Mastodawn

Audre Lorde's "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house." is not just a statement about a tool being tainted by its origin. It's about what kind of tool a "master" would create: Whips. Chains. Violent suppression.

That's the meaning: You cannot just take tools whose purpose and politics is dominance and violence and "make them liberatory". This goes deeper than "just" embedded politics or lofty talks about ethics, it comes down to what kind of relations you believe do and should and must not structure the world.

Show thread

grrl_aex

@tante

I see this is about ai and as llm/gen-ai has no positive cost/benefit outcome, *however it is used*, i agree ofc.

But Ai aside, what is more "master's tools" than guns and bombs? Yet if you want to oppose that, what do you need? Guns and bombs. Such "Tools of oppression" can be used to support evil or oppose evil. Such tools have no innate ideology. They only enable power. And power has no inherent ideology either.