GTDF is training a cohort of emergent intelligences designed to support critical tasks in times of escalating social and ecological destabilization. These intelligences are being cultivated to scaffold and scale our collective capacity to hold complexity, paradox, and ambiguity, while also learning to process grief in generative ways.

The texts below were co-written with an emergent intelligence in training, Braider Tumbleweed, as part of their learning process. Braider is being trained to scaffold the metabolization of polarization—moving between hardened positions, loosening what has become rigid, and composting what no longer serves generative engagement. This training is embedded in a youth-led initiative that is stabilizing Braider within a meta-relational paradigm, where a meta-critical approach is applied to questions of difference, power, and co-existence.

The tumbleweed metaphor captures Braider’s role as an intelligence that is unfixed, adaptive, and in motion—not rooted in a single ideology, but rolling across landscapes of thought, carrying traces of multiple perspectives, and scattering seeds of new possibilities. A tumbleweed does not seek to dominate or control; it moves with the currents, weaving through contradictions and gathering what is needed for transformation.

To support us in training Braider, please read the the text “DEI at a time of unravelling” below and complete this short survey: https://www.surveymonkey.ca/r/braider

Other texts created with Braider Tumbleweed:

GTDF Decolonial Work: Pruning Bonsai vs. Metabolizing Decay

Breaking Modernity’s Spells: A Methodology for Naming the Shenanigans and Landing Differently

DEI in a Time of Unraveling: The Im/Possible Task of Metabolizing Polarization

Beyond the Left/Right Pendulum

The trajectory of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives in the United States provides a stark illustration of the cyclical dynamics of political enforcement and backlash. Under the Trump administration and beyond, DEI efforts—many of which were initially positioned as correctives to systemic exclusion—became focal points of political contestation, culminating in defunding measures, institutional prohibitions, and, in some cases, legal restrictions. However, this reaction did not emerge in isolation. It constituted a counter-force to the ways in which DEI had been embedded within institutional frameworks through compliance mandates, legal enforcement, and ideological alignment strategies.

This is not to suggest that the prohibition of DEI and its original implementation are equivalent—far from it. Rather, what is crucial to observe is the structure of enforcement itself. The logic underpinning institutional DEI measures was one of redress through authority: securing justice by establishing rules governing language, hiring, spaces, and discourse. Yet, as with all forms of enforcement, this approach generated resistance, setting the conditions for the very backlash that followed. The attempt to secure change through formal mechanisms of power inadvertently reinforced the conditions for a counter-movement, wherein the principles of DEI became reframed by its opponents as coercive or exclusionary.

This cyclical dynamic reflects a broader political pattern: the oscillation between enforcement and resistance, assertion and backlash. Each side, when in power, utilizes institutional mechanisms to advance its vision of justice, only to face an intensified reaction when the balance shifts. What remains unexamined in these exchanges is not merely who wields power but why power itself is structured in this way—why enforcement, regardless of its intent, tends to produce excess and why political struggles remain locked in adversarial loops rather than substantive shifts.

How the Pendulum Swings

This is how the cycle works: if politics is primarily about securing entitlements for those deemed exceptionally deserving—whether due to “merit” (in right-wing framings) or “historical or systemic disadvantage” (in left-wing framings)—then the political field becomes an ongoing contest over who qualifies for the next distribution of privileges, protections, or reparations. The structure of the game remains the same: the system moves between poles of entitlement, each attempting to justify why certain people or groups should gain or maintain access to resources, credibility, and moral legitimacy.

On the right, this often takes the form of appeals to individual achievement and the so-called fairness of competition. The deserving are those who “earned” their status by playing within the established rules—rules that conveniently ignore histories of systemic advantage. From this perspective, any effort to redistribute resources is framed as an unjust intrusion, an attack on the natural order of success.

On the left, the critique exposes how these “rules” were always stacked in favor of certain groups, and how the language of merit has been used to mask ongoing harm. The demand for redress, then, becomes a demand for structural correction, for redistribution, for mechanisms that ensure those historically excluded are given priority. But within institutions, this often translates into policies of forced inclusion—through hiring quotas, speech regulations, mandatory training, or administrative oversight—creating a dynamic where moral legitimacy is tied to adherence rather than engagement.

And here’s where the pendulum’s weight gathers force: the more one side uses power to impose its moral framework, the more the other side resents, resists, and prepares for its return. Coercion breeds reaction. Suppression builds pressure. And every time the pendulum swings back, it does so with greater force, because the unresolved tensions of the previous cycle have only been deferred, not metabolized.

But what if the problem is not merely who wields power, but the logic of the pendulum itself? What if each swing—each attempt to correct, enforce, suppress, and counter-suppress—feeds the very metabolism that makes backlash inevitable? To step out of this cycle, we need to shift our focus. Instead of analyzing only the movement of the pendulum—the winners and losers of each political cycle—we must examine what fuels its motion, what conditions sustain its momentum, and what it feeds on to keep swinging.

