Time & Perspective Quote by Janet Reno

A lesser official might have faked fluency. Janet Reno chose the blunt, almost deadpan honesty of someone testifying under oath: "At this moment I do not have a personal relationship with a computer". The line works because it borrows the language of intimacy to describe a tool, then calmly declines the invitation. "Personal relationship" is what you say about spouses, mentors, or complicated relatives, not office equipment. That mismatch creates the faint comic spark, but the comedy is strategic.

Context matters: Reno was Attorney General in the 1990s, when the internet was rapidly becoming a public arena and Washington was scrambling to regulate what it barely understood. Under pressure, public servants often perform competence. Reno instead signals a different kind of authority: institutional seriousness, not Silicon Valley cosplay. The phrase "at this moment" also functions like legal scaffolding. It narrows the claim, preempting the gotcha follow-up (Maybe you used one yesterday? Maybe staff printed your email?). It's precise, defensible, and quietly revealing about how government operated then: mediated by aides, paper trails, and hierarchical distance from the machines beginning to reshape power.

Subtext: the state can police emerging technologies without personally inhabiting them, but that separation has a cost. The remark captures a transitional era when "computer literacy" was becoming a cultural litmus test, and a top law-enforcement official could still frame nonuse as neither shameful nor disqualifying. Today it reads like a fossil from pre-smartphone public life, when your relationship with a computer was optional, not inevitable.