Category Blindness as Structural Violence

Ursula K. Le Guin's The Word for World Is Forest demonstrates that violence can occur not through malice but through category structure. Captain Davidson cannot see Athshean dreaming as knowledge because his framework has only "productive work" and "wasted time." The dreaming reads as the latter. Therefore it is eliminated, not because Davidson hates the Athsheans but because his cognitive architecture contains no slot for "alternative mode of knowing that looks like sleep." The destruction is logical within the framework. The framework is the violence. Applied to AI, the productivity metrics framework sees only output (lines of code, briefs drafted, essays submitted) and has no category for "the relationship between a practitioner and her practice, built through friction, that produces judgment the output does not contain." The embedded knowledge is invisible. Therefore it is not protected. The extraction proceeds, rational and catastrophic, because the framework destroying