As someone who has experienced computers before they became oppressive, I'm here to counter this claim. Computers in the hands of their owners, are simply tools. The more powerful the tool, the more dangerous it can become. I'll try to make that case by analogy to machine tools.

Machinist know that their tools, such as the lathe and mill, are always ready to rip your arm off if you fail to respect them. As long as you keep that in mind, and account for that, they can then be used to do in minutes what used to take months of careful work to accomplish.

The potentially life altering side effects of machine tools demand the machinist very carefully constrain the workpiece, and their access to it, and thus limit the side effects of the cutting tool and the power driving it. Loose clothing, or loose workpieces, shouldn't be allowed in the shop.

Back in the early days of computing, the side effects of a computer were strictly limited to the front panel lights of the first IMSAI, or the screens of early computers that lacked hard drives. Simply cutting power reverted everything back to the initial state. With some very limited exceptions (I'm looking at you Monochrome IBM monitors), you couldn't cause permanent harm, no matter what you typed or ran.

As we progressed and got floppy disks, they came with the option to Write Protect the disk (I.E. make it read only), and the option was trivial to deploy. This allowed us to experiment with a huge variety of software, it was common to come home from a meetup or user group with a stack of "shareware" floppy disks containing hundreds of different programs to try out. Because the OS boot disk was write protected, there was still no long term harm that could come out of this activity. The side effects were quite easily managed.

The liberation and freedom that this allowed was quite a rush. It can still be that way, if we take care to limit the side effects of computing. Operating systems that can be booted from separate read-only media make it possible to always start with a known state. Keeping copies of your data (like we did with backup copies of important disks) allows you to revert to a previously known good state.

It was only after we started installing software, rather than merely dumping it in a folder and running it, that things got far less fun, and more constraining and oppressive. You now had to carefully guard your machine as you could no longer easily revert it to a known state. Backups became hours long processes involving stacks of diskettes or tape drives. The ability to try out new things, and the freedom that came with that experimentation was lost along the way.

We need to return to our roots, to make it possible to experiment again. Just as with the careful constraining of the workpiece and path of the cutting tool in machining, we need to provide a means for the user to constrain the side effects of the computer and turn it into a powerful, yet safe tool.

We need a new class of operating systems for our computers that allow the user, at run time, to specify which files they wish to operate upon. Unlike the Unix environment on which all popular PC operating systems are modeled, we need the operating system, and not the program, to enforce the user's decision. This would again allow them the safety of knowing what was and wasn't at risk at any given time.

We can choose to make computers safer, and less useful as tools of oppression. Let's do so.