"The street finds its own uses" is a surprisingly subtle and liberatory battle-cry. It stakes a claim by technology's *users* that is separate from the claims asserted by corporations that make technology (often under grotesque and cruel conditions) and market it (often for grotesque and cruel purposes).

2/

"The street finds its own uses" is a statement about technopolitics. It acknowledges that yes, there *are* politics embedded in our technology, the blood in the machine, but these politics are neither simple, *nor are they immutable*. The fact that a technology was born in sin does not preclude it from being put to virtuous ends. A technology's politics are up for grabs.

3/

In other words, it's the opposite of Audre Lorde's "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house." It's an assertion that, in fact, the master's tools have all the driver-bits, hex-keys, and socket sets needed to completely dismantle the master's house, and, moreover, to build something better with the resulting pile of materials.

4/

And of *course* the street finds its own uses for things. Things - technology - don't appear out of nowhere. Everything is in a lineage, made from the things that came before it, destined to be transformed by the things that come later. Things can't come into existence until other things already exist.

5/

Take the helicopter. Lots of people have observed the action of a screw and the twirling of a maple key as it falls from a tree and thought, *perhaps that could be made to fly*. Da Vinci was drawing helicopters in the 15th century:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonardo%27s_aerial_screw

6/

But Da Vinci couldn't build a helicopter. No one could, until they did. To make the first helicopter, you need to observe the action of the screw and the twirling of a maple key, *and* you need to have lightweight, strong alloys and powerful internal combustion engines.

7/

Those other things had to be invented by other people first. Once they were, the next person who thought hard about screws and maple keys was bound to get a helicopter off the ground. That's why things tend to be invented simultaneously, by unrelated parties.

8/

TV, radio and the telephone all have multiple inventors, because these people were the cohort that happened to alight upon the insights needed to build these technologies *after* the adjacent technologies had been made and disseminated.

9/

If technopolitics were immutable - if the original sin of a technology could never be washed away - then *everything* is beyond redemption. Somewhere in the history of the lever, the pulley and the wheel are some absolute *monsters*. Your bicycle's bloodline includes some truly horrible ancestors. The computer is practically a crime against humanity:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/24/the-traitorous-eight-and-the-battle-of-germanium-valley/

10/

A defining characteristic of purity culture is the belief that things are defined by their origins. An artist who was personally terrible must make terrible art - even if that art succeeds *artistically*, even if it moves, comforts and inspires you, it can't ever be separated from the politics of its maker. It is terrible because of its origins, not its merits. If you hate the sinner, you must also hate the sin.

11/

@pluralistic
I suspect that some of the motivation to see things that way comes from the books of *one particular* big-name author having contained some questionable elements that would have slid by an uncritical audience, but stuck out like a sore thumb once her politics turned against those of a lot of her original readership.

Since it happened once and caused a generational trauma in the process, younger types are paranoid about it happening again.