Science Quote by Jef Raskin

The sting in Raskin's line is the reversal: the machine marketed as a dutiful assistant has quietly become a petty bureaucrat. He’s not talking about sci-fi domination; he’s pointing at the everyday micro-oppressions of computing: modal dialogs that halt your work, file systems that punish human memory, interfaces that demand you learn their grammar instead of adapting to yours. “Supposed to be” does a lot of work here, invoking the original promise of personal computing as empowerment, then indicting the industry for breaking the contract.

Raskin’s context matters. As the human-computer interaction thinker behind key Macintosh concepts, he was inside the temple, watching usability get traded for features, speed, and engineering convenience. The “oppression” is structural: computers enforce rigid procedures at scale, and because they’re framed as neutral tools, users are trained to blame themselves. If you can’t make the printer work, you’re “bad with computers,” not the victim of a hostile system. That’s how power hides: by making friction feel like personal failure.

There’s also a prescient cultural warning embedded in the present tense “Right now.” Even before today’s algorithmic nudging, attention economies, and subscription lock-in, Raskin saw the trajectory: tools becoming gatekeepers. The quote works because it weaponizes an ordinary metaphor (servant) to expose a quiet class inversion. We thought we were buying labor. We bought rules.