I can use the master’s hammer on the master’s skull by expropriation. I can’t really use the master’s federalists society to much effect
Yep. You can also use the master’s hammer to hammer in nails too.
Hmm I never thought about it that way
Note for those who missed it:
This is in reference to another thread, featuring an AI-generated meme: https://lemmy.ml/post/53349754
Also, worth noting that Audre Lorde’s famous “master’s tools” quote is often misunderstood: https://thinkpeakstudio.com/blog/quote-explained-audre-lorde-september-2026/
Also also worth noting… The whole idea of memetics is that cultural artifacts like images and tools influence the behavior of individuals who encounter them.
So insisting that tools don’t influence behavior while posting memes to try to get that proposition to replicate is just deeply strange.
Thank you for the link
The whole idea of memetics is that cultural artifacts like images and tools influence the behavior of individuals who encounter them.
So insisting that tools don’t influence behavior while posting memes to try to get that proposition to replicate is just deeply strange.Who said that it has no influence in behaviour? And we cannot make adjustments to handle or mitigate/enhance some of it?
Is it like how some people connect video games to violence and ignore the influence of other factors?
The tool has influence, but there are a lot of other factors too.
Or are you saying that tools should not be used?
Okay fair, you didn’t assert no influence.
But you can surely understand how I could see AI as a tool which is exceptionally capable of carrying the philosophy of the “nerd reich”, compared to most other tools.
So it’s only a short walk from there to “well if AI isn’t a meaningfully potent vessel for their ideology then basically nothing is, so there’s no case that merits an abundance of caution.”
AI as a tool which is exceptionally capable of carrying the philosophy of the “nerd reich”
Social media and the internet is also similar in that POV, right?.
Do you have similar views on it. How do you rate them?Anyway, the USAmerican Reich and similar folk controlling it is indeed the issue, right?
Do you have similar views on it. How do you rate them?
I do have similar views on social media, including Lemmy.
I think there are some anti-human biases baked into the structure of something like Reddit, where the headline+body are more accessible than the linked content, comments are ranked and nested, threads only stay relevant for a short period of time, and the most karma-maximizing strategy is to use someone’s comment as fodder to address a silent but large audience instead of actually directly speaking to the original commenter.
But yaknow, here I am, commenting on Lemmy anyway. 🫠
It’s not only ownership of a tool that directs how it gets used. A tool naturally makes some actions easier and more salient, while other actions become more difficult and fade into the background.
Take the gesture priority of iOS and Android. iOS took a radical departure from PDAs by activating scroll gestures more easily than text selection.
You can technically do both actions on both devices, but that tiny change in gesture priority turned smartphones into content-scrolling (and therefore content-consumption) machines.
It arises from the structure of the software, not who controls it. Apple didn’t decide to make people into content zombies, they just decided to put one handler ahead of another in the list of handler functions.
Every digital tool is faced with a million similar tiny dilemmas, where it can’t handle every use case at once, so it has to pick which behaviors to encourage. The way those dilemmas get resolved ends up deeply embedded into the tools themselves.
I think we’ll know what to do with the means of production once seized; I wouldn’t worry about that.
The tools that will not dismantle the master’s house are the bourgeois democratic ones. We can’t seize the means through their political system. We have to overthrow & replace their system through revolution, not reform.
Justice does not naturally arise from unjust circumstances. Justice is a punishment forced onto those who have wronged their fellow man, exacted by those who have been wronged
in today’s world, those who have been wronged have been conditioned to redirect their anger at forces that are trying to liberate them.
“It’s the Master’s tools that will tear down the plantation” was how I thought the phrase went?
Cool. Well, if his tools are useful for that, then good. But those tools need to become not his, but ours.
So, on the ownership.
…are you being the annoying crow in the cartoon rn or am I misunderstanding?
"Of course nobody will be able to tell this is a defense of posting slop. Making this garbage bird meme is a sure way to
- Win respect among your Leninist peers
- Raise awareness about niche anticapitalism slogans
- Preempt any criticism for supporting the worst industry that’s subverting political consciousness in 2026
If you like we can go over more strategies for posting churned trash on the internet"
This is not a defense, but pointing out the issue in thinking that the it is some inherent issue in some tech, rather han who owns it and how it is used.
And I did not make the meme.
The issue is also - to suit what purpose the tool was made. Tools didn’t emerge from nowhere.
Labour saving technology? Shouldn’t it be in the hands of collective?