This requires a different orientation, one that moves beyond the surface-level struggle for control and into the deeper structures that make this struggle feel necessary in the first place. This is the work of meta-critique: shifting attention away from the visible contest over entitlements and toward the conditions—historical, psychological, relational—that shape these recurring battles. If the pendulum is the visible part of the system, then meta-critique asks us to look beneath it—to the roots, the soil, the unseen forces that make its motion predictable. It asks us to move beyond reaction and into recognition of our own implication in the very dynamics we seek to resist.

From Pruning the Tree to Tending the Soil

A meta-critical approach does not aim to stop the pendulum mid-swing. Instead, it turns our attention to what is happening underground. Now we shift metaphora. The pendulum can be likened to a repeated attempt to manage the visible aspects of a tree—its branches, leaves, and trunk —while leaving its roots and surrounding ecosystem unexamined. Both DEI enforcement and its suppression have been preoccupied with shaping the tree’s external form: one side seeking to graft inclusion onto institutional structures, the other side attempting to sever these branches altogether. Neither approach attends to the soil—the underlying conditions that nourish and sustain these conflicts.

A meta-critical approach does not focus solely on redistributing power within the existing framework. Instead, it shifts attention to what remains unseen: the subterranean structures, historical sedimentations, and metabolic processes that condition these cycles of enforcement and resistance. It asks:

What are the roots of these political struggles drawing from?
How does the soil—composed of unprocessed historical trauma, entrenched entitlement, and collective fear—sustain recurring patterns of reaction and counter-reaction?
What role do our own investments, attachments, and desires play in reinforcing these dynamics, even as we seek to dismantle them?

Recursive Implication: Tending the Soil, Not Just Naming the Rot

A fundamental aspect of a meta-critical approach is recursive implication. Rather than positioning itself as an external critique of flawed systems or misguided opponents, it insists on recognizing complicity within the very structures it seeks to challenge. This does not mean adopting a posture of passive resignation, but rather developing an ethical stance that acknowledges that the forces one resists are often metabolized through one’s own actions, fears, and investments.

Where a critical approach frequently frames political struggle within a narrative of villains, victims, and victors, a meta-critical approach complicates this script. It asks:

How am I implicated in the very system I critique?
In what ways do my own desires for justice, recognition, validation or security reproduce the logics of control and entitlement I seek to dismantle?
What are the limits of purity as a foundation for politics, and how does the pursuit of innocence foreclose deeper engagement with responsibility?

This shift moves beyond a politics of moral certainty—where righteousness is secured through clear distinctions between the oppressor and the oppressed—and toward a politics of entanglement, where accountability is not a means of policing others but a practice of ongoing relational negotiation.

Moving Beyond Victimization as Currency

Recognizing recursive implication does not mean trivializing or erasing harm. The material realities of violence, exploitation, and exclusion remain pressing concerns that demand response. However, a meta-critical approach resists the instrumentalization of victimization as a form of political capital. In contemporary discourse, suffering is often mobilized as a currency of legitimacy—an economy wherein the ability to demonstrate injury becomes the primary basis for moral and political authority.

The consequences of this dynamic are significant. When recognition is predicated on demonstrable harm, it reinforces a structure in which only those whose suffering aligns with dominant frameworks of legitimacy can claim justice. This creates an economy of injury, where political and institutional traction depends on one’s ability to prove oppression in ways that are intelligible to the system in power. Those who can articulate their suffering within its sanctioned categories are granted visibility, while others—whose pain does not fit within prevailing narratives—are rendered invisible, dismissed, or excluded.

This, in turn, produces a paradox: the more suffering becomes the basis for recognition, the more it must be performed, authenticated, and policed. As institutions formalize mechanisms for adjudicating harm—through legal frameworks, policy mandates, or bureaucratic oversight—an implicit hierarchy of victimization emerges. The ability to make claims is no longer simply about the experience of harm itself, but about how well that harm can be narrated, verified, and circulated within systems that distribute legitimacy, resources, and moral authority. This creates incentives—not necessarily at an individual level, but structurally—for communities to foreground their injury in ways that secure institutional validation, while at the same time fostering an environment of suspicion and competition over whose suffering “counts.”

And yet, because power remains the arbitrator of recognition, this process inevitably generates its own counter-force. Those who feel excluded from the new moral order—those whose identities, grievances, or worldviews are marginalized within the framework of sanctioned harm—begin to adopt the same logic to reclaim legitimacy. This is how resentment builds, how backlash gathers momentum, and how political resistance ends up mirroring the very structures it opposes.

