged spark an explosion. It is noted that the Felling Colliery explosion (1812, 92 fatalities) and the St Hilda Collery disaster (1839, 51 fatalities) both long after the introduction of the Safety Lamp. Hence, the revenge effect of the Safety Lamps led to over-confidence in the technology and increased disasters until the Safety Lamp was improved. Refer to the link to the podcast below.
The Last Word
My overall impression of Tenner’s idea is that as we complicate the systems which govern our lives, revenge effects multiply. This is not some Luddite anti-technology argument - new technologies certainly do improve the quality of our lives. But we need to recognise that more technology often increases complexity and this demands more, not less human work and vigilance. More technology can also make a system more fragile. Complex technologies that interact with our human system always produce revenge effects. Like a game of ‘Whac-a-Mole’ for every acute problem solved, a chronic problem quickly replaces it. When operating in a complex sociotechnical system, we can only foresee and predict so far.
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So what is your experience?
I’m always interested to hear examples, so please share what you’ve experienced technologies ‘biting back’.
References and further reading
?? Edward Tenner, ‘Why Things Bite Back: Technology & the Revenge of Unintended Consequences’ New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996
?? DisasterCast Safety Podcast. Episode 3 – Risk Acceptance and Coal Mine Disasters. https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/disastercast/episode-3-risk-acceptance-p_0WZzNtna2/
?? A TedTalk with Edward Tenner on his ideas. https://www.ted.com/talks/edward_tenner_unintended_consequences?subtitle=en
Sr. Policy Analyst: Systems Thinking and Wellbeing || blending Art and Science
5 个月Sounds a lot like the Rebound Effect in industrial ecology - solving for one visible problem that creates new hidden effects that isn't often measured. Looks good on the surface and ends up compounding the mess. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666784321000267
Managing Director at Ergo Ike Ltd (home of Phil-e-Slide range of products)
6 个月James Pomeroy ,”rebound effect” per chance , by any other name?????
HSEQ Compliance Professional
6 个月Thanks James. I think the affect of social media on the minds of society is one item of technology that is playing out in real time. It was supposed to connect people but people are now more lonely than ever, narcissistic and addicted to likes. Who knows what impact this will have on society in the future.
Social and environmental risk mitigation
6 个月James, interesting concept! I disagree with the use of the word ‘revenge’ as this implies the technology has some kind of ‘awareness’. Whereas the truth is all the limited upsides with delayed and more significant downsides are completely caused by our own actions and lack of understanding. ? The subcategories are much better especially the first two: repeating and recomplicating effects. The third and fourth seem the same or at least very similar. ? In response to your request for examples, your article highlighted the problems caused by smartphones. As more and more service providers assume everyone has a smartphone, they begin to design their services on the basis of this assumption – however, the results of these ‘design improvements’ are frequently focused on increasing the convenience and profitability of the business instead of the convenience of the consumer / client. Your hotel example highlights this perfectly*. ? (continued in reply)
Agree James Pomeroy, healthcare is awash with bite-backs. The relentless push to shorten the length of stay in hospitals triggers both a Repeating effect and a Rearranging effect. The patients in hospital are on the whole more acute, and the hospital frequently hands the patient back to a primary care sector that is not resourced for post-acute care. And the Recomplicating effect means that technology has allowed medicine to attempt 'good' in ways that were once unthinkable. Surgery in the 100yr old + cohort at one extreme, and survival of 24-week gestation foetuses at the other. Society wants medicine to be heroic, and much of medicine willingly puts their hand up for that hero role - it is undoubtedly a rewarding one when all goes well. And all you need is the n=1 survival story to set a new consumer expectation or clinician aspiration. From that point, the decision to not take the system to right to the boundary of feasibility and safety is somehow immoral or cowardly (regardless of how that decision impacts the system elsewhere).