Audre Lorde's "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house."

[npars01@mstdn.social]

5/

In any technology, power imbalances play an important role.

As Cory Doctorow points out, it's a form of brain damage to deny the role power plays in economics. Ditto for AI.

https://inthesetimes.com/article/ice-deportation-machine-surveillance-artificial-intelligence-thomson-reuters-clear-trump

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/mar/14/ai-chatbots-psychosis

https://theweek.com/world-news/grok-eu-deepfake-porn-probe-elon-musk-ai

https://www.thefp.com/p/grok-is-making-porn-from-peoples-pictures

https://lasvegassun.com/news/2026/jan/13/governments-taking-action-on-grok-due-to-ai-genera/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/02/02/elon-musk-grok-porn-generator/

[sakhavi@aoir.social]

@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.

[mro@digitalcourage.social]

Hi @tante
https://archive.org/details/illich-conviviality is what we need more.

[alter_kaker@hachyderm.io]

@tante I think that Lourde's central insight here is that tool use changes the user and to some degree determines what it's used for. We see this in the cognitive impact of LLM tools, in revolutionary violence leading to the reestablishment of similar structures of oppression it was originally meant to fight, etc etc.

As the old saying goes, if all you have is a hammer...

[sassinake@mastodon.social]

@tante

thank you for that explanation. I kept thinking hammers and saws, and didn't get the metaphor at all.

Now this is much clearer.

[xenophora@mastodon.art]

@sakhavi @tante

I'll bite. What was the original purpose of databases, though?

I mean, I guess Difranco's right but is the reverse really true? Can any weapon be a tool if I hold it right? Can I plant a lush, nourishing garden with a nuke? It's hard to picture. :/

[awkapuma@mastodon.social]

@tante

Your observation is brilliant.

In order to what you said, is that the social networks of the #bigtechs like Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, etc., will never be a tool for the liberation of the peoples, of the opressed (us), as they structure social relations of domination and related to the interests of the oppressor. A tool creates a specific social relation.

It is pointless to open an account on twitter and shout "I will make the revolution from within!".

[raepatterson@mastodon.social]

@sakhavi @tante

Every tool can be used as a weapon, but not every weapon can also be used as a tool, especially not as a tool for good, and most especially not for net good.

[burnitdown@beige.party]

@sakhavi @tante

Ani Difranco had a concert at a former plantation and still has neither apologised nor made reparations.

[sakhavi@aoir.social]

@xenophora @tante See https://explaininghistory.org/2025/09/30/ibm-and-the-holocaust-technology-as-a-force-multiplier-for-genocide/ for a description of genocidal early database use. Lorde's assertion is also about destructive (house-dismantling) tool use. It's harder across the board to use tools constructively than destructively, but that's an eventuality of the 2nd law of thermodynamics, not any given political stance. Again, subversion will most often be unanticipated, not prescribe-able.

[xenophora@mastodon.art]

@sakhavi @tante

Ah, right. I knew of this but I don't think I was aware that it was the first to be considered computerized.

[condret@fedi.absturztau.be]

@haverholm @tante can copying be exploitation?

[dialecticalmusings@app.wafrn.net]

it was mostly sparked by a blog post I read …

Incidentally, the “Conclusion” chapter of the blog author’s famous book published in October 2025 repeats the point made in the blog post, about Audre Lorde being “manifestly wrong” in proclaiming that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house”.

[haverholm@radikal.social]

@condret Of course. That's the basis of intellectual property. Which publishers like the music industry sort of twist to serve their corporate purposes. @tante

[kitkat_blue@mastodon.social]

@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.

/1

[kitkat_blue@mastodon.social]

@tante

Ai, however, is a special case. It is more like nuclear weapons. These are the kind of "master's tools" that should never be used. Once brought into reality, the only course is containment.

Gen-ai and LLM-ai, tho, are more closely akin to another technology which should never be used and that is human cloning. Done digitally instead of physically. But in every essential way they are *the same* and so should be opposed on that basis and contained/banned on that same basis as well.

/2

[haverholm@radikal.social]

@dialecticalmusings I'm afraid I have no idea what the blog post, its author, or their book is 🤷 I replied to @tante's toot, that's all.

At face value though, I'd say someone would have to deliberately misread Lorde to conclude she was "manifestly wrong". Maybe even doing so from a vested interest in keeping the Master's house intact.

But I may be wading blindly into an academic hornet's nest.

[dialecticalmusings@app.wafrn.net]

That's fine.

I will respect the OP's choice to not name in this public thread the author of the blog post under discussion. However, I can tell you that the blog author is an internet activist and a cult celebrity; he is not an academic, at least not in the conventional sense of the term.

[haverholm@radikal.social]

@dialecticalmusings Ah, I may know who you talk about after all. In that case my money is 100% on Lorde over him. @tante

[tante@tldr.nettime.org]

@haverholm @dialecticalmusings I was referring to Cory Doctorow's recent post which kinda read as a response to something I wrote criticizing him