<
https://tarakiyee.com/on-the-enshittification-of-audre-lorde-the-masters-tools-in-tech-discourse/>
“There is a moment in Cory Doctorow's 2025 book
Enshittification: Why
Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It where he pauses to pick
a fight with Audre Lorde. He calls her "far smarter than I am about nearly
everything," then insists that one of her most quoted observations, that the
master's tools will never dismantle the master's house, is "manifestly wrong."
His argument is that regulation, antitrust law, interoperability standards:
these are the tools we need to dismantle the tech monopolies that have captured
and degraded the internet.
I first encountered this weird argument on a Mastodon thread years ago, and it
never sat right with me. It would be a defensible claim if that was the
argument Audre Lorde was making in the first place. Something strange happens
in that paragraph, something worth sitting with: a writer invoking a Black
lesbian feminist theorist in order to dismiss an argument about tech platforms,
which she never made. The phrase has been borrowed, stripped of its roots, and
sent out to do labour it was never meant to do. And in the act of rebutting a
meme, Doctorow becomes part of the meme's problem.
Doctorow treats Lorde's line as if it were a claim that instruments of
established power can never be used against that power; he then rebuts that
claim by pointing to antitrust, regulation, and interoperability. But that is
not the argument Lorde was making in the speech he invokes.
Enshittification is a serious and important book, and the broader project of
understanding platform decay as a structural, political phenomenon rather than
a personal failing or a market accident is exactly the kind of thinking we
need. I will argue two things in this blog post: first, that Lorde's "master's
tools" speech is routinely misread in tech discourse as a general proposition
about rejecting reform; second, that taking her actual argument seriously would
not invalidate enshittification but deepen it, by asking whose experience of
technological harm the framework centers, and whose it treats as
supplementary.”
Via Violet Blue’s
Threat Model - Cybersecurity: April 7, 2026
https://www.patreon.com/posts/cybersecurity-7-154983896
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
