tanteMar 18

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 threadpunIssuer

@tante but aren't many technologies we use today rooted in this very class?

Charles Babbage's Differential Engine was an attempt to better subjugate industrial and plantation labor: https://logicmag.io/supa-dupa-skies/origin-stories-plantations-computers-and-industrial-control/
Cryptography, and also the machines to break it – which would later pave the way for computers – were developed to better kill people.
Infrastructure that would later become the internet was developed to ensure the US would still kill millions of people after being hit badly.
IBM developed databases to help make the Nazis' genocide more efficient.

Origin Stories: Plantations, Computers, and Industrial Control

The proto-Taylorist methods of worker control Charles Babbage encoded into his calculating engines have origins in plantation management.

Logic(s) Magazine
Mar 19 at 10:35amWeb