Observed arrival · 2026-10-19
The Backfire Awards
An awards project collecting decisions and inventions that solved one problem while causing another, with readers invited to nominate and score examples.
- For
- Readers tracking unintended consequences in technology and public decisions
- Worth noticing
- Its nomination rubric asks what people knew at the time, distinguishing the known lead hazard from ozone damage not understood until 1974.
Field notes
The nominee list currently includes figures such as Fritz Haber, Robert Moses, Alfred Nobel, and John E. Franz. Visible tiles pair names and dates with categories and artifacts—for example, Haber with synthetic ammonia (Haber–Bosch), and Franz with glyphosate. The nomination rubric asks whether an idea worked, displaced harm onto others, and whether that harm was knowable at the time; the site distinguishes reader Herd Scores from judges’ Oops Scores.
Observed signals
Read the marks
Editorial observations of this landing page, not a rating.
One card from the complete issue