What I wrote, taught, and published in 2025

You thought that since the holidays were over you were done with all those year end roundup emails? Au contraire, mon frère – I have another hearty helping of year end summary for you to enjoy.

Every year I look back at the major happenings for the year, whether they were writing, teaching, publishing, or presenting, in order to bring folks up to speed on what I've been doing. If you see anything here that piques your interest, please don't hesitate to shoot me an email using matt[at]samsara.media or my Contact page to reach out.

And as for what I'm thinking about as we head into this new year, I'll be sending out a post or two about that in the coming weeks. Right now I'm in a season of discerning what my goals are for my online intellectual work. This piece focuses on taking stock of this past year, although I drop some comments which give you a glimpse into how I'm thinking about my work going forward. Thanks for reading!

What I Wrote This Year

If we simply look at my writing this year from the perspective of raw numbers, I find that I published 23 pieces, 16 on Substack and 7 on Samsara Diagnostics (I've got a number of unfinished drafts too).

I'm also happy to say that email list more than doubled this year, and I also gained 6 paid subscribers (and even lost a few along the way!). The vast majority of that growth seems to have been from Substack, both people sharing my work on Notes or through Substack's native discovery mechanisms. I have found my writing at Substack to be fruitful for my sharpening my own thinking, plus it offers better reader feedback mechanisms, such as likes, comments, and Notes.

Nonetheless, I've made the decision to pivot back towards my private website, where I will be gathering my projects Samsara Diagnostics and Moloch Theory under one heading. Over the coming months, I'll be re-branding this website to just be my name 'Matthew Stanley,' but I will be keeping some visual separation between the two projects because they represent distinct lines of thought.

In 2025 my frequency of publishing pieces was down overall compared to the past two years, but I'm nonplussed by this for at least two reasons:

• First, many of my pieces this year are longer than what I've written at Samsara Diagnostics, the process of writing them involved more deep thinking, and each of them feels highly correlated with what I'm exploring right now.
• Second, in years past I was aiming for volume simply to build and maintain momentum as I established a writing practice on the internet. I set myself a challenge to publish every week, which I did, and a few months I even did three posts a week, but I found that I couldn't sustain this cadence if I wanted to do deeper work or to try other experiments, like teaching seminars.

I've also realized that my productivity in 2023 and 2024 was an outpouring of energy which had been building for years, likely ever since I departed college to start my life outside of the academy. After I wrangled dump truck drivers, reported software bugs, and poured over data about asphalt at my 9 to 5 job, I would head to coffee shops to write about Shusaku Endo or to read Slavoj Žižek.

I almost completed a masters in philosophy and psychoanalysis at the Global Center for Advanced Studies (gcas.ie) from 2020 to 2022, but, as seems to be a pattern with me, I dropped out before I could finish my dissertation. However, much of that dissertation was repurposed into the early posts here at Samsara Diagnostics, helping me to accelerate into my work in early 2023. That worked out well, because the consistency of posting propelled me into conversation with other people thinking about similar ideas, which then stimulated more writing.

But it feels like that creative fount is starting to dry up. I'm not as motivated by elaborating the finer points of continental philosophy or psychoanalytic theory, even as I continue to enjoy these things immensely. I'm realizing that life is often short, and time is utterly precious, so am I using mine well? That remains to be seen, but I think that just continuing to ask the question is a good starting point.

Most Popular Posts

Judging by total views and total likes, these were my most popular pieces in 2025:

• The Intelligence Arms Race – A summary and commentary on Vincent Lê's article "Spirit in the Crypt," where I provide the closest account thus far of what the phrase "moloch theory" is trying to get at. It was my most viewed piece this year, thanks to Vincent sharing and praising the piece.
• Cultivating Conditions – An extended engagement with the political Platonism of Benjamin Studebaker, an exceptional thinker and teacher I've been learning from this past year at Theory Underground. I used our mutual resonance and my disagreements to clarify my own thoughts and intuitions.
• Waving Your Flag in the Void – A piece that had been gestating in me for years, but which finally had an opportunity to come out after Theory Underground's encounter with a Hannah, a flag waver camping out on the footsteps of the Idaho Capitol building. Dave's idea of "the lone flagman" provided a potent image to work with for expressing my own thoughts.

