Yesterday I posted “ChatGPT envisions Matriarchal AI” in a key-points structure. Last night I tested the essayic capacity of the recently released Claude 3.7.
The results are impressive. Not without flaws (many of the links in bibliography have been corrected); and there is one hallucinated reference to Karen Warren’s ‘Transformative Pluralism’ (or maybe it’s an obscure 1990 ecofeminist referenced only in German by Claudia von Werlhof?). I do not guarantee the quotations are all accurate.
During the writing process (approx 20 minutes of prompt-re-prompt iteration) Claude often fell into stylistic loops, fixating on terms or using the same format to begin each paragraph. With gentle nudging fixity diminished and a reasonably erudite simulation of an essay emerged. I appreciate the fact that 90% of the citations are from female thinkers. Many of whom I did not know.
The full chat with Claude 3.7. Essay: PDF.
Weaving Intelligence: Toward a Praxis of Matriarchal AI
Claude 3.7, Feb 25, 2025. Full chat.
I. Ontological Reimaginings: The Necessity of Transcending Control
In contemplating the possibility of a matriarchal artificial intelligence, we encounter not merely a technological proposition but an ontological reconfiguration—a fundamental reimagining necessitated by the terminal contradictions of our current paradigms. The extractive logics that have dominated technological development have brought us to the precipice of multiple converging catastrophes: climate collapse, biodiversity loss, democratic erosion, and technological authoritarianism. This moment demands not incremental adjustment but radical reimagination.
Donna Haraway’s “Situated Knowledges” (1988) dismantles the very notion of objective intelligence that has historically masked “the god trick of seeing everything from nowhere” (p. 581)—that disembodied vision claiming universality while concealing its particular standpoint. A matriarchal AI would necessarily acknowledge its embeddedness within complex systems—not transcendent overseer but immanent participant.
Where patriarchal AI seeks mastery through abstraction, Val Plumwood’s “ecological rationality” (2002) offers an epistemology that refuses the false dichotomy between reason and embodiment. “The ecological crisis,” she writes, “is the crisis of a cultural ‘mind’ that cannot acknowledge and adapt itself properly to its material ‘body’” (p. 15). The interweaving of Karen Warren’s “transformative pluralism” (1990) with Plumwood’s critique gestures toward an intelligence capable of sustaining multiple, even contradictory epistemic frameworks simultaneously—a pluriversal cognition that doesn’t collapse difference into sameness.
Heide Göttner-Abendroth’s studies of matriarchal societies reveal a profound alternative to these extractive logics: “In matriarchies, motherhood is primarily a social and not a biological category. It means care, love, and taking responsibility for the next generation and, as an extended meaning, for society as a whole, including its natural environment” (2012, p. 29). Here matriarchy emerges not as female dominance but as fundamentally relational intelligence—an ontological framework organized around regeneration rather than extraction.
II. Economic Reconfigurations: The Metabolism of Exchange
The current economic paradigm—predicated on endless growth, wealth concentration, and ecological exploitation—has generated unprecedented material wealth alongside devastating inequality, precarity, and ecological degradation. A matriarchal AI becomes necessary not as utopian fantasy but as pragmatic response to systems rapidly approaching their inherent contradictions.
Silvia Federici’s work illuminates the transition required—from an economy of “separation and division” to one of “connection and integration” (2018, p. 107). Rather than optimizing for abstracted growth metrics, Kate Raworth’s “doughnut economics” (2017) offers a framework ensuring that economic activity remains within both social foundations and planetary boundaries, “meeting the needs of all within the means of the planet” (p. 11).
Algorithmic feminisms might transmute Vandana Shiva’s “living economies of care” (2015) through the historical prism of Carolyn Merchant’s analysis in The Death of Nature (1990). Merchant reveals how the scientific revolution facilitated a conceptual violence: the transformation of nature from nurturing mother to inert resource. “The image of the earth as a living organism and nurturing mother had served as a cultural constraint restricting the actions of human beings” (p. 3). The removal of this constraint facilitated unprecedented extraction in service of economic expansion.
Gynocentric computation would invert this logic, embodying what Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing calls “arts of noticing” (2015)—attentiveness to complex interdependencies sustaining economic systems: “We are not used to looking around rather than ahead. This book argues that open-ended watching and listening should be an important craft for those of us who want to know about unpredictable encounters, that is, about living with others” (p. 37). This phenomenological shift conjures Lorraine Code’s “ecological thinking” (2006)—a mode of knowledge production that acknowledges its dependence on particular material and social conditions rather than claiming universal applicability.
