When Technology Takes Revenge
I love Farnam Street.<p>They produce some amazing content.<p>But sometimes they fall into a trap of trying to define new concepts from disparate issues that don&#x27;t have a clear natural delineation.<p>I&#x27;ve seen the same in the New Yorker and Ted Talks. They fall in love with their own narrative and forget to see how applicable it is, or if there is a better &#x27;mental model&#x27; to understand something.<p>I feel this happened here.<p>The mention 4 &#x27;types of revenge effects&#x27; which I simply see as something else;<p>1- Repeating Effects: it sounds to me that with decreased cost per activity users have the option to increase their activity to meet whatever they want based on individual cost-benefit analysis. In the example they mention of &#x27;end up spending the same amount of time on hosework&#x27; technology allows me to hardly ever have to clean (dish washer, robot vacuum, washing machine, insulation + central HVAC + merv 13 air filters, grilling food outside, etc) - It&#x27;s really hard to spend as much time cleaning with technology as you would without it, even if your standard of cleanliness is higher. I know this from experience I grew up poor in the 3rd world. The whole point feels like forced categorization.<p>2- Recomplicating effects - They also become more complex because the technology becomes more reliable and automation increases wealth. Just look at cars. They used to be less reliable and people used to be poorer. So features we take for granted now were great luxuries at some point. Yes, it&#x27;s more complex, but it doesn&#x27;t appear to be. Modern cars are way more complex, but cars when I was a kid were something people knew a lot about because they had to because they broke down and people were poorer. Now they break down less and they pay someone else. Again, not saying such effects aren&#x27;t true, just that the examples and categories seem forced like a listicle.<p>3- Regenerating effects - They mention the issue that are caused by things like pesticides and antibiotics. But forget the issues that existed before them and don&#x27;t seem to count them as part of a pro and contra point of view. Overall I think whatever issues humans face as a consequence of these two, are infinitely less than the issues they faced without them. It&#x27;s like there&#x27;s no sense of sacrifice and underlying difficulties, instead things are discussed on absolute &#x27;look at the bad this is causing&#x27; vs &#x27;look at what happens with X vs what happens without X or maybe with Y instead&#x27; (perfectly illustrated with pros and cons for nuclear)<p>4- Rearranging effects - basically same critique as for &#x27;regenerating effects&#x27;.<p>A part of the article that really gets me is how little they seem to delve into anything or even think things through. They say things that take about .5 seconds to understand why it isn&#x27;t so. Here&#x27;s another example:<p>&gt; Rather, a revenge effect must actually reverse the benefit for at least a small subset of users... typing on a laptop compared to a typewriter has led to an increase in carpal tunnel syndrome ... turns out that the physical effort required to press typewriter keys and move the carriage protected workers from some of the harmful effects of long periods of time spent typing.<p>Yeah, but what about the trees that weren&#x27;t cut down for the typewriters paper. The trucks that didn&#x27;t have to bellow smoke through city streets to get the paper to users, etc. Surely there&#x27;s a benefit to people typing on keyboards? I&#x27;m not really sure the &#x27;revenge effect reverses the benefit&#x27; in this case for anyone. I&#x27;ve had carpal tunnel. Personally I prefer that to the smog and increased pressure on forest resources. Especially when mechanical keyboards, wrist braces and physical therapy work as well as they do. Not to mention the cost of storage of all that paper, the need for climate control to maintain it, the cost of classifying it and retrieving it, etc.<p>At some point, it feels the author is being disingenuous in order to promote the narrative that was the basis for starting the article.