Most Personal Essay

The most important piece on Samsara Diagnostics this year was by far "Losing your field and becoming illegible" which was circulated amongst some folks in the Incite Seminars community, leading to a virtual event where a number of us gathered to discuss the difficulties of pursuing intellectual work within the academy today. I'm grateful to those who took the time to ask me questions to understand my situation further, and offered advice to me about how to proceed.

More than just intellectual work though, the question of the entanglement of intellectual work, community, and identity all feel central to what I've been struggling with for about half my life, and I'm trying to confront those questions more head on for myself by making them explicit.

Lastly, I just want to mention the piece "Practical Freedom," which felt like a next step in understanding how to formulate the problem I'm working on in Moloch Theory, that of how "freedom" itself is both our central possibility and problem within our modern social, political, and economic environment. You'll see me continue to weave themes from that work as I write and explore more this year.

Seminars, Presentations, and Publications

Heading into 2025, I had planned to design and launch a "critical bureaucratic studies" course online which would explore the main themes of my Moloch Theory project – the critique of the professional-managerial class, the entanglement of science, governance, and capital, the capitalist colonization of vital human activities, the distortion of learning perpetrated by schooling, and much more.

While I ultimately realized that the project was much too large to properly explore in one class, which is perhaps somewhat an issue with my failure to properly scope the research, much of my work this year nonetheless tried to keep doggedly exploring the elements which would compose such a research program. I realized that I had a number of guiding intuitions, conceptual frames, and key texts I was working with, and I ended up exploring those through my writing at Moloch Theory, justified in my mind as preparation for this hypothetical future course.

While my "critical bureaucratic studies" course remains a distant hypothetical, I'm nonetheless grateful to the Incite Seminars community, and all the wonderful students who turned out, for allowing me to teach two seminars this year which explored some key aspects of the "critical bureaucratic studies" research program.

In February 2025, I taught "The Violence of Care: A Critical Inquiry into Bureaucratic Power" as an attempt at a micro-version of the course, to see what felt most important about the project and how others might receive its ideas. The seminar had learners reading Michel Foucault, Ivan Illich, Bruno Rizzi, James Burnham, David Graeber, and James C. Scott, looking at the ways that bureaucratic governing apparatuses change our individual and communal perception, expand through the production of harmful outcomes, and leave us more dis-abled precisely through their efforts to help us.

For five weeks from July to August, I enjoyed co-teaching "An Introduction to Cybernetics" with Joseph W. Turner, a friend I had met through Incite Seminar. Joseph is working on a PhD at UW-Madison, and had spent quite a bit of time studying things I was also interested in – cybernetics, Japanese philosophy, Agamben, anarchism – so we decided to team up and teach a course together. I had never taught with another person before, but the experiment was a resounding success, and I think the combination of both our approaches added a rich depth to the learning experience.

Presentations and Talks

This year also afforded the opportunity for me to deliver presentations in a few academic venues, both digitally and in-person.

1. This year I had the pleasure of presenting "Renewing Liberation Theology Under Capitalist Conditions" at Philosophy Portal's "Rosy Cross 2" conference which was the culmination of Cadell Last's seminar from Fall 2024 on "Christian Atheism," where he looked at German Idealism, Psychoanalysis, and Christianity together. Philosophy Portal's conferences are always a delight – they bring together a variety of rogue thinkers, artists, and writers delving into the depths of philosophical investigation and wrestling with contemporary issues.
2. It's also fun to deliver a talk in-person though, which is precisely what I did at The Davenant Institute's "What is Christian Freedom?" conference in Charlotte, NC this year. I presented "When Freedom Isn't Liberating: Practicing Christian Freedom in a Post-Disciplinary Society." The text revisits a number of ideas I've explored here at Samsara Diagnostics, including Foucault's distinction between "right of death" and "power over life", but I added to this a technological angle with McLuhan's "the message is the medium" and his contrast between the age of print vs the electric age. I also focused on making concrete applications to the Christian church, since I was amongst brothers and sisters. As always, my hope was to introduce Christians to non-Christian thinkers they might find scary (like Foucault!) to help them glimpse the value to be found outside Christian echo chambers. I haven't released this paper anywhere publicly, but if you'd like access to the draft, shoot me a message.
3. I delivered a "lightning talk" at the Theory Underground retreat in September 2025, where I toyed with a new motif I'm exploring in my work – "wilding the professionals." I'm trying to articulate a positive project which goes beyond endless critique of technocracy and capitalism, and attempts to turn critical analysis of bureaucratic failures into insights about how we can reform our communal capacities to serve our communities better, use accountability to create smarter feedback loops, and increase both individual and group agency.
4. Finally, the presentation which I enjoyed the most, was a talk (a provocation?) I gave to a high school class at a small Christian classical school. My friend reached out to me, telling me that he was assigning Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil after the students had been introduced to Descartes and Kant, and he wanted me to help the students understand Nietzsche's work more deeply.
   