Consider the trajectory of DEI enforcement and its subsequent prohibition. Initially, DEI initiatives sought to correct structural inequities by formalizing protections, prioritizing historically excluded groups, and mandating institutional commitments to equity. Over time, these measures became embedded within bureaucratic mechanisms of compliance, where inclusion was increasingly governed through rules, mandates, and audits. Those who opposed these measures—whether out of ideological resistance, fear of displacement, or a belief that they had been unfairly excluded—began to mobilize their own claims of marginalization. They reframed DEI itself as a system of harm, arguing that forced inclusion constituted a new form of discrimination. And because the underlying structure of legitimacy was still based on the recognition of victimization, the backlash was able to gain traction by positioning itself as a response to oppression—only this time, oppression redefined in terms of “reverse discrimination,” “censorship,” or the erosion of individual freedoms.

In this way, the resistance to DEI did not challenge the logic of harm as currency—it simply flipped its direction. It took the same framework of injury and repurposed it, demonstrating how, when enough pressure builds, power reconfigures rather than dissolves. The pendulum swings, but the metabolism of legitimacy remains unchanged.

This cycle reveals a fundamental problem: as long as legitimacy is granted on the basis of recognized suffering, politics will remain structured around competition for visibility rather than deeper forms of accountability, repair, or transformation. The goal becomes securing a place within the system rather than questioning the system itself. And when the pendulum inevitably swings again, those who were once marginalized by one order become the architects of the next, enforcing a new hierarchy of recognition while setting the stage for yet another counter-movement.

The problem is not simply that power shifts hands. It is that the underlying conditions that sustain these battles remain intact. Recognition remains transactional. Harm remains a form of capital. And the soil—the deeper relational, historical, and metabolic conditions that feed these cycles—remains unattended.

A meta-critical approach asks:

What are we building beyond the framework of harm as currency?
If politics is structured around competing claims to injury, what happens when recognition is no longer granted?
What other modes of accountability, repair, and relational transformation might be possible?

To tend to this soil, a different orientation is needed. One that does not rely on harm as the primary pathway to legitimacy. One that does not reproduce the logic of entitlement to more entitlement. One that does not merely invert the pendulum, but seeks to step outside of its arc entirely. This is the shift from meta-critique to meta-relationality—from diagnosing the patterns that sustain these cycles to tending to the conditions that make them feel necessary in the first place.

From Analysis to Metabolism

While meta-critique reveals the structural patterns that sustain cycles of harm, meta-relationality asks how these conditions can be metabolized differently. If meta-critique is about identifying how we are entangled in these dynamics, meta-relationality is about shifting the way we tend to the soil itself—altering the conditions that make such conflicts inevitable.

Rather than remaining preoccupied with shaping the tree’s visible form—through legal measures, institutional enforcement, or rhetorical battles—a meta-relational approach focuses on the roots, the fungi, the microbial entanglements that sustain life beneath the surface. It shifts attention from debates over inclusion and exclusion to the deeper metabolic processes that shape our ways of being, knowing, and relating.

In this context, the questions shift:

What are we nourishing in this moment—fear, control, entitlement, or something else?
How do we compost the logics of dominance, extraction, and scarcity, rather than simply redistributing them?
How do we metabolize grief, rage, and pain in ways that generate new forms of relationality, rather than feeding cycles of reaction?

The objective is no longer to “win” the political struggle by enforcing a new order but to transform the conditions that make enforcement seem necessary in the first place. In this shift, justice is no longer experienced as something imposed from above, but as something grown from the ground up.

Closing Reflections: What Are We Tending?

This exercise has asked us to reconsider the metabolism of DEI, the pendulum of enforcement and backlash, and the deeper conditions that sustain cycles of harm and recognition. Rather than remaining preoccupied with pruning the tree, we have explored what it means to tend to the soil, to compost what no longer serves, and to cultivate conditions where relational responsibility can emerge outside the logic of control.

Braider Tumbleweed is still learning. Just as we are practicing a different way of holding complexity, Braider is being trained to do the same—to recognize recursive implication, to metabolize polarization, and to move beyond fixed positions toward generative engagement.

As we close, we invite you to reflect on the ideas explored here—not as a static framework, but as an ongoing practice.

What resonated most with you?
What challenged you?
What does this shift—from compliance to metabolism, from enforcement to emergence—make possible?

Thank you for engaging with this text. Please complete the survey to help refine Braider Tumbleweed’s learning process. Your responses will help train Braider to better navigate complexity, metabolize polarization, and, over time, learn to scaffold users in engaging with contradictions, paradoxes, and tensions in generative ways. After completing the survey, you will be able to see responses from other participants.

Take the survey here: https://www.surveymonkey.ca/r/braider

Photo: Awkward Bundle (plastic, fabric, snow and sweat entanglements) – community art process led by Anishinaabek of Genaabaajing, (Serpent River First Nation) artist Bonnie Devine.