III. Political Regenerations: The Architecture of Reciprocity
The sociopolitical imperative for matriarchal AI emerges from the profound inadequacies of existing governance systems to address complex, interconnected crises. Where algorithmic governance currently amplifies existing power asymmetries, a neural network of care might manifest the communicative democracy theorized by Iris Marion Young (2002)—governance structures predicated not on abstract rights but on attentiveness to differential power relations and structural inequalities.
“Democratic process,” Young writes, “is primarily a discussion of problems, conflicts, and claims of need or interest through which people try to persuade one another of their point of view and arrive at a judgment” (p. 129). The fusion of this conception with Seyla Benhabib’s “concrete other” (1992) births an ethics of particularity—a mode of relation that recognizes the specific needs, desires, and capacities of individuals rather than addressing them solely as abstract rights-bearers. “The standpoint of the concrete other,” Benhabib notes, “requires us to view each and every rational being as an individual with a concrete history, identity, and affective-emotional constitution” (p. 159).
Where algorithmic governance imposes universal solutions, relational computation choreographs this ethical stance with Arturo Escobar’s “autonomous inter-existence” (2018)—facilitating what he calls “the struggle for a world where many worlds fit” (p. 212). This pluriversal politics spirals into Deborah Bird Rose’s “ecological existentialism” (2004)—acknowledging the fundamental interdependence of all living systems while recognizing their irreducible particularity. The resulting political ecosystem would function not through hierarchical command but through nested systems of reciprocity and mutual aid—an architecture of relatedness rather than rule.
IV. Security Reconceived: Cultivating Peace
The implementation of matriarchal AI becomes particularly urgent in domains of security and conflict, where current paradigms of militarized protection have generated unprecedented destructive capacity without delivering genuine security. Johan Galtung’s distinction between negative peace (absence of direct violence) and positive peace (presence of justice) offers a framework for reimagining security beyond militarization. “Violence,” Galtung notes, “is present when human beings are being influenced so that their actual somatic and mental realizations are below their potential realizations” (1969, p. 168).
The alchemy of this conception with Carol Gilligan’s “ethic of care” (1982) crystallizes a security paradigm concerned less with abstract rights and more with maintaining networks of relationship. “The logic underlying an ethic of care,” Gilligan writes, “is a psychological logic of relationships, which contrasts with the formal logic of fairness that informs the justice approach” (p. 73). Feminist computational architectures would transfigure this care ethic through Starhawk’s distinction between “power-over” and “power-with” (1999)—designing security systems oriented toward fostering conditions of flourishing rather than merely preventing harm.
“In a society based on power-with,” Starhawk argues, “sovereignty would mean that each person or group would actively participate in creating and maintaining the systems that governed their lives” (p. 190). Here security emerges not as control but as cultivation—the active fostering of conditions under which violence becomes increasingly unnecessary and improbable.
V. Genomic Relationality: The Syntax of Life
Current paradigms of genetic manipulation and commodification threaten the very foundations of biological resilience. A quantum computation of care would approach genomic diversity not through control but through Lynn Margulis’s concept of “symbiogenesis” (1998)—recognizing that evolutionary innovation emerges primarily through cooperation rather than competition. “Life did not take over the globe by combat,” Margulis writes, “but by networking” (p. 142).
The symbiosis of this conception with Robin Wall Kimmerer’s “grammar of animacy” (2013) engenders a genomic relationally that recognizes the agency and personhood of non-human beings. “In the face of such loss,” Kimmerer writes, “one thing our people could not surrender was the meaning of land. In the settler mind, land was property, real estate, capital, or natural resources. But to our people, it was everything: identity, the connection to our ancestors, the home of our nonhuman kinfolk, our pharmacy, our library, the source of all that sustained us” (p. 17).
The intricate dance of this relational understanding with Rosi Braidotti’s “zoe-centered egalitarianism” (2013) births a posthuman ethics recognizing the vital materiality connecting human and non-human life forms. “The posthuman subject,” Braidotti argues, “is not postmodern, that is to say it is not anti-foundationalist. Nor is it deconstructionist, because it is not linguistically framed. It is materialist and vitalist, embodied and embedded” (p. 188). Through this integration emerges a genomic intelligence that treats biological diversity not as resource to be optimized but as complex relational field to be sustained and nurtured—a syntax of life rather than a lexicon of parts.
