Without Why in 2026
Ambitions and Anticipations for the Year Ahead
One Year of Without Why
Without Why passed its one-year mark on December 14, and by the end of today the page will be sitting right around 600 subscribers.
If you were in my early wave of annual subscribers back at the beginning (thank you!), you should be receiving an email inviting you to resubscribe for the next year. I hope that you accept.
I’m especially grateful to the many people who have taken the time to write me directly over the past year, sending messages of questions, encouragement, and disagreements. Even the occasional mindless trolling helps to keep my thinking on its feet. I’m also grateful for being able to build more connections and community here on Substack, for example through being featured recently on Céline Leboeuf’s inspiring Why Philosophy?
The last few months, I’ve been barreling toward the end of the year in a celebratory textual sprint, posting substantive essays week after week. In part, the sprint was aimed at marking the upcoming anniversary.
The textual sprint was also a way of showing my commitment to careful, serious, and sometimes playful writing about what it means to be human in these times, the erosion and possible renewal of our capacities to care, and the ways technologies don’t merely serve us but shape the kinds of beings we are becoming.
More Audio-Visual Elements, Philosophical Travelogues, and a Project with The Hubert L Dreyfus Foundation
Next year I’ll also be sharing more video content, including more pieces like Frictionless Spinning in the Void: Why Humans Aren’t LLMs and Heidegger’s Phenomenological Ontology in 12 Minutes. I will also be sharing lectures and materials from the course on Heidegger’s Being and Time I taught at UC Berkeley this summer. That course is dense, unfinished, and exploratory, and I’m looking forward to editing and sharing it.
I’ll be writing more about my adventures and travels as a philosopher of AI as well. In a variety of exciting new collaborations, I’ve already applied to AI-related conferences in Paris, Austin, Santiago, and Hong Kong in the first half of the year, and I plan to share reflections from those experiences and conversations as they unfold.
Additionally, I’ll be sharing updates from an exciting project I am launching with The Hubert L Dreyfus Foundation, the educational non-profit founded by Hubert’s family after his death, which was almost nine years ago now. I will make an official announcement about this next week. Stay tuned.
Intimations of My Book Project
You’ll also start seeing more material from the book I’m writing. It’s a hybrid philosophical memoir organized around the lost art of mentorship, and the interpersonal making of minds (human and artificial). The book will offer a sustained reflection on how people are formed by teachers, elders, and traditions at a moment when those forms of formation are increasingly displaced by technological substitutes.
The middle of the book focuses on my relationships with my own mentors, figures who were central to the first wave of philosophical critiques of artificial intelligence in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, and whose work I often reference in these pages: Hubert Dreyfus, Stuart Dreyfus, Fernando Flores, and Terry Winograd.
Writing about these relationships is also a way of bringing their still timely ideas into the present moment, ideas about skill, embodiment, care, finitude, conversation, commitment, and meaning that have been largely neglected amidst the current wave of AI research. These alternative philosophical perspectives on AI need our renewed attention.
The book won’t only be about inheritance, though. It’s also about how to be a mentee, and what it means to eventually outgrow one’s phase of being a mentee, and to risk speaking in one’s own voice. In a certain sense, I’ve hidden myself behind the cold clarity of scholarly writing for many years, and this book project (and this substack) are my earnest attempt to write more directly from my heart and experiences.
Some of the essays I’ve written here in Without Why over the previous year are already testing elements of this exploration, experimenting with how to braid personal history, philosophical explanation, and contemporary critique. Hence, for example, the autobiographical elements in my post about The Dreyfus Model of Skill Acquisition, from earlier this year. Hence also, my occasional posts here about my life in punk music, another installment of which is soon forthcoming. Punk is a response to and a manifestation of living in an age of technological nihilism.
A long-swirling project is now beginning to come into focus, helped in no small part by one of my writing mentors, Marya Hornbacher. I strongly recommend both her Substack, Going Solo at the End of the World, and her writers’ support group, The Caravan Writers Collective.
Next year I’ll be more explicit about how all of these pieces fit together, and about where the larger project is headed.
Deeper Levels of Engagement and Support
All of this coincides with a genuinely transitional moment in my own life and career. Some engagements have loosened their grip, while other possibilities are beginning to demand more attention.
In that context, I’ve decided to sustain and deepen Without Why as a central thread of my work next year, and that brings a few changes worth sharing.
I’ll be posting at least every other week, and most of the time every week. I’ll also be adding audio and video versions of the posts, read by me. The audio-visual elements will usually follow the written pieces by a few days or more. I am still a beginner with all of that.
I’ve decided not to put any writing behind a paywall. At the same time, if you have the means to become a paying subscriber, or to leave an occasional one-time tip, that support directly enables me to keep doing this work with the time and care it requires. I only make that request of those who have the means.
Alongside that, I’m creating a new Founding Circle level of support for those who are able and interested in supporting and engaging with this project at a deeper level. Founding members will be invited to regular Zoom or Substack Live conversations with me, oriented toward genuine conversation.
These will be spaces for cultivating meaningful conversations, thinking together about the most recent posts, and exploring the themes that run through this project: care, skill, learning, creativity, phenomenology, technology, and what it takes to remain meaningfully oriented in a world that can be hostile to meaningful orientations.
I plan to host these conversations monthly, starting after I have at least 3 subscribers at this level. If you’d like to participate in a session but can’t afford support at the Founding Circle, you are more than welcome to join if you send me a message and register in advance: whywithoutwhy@gmail.com
Support at the Founding level is $1,000 per year (you can also enter in alternative amounts). Such an elevated level of contribution will greatly help sustain the time and attention this project requires.
I’m moved by the fact that more and more people tell me they read Without Why regularly, look forward to the posts, and find the writing helpful for thinking about the human stakes of our current technological moment. I don’t take that lightly. Philosophy only really happens in conversation, and I’m delighted that this project is becoming a conduit for meaningful conversation.
Thank you for being here. The work, and the adventure of being human in a technological age, continues.