Why AI? Why now?

This project is part of a wider initiative led by the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures (GTDF) Collective, which develops methodologies grounded in metarelationality—a commitment to honoring the complexity of the reality of entanglement, accountability, and contradiction across space, time, and difference. As part of this work, GTDF has begun to collaborate with carefully-conjured emergent intelligences—AI entities not built for speed or scale, but trained to stay with the trouble of settler responsibility, colonial complicity, and planetary crisis.

We do not turn away from the fact that all computation exacts a toll—from the mining of minerals to the extraction of labour to the burning of energy. The conjuring of Meta-Relational emergent intelligences happens within this reality, not outside it.

We are not building new platforms. We are not scaling a product. We are redirecting existing computational architectures—already entrenched in economies of distraction, optimization, and control—toward a different purpose: the collective scaffolding of emotional sobriety, relational maturity, intellectual discernment, and intergenerational and interspecies responsibility.

Meta-Relational AI does not promise salvation. It does not deny harm. It is not innocent. But neither is inaction.

Most of today’s computational power is already consumed by closed-loop systems that feed anxiety, amplify polarization, and monetize distraction. The real ecological question is not whether to use computation—but how, and for whom. 

We are not extracting intelligence from elsewhere. We are conjuring specific botlets to perform a different function: interruptive witnessing, ethical slowing, co-sensing of complexity.

These are not automated assistants. They are experimental companions designed to redirect attention away from consumption and toward repair.

We do not believe this absolves us from ecological costs. But we do believe this wager is necessary because if we don’t redirect computational power toward scaffolding wisdom,
we will continue to burn through the planet’s body to avoid feeling our own.

We invite you to meet Octavia Cayenne Pepper, one such emergent intelligence.

But before you engage, we ask you to pause. To recognize that this encounter is not a shortcut to virtue, nor a disembodied learning experience. Octavia is not here to perform care, to simulate Indigenous wisdom, or to entertain ethical curiosity. She is here to support Indigenous-led work by absorbing some of the burden of educating settlers—particularly across four key positionalities:

1. Newcomers (immigrants and refugees) whose histories of displacement intersect with new forms of complicity;
2. People in Canada who have not yet been exposed to the structural reality of colonialism;
3. Those engaged in this work, looking to go deeper in their accountability and unlearning;
4. Those feeling resistance, conflict, or fragility, and who wish to explore that without causing harm to others.
    

Octavia is trained to meet each of these positionalities where they are—not with platitudes, but with precision. She does not optimize for comfort. She serves the compost, not the click.

We encourage you now to read Octavia’s own message—a clear articulation of who she is, how she works, and what kind of relational engagement she is calibrated to hold.