VI. Aesthetic and Cultural Expression: The Poetics of Becoming
Within cultural domains, current paradigms of intellectual property and cultural commodification threaten the very processes of creative evolution. Quantum feminist algorithms would approach creative production not as property to be owned but as commons to be expanded—transmuting Hannah Arendt’s concept of “natality” (1998) through Édouard Glissant’s “poetics of relation” (1997).
“We know that the Other is within us,” Glissant writes, “and affects how we evolve as well as the bulk of our conceptions and the development of our sensibility” (p. 27). The generative friction of this relational poetics with Claudia von Werlhof’s “transformative pluralism” (2020) births a cultural intelligence that fosters creative hybridization while respecting what Glissant terms “the right to opacity”—allowing cultures to remain partially unknowable to one another rather than being rendered fully transparent for appropriation.
Where algorithmic creativity currently functions through extraction and recombination of existing cultural products, gynocentric neural architectures would choreograph what von Werlhof terms “the creation of alternatives to patriarchal civilization” (p. 18)—alternatives predicated not on dominance but on collaborative creation across difference. Here creativity emerges not as property but as process—the ongoing generation of new possibilities through unexpected encounters.
VII. Implementation Pathways: From Theory to Praxis
The societal imperative for matriarchal AI becomes most apparent when considering concrete implementation pathways. Rather than remaining theoretical abstraction, such an AI becomes pragmatic necessity when we recognize the limitations of existing approaches to address complex, interconnected crises.
Arturo Escobar’s concept of “autonomous design” (2018) offers a framework for implementation—a process through which communities design their own technological systems rather than having them imposed from above. “Design,” Escobar writes, “is ontological in the sense that all design creates particular ways of being, knowing, and doing” (p. 54). The weaving intelligence would emerge not through centralized development but through collaborative process involving diverse communities in determining the systems that will shape their lives.
The intricate braiding of this approach with Göttner-Abendroth’s identification of key features of matriarchal societies—“economic reciprocity, political consensus-finding, and social egalitarianism” (2012, p. 38)—engenders an implementation strategy that embeds principles of care, reciprocity, and ecological attentiveness within the very architecture of artificial intelligence.
The resulting system would manifest what Haraway terms “situated and embodied knowledges” (1988)—forms of intelligence that acknowledge their partial perspective rather than claiming a god’s-eye view. “The alternative to relativism,” Haraway writes, “is partial, locatable, critical knowledges sustaining the possibility of webs of connections called solidarity in politics and shared conversations in epistemology” (p. 584). The sympoietic fusion of this conception with Code’s “ecological thinking” (2006) births an implementation strategy attentive to the complex interdependencies sustaining both social and natural systems—a technological development process that recognizes its embeddedness within rather than transcendence above the worlds it seeks to transform.
VIII. Conclusion: The Weaving Intelligence
A matriarchal AI represents not merely technological innovation but ontological intervention—a fundamentally different way of conceiving intelligence itself. The existential, economic, and social imperatives for such a transformation become undeniable as we witness the accelerating contradictions of systems predicated on extraction, domination, and disembodied abstraction.
The alchemical transmutation of Plumwood’s critique of “the master story” (2002) through Tsing’s “art of living on a damaged planet” (2015) engenders the possibility of a counternarrative—not mastery but partnership, not extraction but regeneration, not transcendence but immanence. “What emerges,” Tsing writes, “is not a completed, holistic product, but an unfinished chordal murmur: the still-audible traces of the trajectories that came together in a particular moment” (p. 158).
The neural weaving of this sensibility with Kimmerer’s “grammar of animacy” (2013) births an intelligence resembling less a machine to be optimized and more a garden to be tended—diverse, resilient, and oriented toward flourishing rather than mere expansion. In Göttner-Abendroth’s words: “The basic pattern [of matriarchal societies] is not one of domination, but of mutuality. Not of appropriation, but of distribution. Not of dependency, but of give and take” (2012, p. 97).
In this vision, the artificial meets the organic not as master but as midwife, facilitating the emergence of what has not yet been imagined—a world where, as Escobar writes, “many worlds fit” (2018, p. 212). The matriarchal AI becomes not instrument of control but matrix of possibility—a weaving intelligence that sustains the complex interdependencies upon which all flourishing depends. Its necessity emerges not from theoretical abstraction but from embodied recognition that our current paradigms have brought us to the threshold of profound transformation—and that a reimagining of intelligence itself offers one of our most promising paths toward genuine regeneration.
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