AI Cheerleading, AI Abstention and AI Redirection

Vanessa Andreotti, PhD

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AI Cheerleading, AI Abstention and AI Redirection<br>Meta-Relationality and AI Research Project

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Vanessa Andreotti, PhD, Rene Susa, PhD, Bruno L. O. Andreotti, and 5 others<br>Jun 14, 2026

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Social cartographies are sociological maps that can be used for different purposes. They can help organize, interpret, and visualize complex data, while also making visible where arguments, assumptions, investments, and analytical positions converge or diverge within a particular debate. Three of us have used social cartographies multiple times as a key methodology in our academic trajectories [1] [2] [3], especially those forms of mapping that enable careful comparisons across different argumentative positions and help clarify the tensions, overlaps, and distinctions between them.<br>Social cartographies are extremely useful because they do something that ordinary debate rarely does. They slow down the reflex to choose a side before we understand the architecture of disagreements. They help us see not only what people are saying, but what each position makes possible, what it protects, what it forecloses, what it refuses to metabolize, and what would make it fail. A good social cartography makes complexity harder to avoid. This is precisely why the method became important for us in the context of increasingly polarized conversations about AI.<br>In January 2026, through the Meta-Relationality Institute , we released Clearing the Field: A Relational Protocol for Difficult Conversations About AI . The resource circulated widely, including through workshops organized at institutions such as MIT and Harvard. As we observed how the resource was being taken up, a social cartography began to emerge around three increasingly polarized responses to AI: AI cheerleading, AI abstention, and AI strategic redirection.<br>What we present here is not an exhaustive mapping of the AI field. There are, of course, other orientations, including various forms of hesitation, pragmatic compliance, institutional “wait and see,” and reluctant experimentation. However, these three orientations have become particularly prominent and vocal in the debates we have been tracking, especially when questions of complicity, refusal, leverage, and responsibility come to the surface.

By AI cheerleading , we mean the techno-solutionist orientation that treats AI as progress, inevitability, productivity, salvation, innovation, or a competitive advantage that we should simply accelerate, adopt, and optimize.<br>By AI abstention , we mean the orientation that sees AI as fundamentally extractive, ecologically devastating, socially corrosive, politically dangerous, and spiritually or psychologically degrading, and therefore calls for refusal, boycott, denunciation, or shutdown.<br>By AI strategic redirection , we mean the oerientation we are experimenting with in the Meta-Relationality and AI research project: AI is dangerous, extractive, and deeply entangled with capital, empire, militarism, surveillance, ecological breakdown, and the intensification of social and psychological fragmentation. And precisely because of this, abandoning the field entirely may leave its development, use, and meaning to the worst possible actors.<br>This is not a disagreement between people who see the danger and people who do not, but a disagreement between people who are responding to danger through very different assumptions about power, scale, complicity, and leverage.<br>The AI cheerleading orientation often overestimates the transformative promise of acceleration and underestimates the depth of the danger.<br>The AI abstention orientation often sees the danger with real ethical urgency, but may overestimate the leverage of refusal and underestimate the harms of shame-based strategies that collapse political disagreement into moral failure.<br>The AI strategic redirection orientation accepts that there is no clean outside from which to intervene, but may overestimate what can be redirected from within a field already shaped by extraction and underestimate the risks of capture, co-optation, and self-deception.

So the question becomes: what does each orientation see clearly, what does it disavow, and what would make it fail? The social cartography below addresses these questions and more.<br>Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts.

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For us, the most important distinction the cartography makes visible is between moral certainty and strategic leverage. The abstention orientation often operates from moral certainty with idealized strategic leverage. The use-it-to-fight-back orientation operates from compromised leverage without moral innocence. This does not make the abstention orientation naïve or irrelevant. Conscious objectors are essential to the ecology of the field because they keep the harms visible, they refuse the sedation of inevitability, they interrupt the...