The Hinternet Foundation

Programming and Announcements for 2026

1. The Hinternet Foundation — an Introduction

As some readers will already know, last year a number of us here at The Hinternet, along with a host of incredibly talented others, were busy laying the groundwork for the Hinternet Foundation, a California based 501(c)(3) educational nonprofit. At the tail-end of 2025, with all the paperwork completed and signed and stamped, the Foundation was officially born. We are now open for business, and very eager to share some news about the year ahead.

Before we proceed with that, you may wish to peruse the website, and, if you like what you see, to click over to the “Donate” page.

Now to the news, beginning with a note on the relationship between the two projects currently operating under the name of “Hinternet”. From the beginning, we have conceived the Hinternet Foundation as a grown-up, sober, and responsible counterpart to the Hinternet publication. Such a “double mouvement” is really not so unusual, historically speaking — think of André Malraux, who was no less at home writing formally audacious modernist novels than he was heading up government ministries, or of so many of the members of the Surrealist and Situationist movements, who delighted in confusing people, but also knew how to be clear and programmatic when that was what circumstances required.

There is no legal or financial overlap between the two operations, but they bear the same name, involve many of the same people, and, most importantly, they care about the same things. The Hinternet manifests its care in play; the Hinternet Foundation in work.¹ The spirit of The Hinternet is anarchic and youthful and often cagey; the spirit of the Hinternet Foundation is disciplined and always forthright about its objectives and aims.

Those objectives and aims are however the same on both sides of the operation. Both are concerned, namely, as the official Mission of the Foundation has it, to steward human creativity into a machine-driven future. We are concerned, in particular, to find ways to ensure that the centuries-long, glorious tradition of humanistic inquiry should continue to have a place in a world that for better or worse is increasingly shaped by values and priorities different from, and often hostile too, what humanists have always held dear — the autonomy of the human spirit, the irreducible and unquantifiable wonder of subjective experience, and the inalienable right of all human beings to the exercise and cultivation of the faculty of the imagination, and to its free expression in something like what Friedrich Schiller called the play-drive.

We conceive humanistic tradition in an expansive way, not as a positive science but as a form of life, not as a data-driven, frantic quest for “research results”, but as a fundamentally creative endeavor. To this extent the creative arts —literature, most intimately, at the outset, but music, film, dance, too— are as central to our concerns as the survival of humanistic scholarship more narrowly conceived (we would say “traditionally conceived”, but in fact positivism in the humanities is a very recent invention, of the late 19th century, and, we hope and expect, will ultimately turn out to have been a historical aberration).

We believe there has never been a moment in history more ripe for the proliferation of new communities and institutions of what might be called “para-academic inquiry”. There are already many out there that we think of as our friends, peers, and inspiration (the Strother School of Radical Attention, the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, to name a couple). Many people involved with the Hinternet Foundation are academics, and we all love universities. But we also weep for them, and we believe that in addition to efforts at reform from within, the current state of education positively requires external pressure on the universities, demonstrating to them a model of inquiry that they have themselves patently failed to uphold.

For especially as regards the humanities, the universities are failing; more tragically, taking that same verb as transitive, they are failing their students. We have encountered fourth-year philosophy majors who cannot tell us the name of a single philosopher. We have encountered film-studies majors who not only cannot read the canonical works of film theory or criticism, but cannot even sit through a feature-length film. None of this is the students’ fault. It is the fault of administratively bloated institutions that have so lost their way as to be unable effectively to communicate to young people what the value of an education is — what, in other words, they are even doing there.

Much of this failure may be traced to the bulldozing effect of our new technologies, and of the profit-model behind them, which have effectively insinuated themselves into and corroded every domain of human social life over the past few decades. We consider however that it is a fool’s errand to attempt to return to Plato’s grove, as at least some new para-academic initiatives are doing, to insist that tech must be left at the door in order for any real learning to occur. While of course there is a time and a place for imposing a “no gadgets” rule, structured learning has always itself been a technology, in the sense of a technē, and has almost always made use of external prostheses. Books themselves are gadgets, in some broad sense. They come with a particular contingent history of preeminence in human culture, and with absolutely no guarantee that this preeminence must or should continue indefinitely into the future. We must be vigilant, lest our completely understandable reverence for them degrade into a fetish.

We are of course free to remain bibliophiles, just as we are free to play in baroque chamber orchestras on period instruments. But this is not what is going to save the humanistic tradition. In order for that to have any hope of happening, what is needed is serious, sustained, collective reflection on what sort of place the humanistic tradition can have in our present age, in serious and sober recognition of the radical transformations currently underway in our millennia-old technologies and habits of literacy, and in recognition of what is by now the obvious inability of universities to do the hard work of stewarding humanism through these great upheavals.

2. Hinternet Foundation 2026 Programming

When you peruse the Hinternet Foundation website, you will find several different yet plainly interrelated projects that we intend to pursue as part of the ongoing fulfillment of our Mission. We are learning, as we go, the importance of starting small, and building gradually. With this in mind, in 2026 we will be actively pursuing three of the projects in particular. Some of them may be of interest to you as a potential participant or contributor. Whether or not that is so, we hope you will help us to get the word out about the work we are doing.

