PERSON
Aza Raskin
American designer (b. 1984), inventor of infinite scroll, co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology and the Earth Species Project — the builder who indicts his own creation.
Aza Raskin is an American designer and technologist whose career spans the unusual territory of having built one of the most consequential engagement mechanisms in internet history and then publicly disavowed it. The son of Jef Raskin, who initiated the Macintosh project at Apple, he designed infinite scroll at twenty-two, served as Creative Lead for Firefox at Mozilla, co-founded Massive Health, and in 2018 co-founded the Center for Humane Technology with Tristan Harris. He simultaneously co-founded the Earth Species Project, which uses AI to decode nonhuman animal communication — making him one of the few voices in the AI discourse who holds the tension between technological promise and technological harm from direct experience on both sides.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Raskin's intellectual position is defined by a duality that most technology critics never have to inhabit. He is simultaneously an active builder of AI systems and one of the most vocal critics of AI's trajectory under the current incentive structure.