"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).

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"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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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/

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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.

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"The street finds its own uses" counsels us to hate the sinner and *love* the sin. The indisputable fact that HP Lovecraft was a racist creep is no reason to write off Cthulhoid mythos - it's reason to claim and refashion them:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/09/the-old-crow-is-getting-slow/#i-love-ny

The claim that sin is a forever-chemical contaminant that can't ever be rinsed away is the ideology of Mr Gotcha:

> We should improve society somewhat.

> Yet you participate in society. Curious!

https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/

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In its right-wing form, it is Margaret Thatcher's "There is no alternative":

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/15/piketty-pilled/#tax-justice

Thatcher demanded that you accept all the injustices and oppressions of capitalism if you enjoyed its fruits. If capitalism put a roof over your head and groceries in your fridge, you can't complain about the people it hurts. There is no version of society that has the machines and practices that produced those things that does not also produce the injustice.

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The technological version of this is the one that tech bosses peddle: If you enjoy talking to your friends on Facebook, you can't complain about Mark Zuckerberg listening in on the conversation. There is no alternative. Wanting to talk to your friends out of Zuck's earshot is like wanting water that's not wet. It's unreasonable.

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But there's a left version of this, its doppelganger: the belief that a technology born in sin can never be redeemed.

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If you use an LLM running on your computer to find a typo, using an unmeasurably small amount of electricity in the process, you still sin - not because of anything that happens when you use that LLM, but because of LLMs' "structural properties," "the way they make it harder to learn and grow," "the way they make products worse," the "emissions, water use and e-waste":

https://tante.cc/2026/02/20/acting-ethical-in-an-imperfect-world/

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The facts that finding punctuation errors in your own work using your own computer doesn't make it "harder to learn and grow," doesn't "make products worse," and doesn't add to "emissions, water use and e-waste" are irrelevant. The part that matters isn't the use of a technology, it's the *origin*.

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The fact that this technology is steeped in indisputable sin means that every use of it is sinful. The street can find as many uses as it likes for things, but it won't matter, because there is no alternative.

When radical technologists scheme to liberate technology, they're not hoping to redeem *the gadget*, they're trying to liberate *people*.

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Information doesn't want to be free. Information doesn't and can't want anything. *People* want to be free, and liberated access to information tech is a precondition for human liberation itself.

Promethean leftists don't reject the master's tools: we *seize* them. The fact that Unix was born of a convicted monopolist who turned the screws on users at every turn is no reason to abandon Unix - it demands that we reverse-engineer, open, and *free* Unix:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/20/capitalist-unrealism/#praxis

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We don't do this out of moral consideration for Unix. Unix is inert, it warrants no moral consideration. But billions of users of free operating systems that are resistant to surveillance and control *are* worthy of moral consideration and we set them free by seizing the means of computation.

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If a technology can do something to further human thriving, then we can love the sin, even as we hate the sinners in its lineage. We seize the means of computation, not because we care about computers, but because we care about *people*.

Artifacts do have politics, but those politics are not immutable. Those politics are ours to seize and refashion:

https://faculty.cc.gatech.edu/~beki/cs4001/Winner.pdf

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"The purpose of a system is what it does" (S. Beer). The important fact about a technology is what it *does*, not *how it came about*. Does a *use* of a technology harm someone? Does a *use* of a technology harm the environment?

Does a *use* of a technology help someone do something that improves their life?

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@pluralistic But the *use* of the technology, in this case, includes the ongoing training. We can’t wave a magic wand and have that go away. The use of this technology *is* harmful, unless you buy into the externalization of costs advocated by the people peddling the technology in the first place.

Gibson’s quotable, but Stephenson’s _Snow Crash_ is more apt here. LLMs are a remarkable parallel to that virus. And the street didn’t find a use for it, it needed to be destroyed.