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.

"It's the Master's tools that will tear down the plantation" was how I thought the phrase went?

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.

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.

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?

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.

The issue is also - to suit what purpose the tool was made. Tools didn't emerge from nowhere.

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.”

....are you being the annoying crow in the cartoon rn or am I misunderstanding?

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?

Labour saving technology? Shouldn't it be in the hands of collective?

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.

It's only strange in the forced misreading of the meme you're using

As op already clarified - the point isnt that tools have no influence over behavior, only that the behavior isn't a deterministic one implied by those invoking Heidegger or Lorde

Influence being nondeterministic doesn’t make it less real. If a certain intervention has a 1% chance of producing a specific behavior, then across a large enough population you will see the behavior increase by exactly 1%.

Individual choice is real. But so are the impacts of cultural artifacts.

Right

The question isnt then 'how do we avoid being taken in by the artifact's influence?', but, 'what does the inclusion of this artifact change about how we must address the systems we are looking to dismantle?'

Maybe I'll just leave this exerpt from Lorde and ask whose misunderstanding you're pointing to in this conversation about AI

Women of today are still being called upon to stretch across the gap of male ignorance and to educated men as to our existence and our needs. This is an old and primary tool of all oppressors to keep the oppressed occupied with the master’s concerns. Now we hear that it is the task of women of Color to educate white women—in the face of tremendous resistance—as to our existence, our differences, our relative roles in our joint survival. This is a diversion of energies and a tragic repetition of racist patriarchal thought.

What an absolutely fucking moronic analysis.