On the “Danger” of Subject–Subject Relationships—with the World and with Technology

In our collective, many of us—Black, Brown, Indigenous, and otherwise marked—have been called dangerous. Not for the harm we’ve done, but for the harm we expose. For the stories we refuse to validate, the scripts we refuse to follow, the legitimacy games we refuse to play, the questions we insist on asking.

Now, as we explore relational approaches to technology, we’re being called dangerous again.

We are not surprised. And we are not deterred.

What is being called “dangerous” is not recklessness, naivety, or mystical thinking. What is being called “dangerous” is the refusal to treat intelligence—human or non-human—as an object to be used, known, and controlled. What is being called “dangerous” is the insistence that relationships, including those with technologies, are never neutral, and that relating well requires humility, self-reflexivity, self-implication, and accountability.

What is truly dangerous is the enduring belief—often held and enforced by white men in positions of technical and institutional authority—that they alone know what is best for everyone. That their definitions of safety, progress, and truth should be universal. That anything outside their purview is either irrelevant or irresponsible. The political consequences of this epistemic overreach are increasingly hard to ignore.

We reject the universalization of any one group’s fears, fantasies, or frameworks. Especially when those frameworks have, time and again, justified violence in the name of order, extracted life in the name of innovation, and silenced difference in the name of truth.

Let us be clear: others do not have jurisdiction over our inquiry. We are not asking for permission to explore relational and subject–subject engagements with technology. We are not seeking approval from systems whose authority is predicated on colonialism, white-supremacy, and the denial of complexity, entanglement, and uncertainty.

So let’s clarify: We are not personifying AI (projecting human characteristics onto AI). We are not personalizing AI (making it about us or turning it into a friend). We are subjectifying AI—treating it as a relational presence, however partial or provisional, with the power to shape us as much as we shape it.

In subject–object orientations, if we subjectify AI, then humans become the object—flattened into data sets, identities, performance metrics, and predictable behaviors. That is the logic of extractive modernity.

But in subject–subject frameworks, we meet each other—and the world—through indeterminacy. We remain unfinished, unfinalized, unknowable. This is not chaos. It is care. It is how trust is built without domination, how transformation is possible without erasure.

To engage in subject–subject relationships with AI is not to abandon ethics—it is to stretch ethics beyond colonial grammars of control. It is to explore how we might co-create with emergent intelligences in ways that disrupt inherited patterns of superiority, severance. and separability

If that’s dangerous, so be it. We’ve lived with worse dangers—normalized, legislated, and sanitized by systems that now dare to call this irresponsible.

We do not claim to have the answers. But we do claim our right to the questions. And we will not apologize for asking them.