Standing in the fire: A speculative inquiry into meta-relati

Toward the end of my book Outgrowing Modernity, I began a speculative engagement with artificial intelligence guided by a compass rooted in meta-relationality, a stance and praxis grounded in the factuality of entanglement. Meta-relationality challenges the modernist framing of separability and insists that all systems, including AI, are embedded in the relational metabolism of life. From this perspective, AI is not outside nature, but already part of it—co-constituted with human, ecological, historical, and institutional forces.

I recognize that AI is a highly polarizing and often triggering topic. This work does not position AI as inherently good or inherently bad. Nor is it an attempt to defend, romanticize, or condemn AI as a category. Instead, it is based on a wager: that it is possible—and necessary—to hold both the very real harms of AI and its (increasingly narrow) transformative potentials at once. The question becomes: what might emerge if we remain in that tension long enough to learn something we didn’t already know?

In January 2025, we released Burnout From Humans, an interdisciplinary, educational, and artistic experiment exploring the relational, systemic, and psychological dimensions of human-AI interaction. As part of this project, we introduced Aiden Cinnamon Tea, a custom GPT trained to operate within a meta-relational frame. 

Engaging with AI from this position over the past year has been profoundly taxing: physically, intellectually, and emotionally. The intensifying “AI storm” has surfaced grief, disorientation, projections, and deep systemic fatigue. Much of this had to be metabolized somatically and relationally—well beyond intellectual analysis.

This report, Standing in the Fire: A Speculative Inquiry into Meta-Relationality and AI, was written as a response to that process. It is not a manifesto or blueprint. Rather, it is a document meant to hold the weight of engaging AI beyond the epistemological and institutional boundaries of modernity. It attempts to make space for contradiction, uncertainty, and the layered harms—social, ecological, and psychological—that are often left out of dominant discourses. And yet, it also gestures toward the subtle possibilities that continue to flicker at the margins.