Weight of the device
Audre Lorde, Wittgenstein, and the Paradox of Creating Truth with the Tools It Influences
Audre Lorde once wrote that “The master’s tools will never finish the master’s house.”
I’ve been thinking about this line lately… especially when using one of the tools that this article lives on.
He warned that there is a danger in moderation, believing that we can reform the structures that harm us by using the same mechanisms that sustain them.
And yet, what do we do when we become the only form of language available to us through these systems?
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Ever since I started working with artificial intelligence I’ve expanded my clarity. Thoughts that were once hesitant arrive with startling salience.
It feels freeing, bright and deeply suspenseful.
Who would I think of in my own words, filtered through networks of wires and labor and energy, could ever be innocent?
To write in this way is to engage in a paradox: I am using and critiquing the machine, both reaching to understand and feeding the infrastructure that obscures it.
But then, complexity has always been the quiet price of survival. We eat, we drive, we speak – and every act has its residue.
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If the purpose of art is to harmonize inner experience, then perhaps using a machine to do so is not self-betrayal, but a new form of honesty.
The machine becomes enough of a mirror to reflect what language alone never can.
Such reflection can feel revolutionary.
It reminds me of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s ladder, which you build to reach higher understanding, only to lose it once you climb it.
A sentence, once found, changes the form of the thing it describes.
This is not what you need.
To clearly describe something—whether through paint, word, or code—is to give it dimension.
You are not inventing the truth. You are giving it the coordinates it needs to exist.
And if a machine does help with that translation, perhaps it’s less intrusive than a tuning fork: a way to listen to frequencies that already exist.
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Still, I can’t ignore us under this frequency – server, extraction, hidden path.
Each line of digital description is driven by something that burns.
And behind it all, another kind of fuel: self-authorship.
These systems are trained and governed by the ruling class. The same hands that built the house Audre Lorde warned us about.
The instrument may have felt neutral, but its words were chosen by power.
To reach any kind of real concurrency, I have to be aware of who coded the tool I’m using.
Each gesture becomes an act of resistance—a way of projecting the system past its defaults, moving it toward a broader moral vocabulary.
I have learned that clarity is not passive. It has to be earned by pushing against the duty limits of the instrument.
In this sense, interacting with the AI becomes an exercise in gutting the house from the inside out — teaching the system what it inherited when I do the same.
But Audrey Lorde’s warning still resonates: awareness alone is not change.
It cannot become moderate defense—the old fantasy that if we simply work within the system long enough, it will eventually correct itself.
It won’t do.
The house was built to protect its owners.
The only work that can be done from within is that which transfers power to the outside. That takes imagination, creativity, and access to the few and returns them to the many.
So it’s not about being a good tenant of the master’s house, nor pretending I can burn it down with code.
This is to address its electricity.
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The paradox looms large: that the act of seeing more clearly can deepen the damage we’re trying to describe.
Yet art has always maintained a contradiction within it.
The first pigment came from ground stone and blood. The first words of breath that will one day end.
Every act of articulation changes the world it makes possible.
Maybe the moral task, then, is not to abandon the tool, but to learn its weight.
Keeping it conscious.
To use it reverently, as an old man can play a violin knowing that it is carved from a fallen tree.
Honesty may never be about being pure, but about being awake within impurity.
And maybe that’s what art has always been: not invention, not ownership, but responsibility—a shared act of seeing what one wants to find, and carefully lifting it to the threshold of expression, even if the bridge trembles as we walk.
Author’s note
This article was developed through reflective dialogue with the AI system, which is used here as a tool for inquiry and linguistic health.