Word: tenner
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Tenner's gently skeptical fascination with what he calls "the perversity of everyday objects and systems" seems unlikely to overturn the neo-utopianism of the Wired generation, that's all the more reason to attend closely to it. For though his history of technological "revenge effects" ranges freely over the past two centuries, most of his examples take a healthy dose of air out of today's overinflated enthusiasm with high tech...
Indeed, what inspired Tenner to write the book was his observation 10 years ago that the personal computer, then heralded as the cornerstone of a tidy, eco-correct "paperless office" of the future, was creating more paper, not less. Nowadays, of course, with the Internet pouring ever more information into our lives and our printers, the paper-strewn paperless office seems less like a paradox than a fact of life...
Contemporary technophiles could learn a lot from the fire ants' story. They could learn even more from historian Edward Tenner's newly published Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences (Knopf; 346 pages; $26), in which that story and many more like it combine to paint a richly detailed picture of one of the more enduring features of modernity's landscape: the way our best-laid technological plans often go so thoroughly awry...
Still it serves as a nice metaphor for what remains a deeper conundrum about computers: despite their growing power and ubiquity, especially in modern offices, the resulting increase in productivity is almost negligible. Tenner offers some convincing reasons why this might be so (time-consuming software upgrades; downsized secretarial pools), but no reassurance that the dilemma will ever be resolved...
...looking to Washington for guidance may be disappointed. As the sordid spectacle of the budget battle and the midterm elections showed, there is still no will in the capital to make hard economic decisions. "How do they ever expect our kids to pay that $3.3 trillion debt?" worries Tom Tenner, a retired appliance-company executive in Houston. "No one seems to care or give a damn. They feel we can borrow forever." Still, the capital is not immune to the jitters. Washington caterers say that guest lists are smaller and there are more lunches than dinners, more wine than champagne...