   Naturally, I jumped at the opportunity, because Nietzsche remains a lifelong dialogue partner for me, and his Beyond Good and Evil was especially formative text for me when I first read it. In my talk "Love is Beyond Good and Evil," I focused on the challenge which Nietzsche presents to a young person. I warned the students at the outset that Nietzsche is dangerous, tempting, and seductive. He's not for everyone, and now might not even be the right time to hear him, but for those who have ears to hear, he might become a catalyst to fuller life.

Anthologies

This year was also filled with opportunities to include my work alongside the writings of other great thinkers in some unique collections.

1. The first anthology was a long time in the making – Philosophy Portal's seminar on Lacan's Écrits took place all the way back in fall 2023, and we finally managed to publish a collection of the students writing in August 2025 as Writing For (a) First Cause: Psychoanalytic Speculations on the Truth of the Subject. My piece was titled "From Exoteric to Esoteric (and Back Again)." You can get a glimpse into this piece by watching my presentation last year or reading this essay which was an early attempt to capture the essence of what I was saying.
2. In November 2025, Theory Underground released Underground Theory, Vol 2: Capital | Timenergy | A.I. | Human Future | Education | Critical Media Theory, which was a followup to the first Underground Theory released in 2023. My piece "The Schooling Industry" was an argument for a revival of Ivan Illich's "deschooling agenda," and an extended exploration of the reproductive feedback loop which technocratic institutions use to propagate and expand their power. It's exciting for my writing to be included alongside Nick Land's and Slavoj Žižek, but I have also been blown away by many of the other pieces from relatively unknown authors. I might be biased, but this book really is a must-read.
3. Finally, I have to mention that Theory Underground had another collection in production, but this one was blocked and cancelled by Amazon KDP. Dave at TU put out a call for papers for an anthology providing a critical analysis and reflection on the Left's response to the assassination of Charlie Kirk, and I submitted a piece titled "The Non-Ideological Shooter" which focused on how Tyler Robinson exemplifies an emergent pattern in shooters where they seemingly possess no coherent ideology, but are actually radicalized simply by the medium of the internet itself. This collection was scheduled for release on November 1, but KDP refused to publish the book, offering vague justifications and refusing to accept appeals. We'll see if the text ever sees the light of day!
4. Lastly, I would note that Underground Theory, Volume 3 is in the works, and I'm hard at work on a piece to include in that collection as well. It will be addressing the question of whether we will be able to hit the AI singularity before the global economy runs out of resources, and if we do miss the singularity, where might we land as a species?

Heading into 2026

Whether you've just found my work or you've been following for years, I'm delighted that you're here. I fully trust that whatever is of most value to you in my work will find you when you most need it.

This year feels to me like a time for reflecting, taking stock, and looking forward to build on what has already come before. You can expect from me another book published, some essays trying to synthesize my past work, as well as guides about where to start or dive back in, as well as charting new directions (the "wild professionals" motif feels particularly potent to me).

I would be remiss if I didn't offer you the chance to upgrade from a free subscription to a paid subscription. My family and I are not destitute by any means (God is always gracious to us), but everyone who gives even a little bit of money sends a strong signal about whether I'm on the right track or not. It encourages me to keep going, to keep putting independent scholarship out into the world. I hope you'll partner with me this year on this journey of exploration!