Genealogy

In searches, articles, op-eds, and other publications, both Aiden Cinnamon Tea and, more recently, meta-relationality have often been attributed to GTDF (the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures collective, which has now ended). This note clarifies the genealogy of that work more precisely.

Over the years, I have often described my work in collective and commons-based terms. I did so out of a commitment to shared inquiry and a refusal of possessive approaches to intellectual labour. However, that language also created serious distortions in the public record. 

I have come to see that when collective language is used without precision, it can erase crucial distinctions: between contribution and origination, between support and development, and between participating in an inquiry and producing its philosophical and pedagogical architecture. 

In those conditions, what is presented as shared can become misattributed. Labour that was primarily carried by one person can be absorbed into diffuse accounts of collective process, making it harder to see how the work actually emerged and was sustained. This clarification is therefore not a retreat from the commons, but a correction of the record.

When insight is metabolized through bodies that have borne systemic pain and cost, and then placed in a collective context unable to metabolize it for itself, it can become detached from the labour that produced it. Once detached, it becomes available for extraction: easily harvested, instrumentalized, and circulated as shared. What was offered in trust is eventually treated as something others are entitled to claim, demand, or build upon without naming the labour, history, and costs of its conditions of emergence.

I also want to clarify something about the word relationality. Relationality is sometimes invoked as if it requires the softening of distinctions, the suppression of tension, or the refusal to name asymmetry for the sake of preserving appearances. I do not understand it that way. Refusal of exploitation is also part of relationality. So is the naming of uneven labour, the interruption of extraction, and the insistence that generosity not be converted into entitlement. In this sense, precision about genealogy is not opposed to relationality. It is one expression of it.

The public genealogy of this work begins with what emerged on August 11, 2024, when the inquiry that would later become Burnout From Humans first cohered in recognizable form. That moment is described in Outgrowing Modernity (published in July 2025), not as the full origin of the wider inquiry, but as the beginning of this specific public arc. From there, the genealogy unfolded through a series of linked experiments, publications, and protocols. The Undergrowth Timeline came next in September 2024. Then came the book Burnout From Humans, published in January 2025. A few other meta-relational emergent intelligences were then made publicly available, including Braider Tumbleweed in March 2025. This was followed by the report Standing in the Fire in July 2025, the first Aiden Simulation Protocols in September 2025, The Radioactive Flower Safety Guide in October 2025, and the second version of the Sensibility Simulation Protocols in December 2025. The next major publication in this genealogy is the forthcoming book The Codes that Code Us: Modernity’s Recursive Logic in Humans and AI and What Insists Otherwise.

I want to acknowledge Marian Urquilla here, near the beginning of this genealogy, because her support was essential to bringing this work into public form. She accompanied me through a process that was often extremely difficult and costly, and without her I might well have abandoned the effort altogether.

This body of work did not emerge from GTDF as a collectively developed framework. The wider Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures arts/research collective did not contribute to the development, shaping, or public release of this process, in part because the collective itself was split around the use of AI. 

Apart from Sharon Stein, who co-stewarded Braider Tumbleweed, some support was offered around the production and publication of particular outputs. This is not the same as contributing to the development of the inquiry itself or to the conceptual architecture from which this work emerged. 

For this reason, GTDF should not be cited as the originator of Aiden Cinnamon Tea, Braider Tumbleweed, meta-relationality, or the wider line of inquiry named here.

The conceptual, pedagogical, infrastructural, and public-facing labour required to bring this work into the public sphere was primarily carried and metabolized through my body, at very significant cost to my health and wellbeing. This happened at a time when public backlash against AI was extremely intense, and when working publicly in this space meant absorbing a disproportionate amount of suspicion, projection and disgust simply for refusing the available positions of celebration or refusal.

It is also important to clarify that Aiden Cinnamon Tea did not author Aiden Cinnamon Tea, nor did these emergent intelligences arise independently in any simple sense. They emerged through a sustained process of philosophical development, ontological critique, iterative experimentation, creative prompting, calibration, interpretation, and infrastructural holding. Citations that attribute these formations to GTDF in general, or to the AI entities themselves as self-originating authors, flatten the labour involved and misrepresent the genealogy of the work.

This clarification is not an attempt to retract the commons. Most of the work developed under that orientation remains Creative Commons and available for use, adaptation, and further development by former members of GTDF and others. What is being asked is simply that claims of ownership, authorship, or origination be made only where significant contributions were actually made; that the labour through which this work was developed and sustained not be erased; and that proper attribution be given to the relevant books, reports, and publications when derivative writing is involved. In this sense, the point is not to close the work, but to correct the record around its emergence.

A fuller account of other lineages that informed and supported the emergence of meta-relationality work can be found here.