EVERYTHING THAT COULD GO WRONG...

By JULIAN DIBBELL

Let the record show that in the matter of human technology vs. the South American fire ant, technology has been its own worst enemy. Brought to the southern U.S. as shipboard stowaways in the 1930s, the fierce-biting ant (which likes to sink its mandibles not only into people and livestock, but also into electrical insulation, sometimes knocking out traffic lights) was officially targeted for eradication following the wartime development of DDT and other superpesticides. After three decades of spraying fire-ant territory with the killer compounds, however, the U.S. government was forced to concede defeat. It turns out the pesticides had all along been doing less damage to the invader than to its predators. Pouring chemicals on the ants actually helped increase their population.

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.

It's not a picture many people seem in the mood to look at just now. With computers doubling in speed and power every couple of years, and with genetic engineering's dazzling feats growing more and more routine, the battered American faith in technological progress has been growing stronger and giddier of late.

But if 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.

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.

Nor do the ironies he culls from the history of medicine bode well for the disease-free future imagined by some prophets of biotech. Earlier this century, breakthroughs in antibiotics inspired similarly confident predictions that the ancient scourges would soon be eradicated. Now, however, we are faced with wave after wave of drug-resistant microbes, and we are running out of antibiotics to fight them.

According to Tenner, every technological endeavor is riddled with "solutions" that backfire. Sports equipment designed to make football safer encouraged more reckless moves and ended up making the sport more dangerous than unpadded, unhelmeted rugby. Fire-fighting techniques are so effective today that small forest fires get doused before they can burn up the debris that eventually fuels larger, unmanageable ones. Agriculture, of course, boasts its kudzu, the "miracle vine" promoted as a soil protector in the Southeast and now despised as an unstoppable weed, able, as Tenner reports, to overwhelm "almost any stationary object--unmoved automobiles, sidetracked railroad cars...even (so says Southern folklore) unconscious drunks."

The list of snafus goes on and on. But there's no need to despair. As Tenner takes care to explain, even the military engineer who coined Murphy's Law meant it not as a defeatist principle, but as a call for alertness and adaptation in a world technology makes increasingly unpredictable. Tenner's remarkable catalog of unintended consequences makes a similar call, and we would do well to heed it.