Hinternet Foundation Annual Summer School — “Whither the Humanities?” For our inaugural summer school, which will take place online in August, we will be adopting the approach of a “working group”, focused on the challenges, opportunities, and prospects for humanistic inquiry in the coming years (say, what remains of the 21st century). We are interested in maintaining a high-level reflection on what the humanities have traditionally been, what human needs they satisfy, and where their particular oversights and failures have been — all with an eye to finding a way forward for them. Our engagement with the issue will be theoretical and practical at once, with readings as diverse and wide-ranging in time and in focus as Erasmus, Friedrich Schiller, and Gillian Rose. A number of the sessions will include invited guest speakers. This summer school will serve as the “starter yeast”, so to speak, for the monthly working group that will be launched early in 2027, and that will aim to make significant interventions in policy and public life. Some participants in the summer school will be encouraged to stay on for the working group as well. Participation in the summer school is limited to ten people, and the cost of participation is $400 USD. Those interested in participating should send us, no later than April 15, 2026, a 1-2 page statement outlining their personal and intellectual reasons for wishing to join us. Decisions will be announced in mid-May, at which time we will also be providing a more detailed program of dates, readings, and themes.

Hinternet Foundation Fall Course Offerings. Why take a non-credit course from an unaccredited institution? The evidence is abundant that many people find this a perfectly worthwhile thing to do — for the love of learning itself, and for the opportunity to meet others with similar interests. And even if we are speaking practically, the simple truth is that doing such a thing, even if no transcript comes out of it, can lead to all sorts of new opportunities, intellectual, creative, and even financial. We are not convinced, in fact, that the practical benefit of any non-credit course from a para-academic institution is less than that of any traditional institution. We are convinced, moreover, that the presumption of such manifestly greater utility will continue to decline in the future. With all this in mind, we would like to propose at least 2, and perhaps 3, distinct course offerings, each beginning in mid-September and extending into early December. The price for participation is $200 per course, and we will be capping participation at 15 people per course. One of these courses will be similar to the summer school in scope and purpose, led by Justin Smith-Ruiu, with details to be worked out in the next months. The 1 or 2 other courses will be taught by suitable experts. So, to all you suitable experts out there, this is a call: we would like to see course proposals! These should be focused on whatever topic you know you can bring to life, you know, that thing that is such an intimate part of you that you just can’t help infecting other people with your love of it. The topic can be narrow, but it must be deep, and it must be the sort of thing that can tell us at least something, from some angle or other, about the human condition. Moby-Dick? Byzantine heresies? The Fashion System? Salic law? The Bhagavad Gita? The Qu’ran? The history of animal domestication? It’s all good, in principle! Just send us a course proposal, along with a brief statement explaining who you are and how you got where you are. There are no formal background requirements, though we encourage you to apply especially if you are one of those young Ph.D.s for whom, alas, the academy failed to make room. Their loss! Course leaders will be paid $2500 for their efforts.

Hinternet Foundation Annual Summit. In mid-to-late November, 2026, we will be hosting our Annual Summit, which serves as an occasion to bring to the public a high-level, engaging discussion of the ideas and problems that animate our work. The event will take place in Paris. Blaise Agüera y Arcas —Hinternet Foundation Board Member, AI researcher, and intelligence theorist—, is among the confirmed speakers. Dates, venue, and full program will be announced by early April.

3. Other Projects

We are putting what follows in a residual “Other” category because we are not entirely certain, yet, what side of the boundary between The Hinternet and the Hinternet Foundation it will fall on (and indeed it might end up straddling the boundary), but, beginning in early 2027, we will be publishing the first fruits of our very small, very boutique imprint, Hinternet Editions. The Editorial Committee of our publishing wing is made up entirely by the Associate Editors on the Masthead of The Hinternet. Our Spring 2027 catalogue will include no more than three titles. One of these will be a collection, adapted for the print medium, of some of the best essays and experiments that have appeared here at The Hinternet (and that are now of course mostly behind a paywall). Another will be a remarkable tour de force of, let us say, imaginative philology, by the very talented Alistair Ian Blyth. We would like to publish one more title, in any genre, by any author, just so long as it is very, very good. Submissions may be sent to editor@the-hinternet.com. We’re very eager to see what comes in, but please do think hard, and move slowly, before clicking “Send”.

4. Varia

We are probably blurring the line between the Foundation and the publication already too much by including this decidedly non-Foundation-related “Varia” section in the same missive as the rest, but efficiency is also a priority for us, so:

A new batch of Hinternet t-shirts have finally gone out, and we have received confirmation of arrival, in Los Angeles, from at least one of the recipients. If you are waiting “overseas”, please hold tight just a bit longer.

We have a developing project that will require an experienced illustrator, working broadly in the graphic-novel idiom. If that’s you, please be in touch (editor@the-hinternet.com).

—

The Hinternet Foundation is a California-registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit entity. All donations are tax deductible. Click below to support our programs!

1. There is of course a higher-level synthesis where the opposition between these two is entirely sublated, and in truth both endeavors remain ever-focused on discovering new ways to pull off that sublation.