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.

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World Basement Classic Mar 18

@tante This is why I hate talk about "good" uses of #LLM / #GenAI technology.

Those tools are rooted in harm, whether it's theft of creative works, exploitation of developing world labour, or abuse of scarce resources. You can't use them without being complicit in that harm, no matter how noble your cause.

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fraggle

@diffrentcolours @tante the other that sprang to my mind was cryptocurrency. I've seen various misguided projects over the years from people trying to create "socialist cryptocurrencies" and the like. But fundamentally it's a system that by design tries to elevate property rights above democratic accountability. You can't start from that and try to paint some attempt at socialism on top of it

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Haere Mar 19

@fraggle @diffrentcolours @tante if an hostile alien species wanted to force an ecological collapse scenario onto the world, anonymously released fake computer money that has escalating *computationally expensive & useless busywork* as part of its core operation would be a good start. when that fake money gets too obviously fake for widespread societal buy-in? simply scale up recklessly wasteful artificial neural networks & spread em w/ stories of machine god
👽 ᴇɴᴊᴏʏ ᴅᴀ ꜱʟᴏᴘ, ꜰᴏᴏʟɪꜱʜ ʜᴜᴍᴀɴꜱ