Science & Tech Quote by Clifford Stoll

Stoll’s question lands like a throwaway joke, then tightens into an indictment. “Users” is supposed to be a neutral term from computing: the person at the keyboard, the customer, the account. He yanks that clean, managerial word into contact with addiction, where “user” is a diagnosis and a warning label. The charge isn’t that technology is literally narcotics; it’s that our language already knows something we’d rather not admit about compulsion, dependency, and the way systems are designed to keep people coming back.

The wit works because it’s linguistic sabotage. One word collapses two worlds that culture prefers to keep separate: the respectable enthusiast (“computer aficionados”) and the stigmatized addict. By making them share a label, Stoll points at how institutions launder power through vocabulary. If the person is a “user,” the product is quietly framed as inevitable, like a utility, not a persuasion machine. Nobody “uses” you back, except of course platforms, advertisers, and the incentives embedded in software.

Context matters: Stoll emerged as a prominent skeptical voice in the early networked era, when computers were shifting from specialized tools to everyday environments. His broader project was to puncture techno-utopian hype with human consequences: attention, autonomy, and the moral fog of “progress.” The question feels playful, but the subtext is sharp: if the best word we have for digital participation rhymes with dependency, maybe we should interrogate what kind of relationship we’re normalizing.