So what is a revenge effect?

    "They happen because it is very humanity to know in advance exactly what the technological and social systems we are dealing with really are. So when you take a new technology and put it into a psychological and a social context you are really performing an experiment and the results can very often be the opposite of what you expected. That's not the formal definition but that is why we so often encounter revenge effects as consequences that tend to cancel out our reasons for adopting a technology in the first case."

    In the introduction to the book you allude to one or two weird cases: the Audi sedans that mysteriously accelerated on their own and the computer that refused to work when one particular technician walked into the room. Do ghosts in the machine really exist?

    "Well sometimes there are very random changes of state that combine to produce something that is really amazing. I've heard about experiments where you would never have expected that all the electrons would have passed through a filament in a certain way, but they did. And there are things that amaze physicists and experimenters and so there should be things that amaze people. And while I don't attribute any occult properties to them still find it interesting that nature and technology act as though they have these properties."