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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Sasha Akhavi Mar 18

@tante In the conflict between Lorde's quote and Ani Difranco's "Every tool is a weapon if you hold it right," Difranco's insight wins every time. If UX has taught nothing else throughout its history, it has taught that users always subvert tools in ways their developers could never expect. This goes double for digital tools given their abstraction: E.g. databases have a horrible, genocidal early history, but most liberatory projects use them today.

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Maximilian Overdraft, Esq.

@sakhavi @tante If the only tool you value is one that does harm by its use, then you have valued Unwisely.

A gun is not a hammer, and hitting a nail with it won't make it constructive.

A.I. is designed to deprive humans of jobs, livelihoods and workplace power. It's a gun.