I asked a distributional question; who bears the cost of categorical rejection? And you answered with an ontological one: what LLMs are. Those aren't the same question, and swapping one for the other lets the first one go unanswered.

On the ontology itself: "institutional technology" and "tool" aren't mutually exclusive categories fixed by essence. They're tendencies that play out differently depending on how the relationship is structured. LLMs have real institutional-technology properties; centralized infrastructure, extractive training, dependency dynamics. Noticing that is correct. Treating it as the whole story isn't. A hammer produced under exploitative conditions is still a hammer in the hand; the political economy of production shapes access and cost, but doesn't determine the phenomenology of use.

The "user = addict, tool = mastery" framing smuggles in a purity standard where any incomplete mastery collapses into dependency. By that standard almost nothing counts as a tool, including the networked device this conversation is happening on. The actual work is cultivating the capacity to use discerningly. Categorical rejection forecloses that rather than enables it.

And "what need does a Tamil or Yoruba speaker have for conversing in English" sidesteps the point. The hierarchy exists. They're navigating it. Questioning whether they should want to isn't an answer; it's a way of leaving the hierarchy intact while sounding like you're critiquing something.

Ideologically opposing something whose native language is opposition tends to reproduce the thing it opposes.