The Sartre Society's 31st meeting: AI, virtual worlds and digital existentialism

The 31st Annual Meeting of the North American Sartre Society will be held online on 23-24 October 2026.

The theme is “A.I., Virtual Worlds, and Digital Existentialism”.

Proceedings will run over Zoom. The society is chaired by Dane Sawyer (University of La Verne; dsawyer@laverne.edu).

Why this theme?#

At first glance the pairing may look odd. Sartre died in 1980, when there was no internet and artificial intelligence was a laboratory enthusiasm.

Look at the conceptual kit of existentialism, though, and it seems almost purpose-built for the analysis of digital life.

Bad faith (mauvaise foi). Sartre's best-known concept: defining oneself as a thing — a role, an identity, a destiny — in order to escape one's own freedom. The waiter who plays at being a waiter is the famous case.

Now apply that to a profile on a platform. The user name, the biography, the chosen photographs, a consistent “content identity”. Sartre's question transfers without alteration: is this self-expression, or is it flight from freedom by pinning oneself down as a thing?

The look (le regard). One of the most powerful passages in Being and Nothingness: when the other sees me, I cease to be a subject for myself and become an object for him. The example is the man caught peering through a keyhole.

In the digital environment the look is continuous and it is not reciprocal. I am seen but cannot see; I am measured but do not know who is measuring. Sartre's phenomenology of shame supplies a framework that applies directly to the argument about surveillance.

Situation (situation). Sartre's freedom is never abstract; it always stands within a situation. Language, the body, history, class — these do not abolish freedom, but they set its conditions.

Algorithmic recommendation systems are, in this sense, a new layer of situation. I make the choice; I do not draw up the list of options.

The freedom of the other. The ethical side of Sartre: to will my own freedom requires willing the freedom of others as well.

Can freedom be ascribed to an artificial agent? Sartre's answer would in all likelihood have been no, since for him freedom arises from the fact that consciousness does not coincide with itself, that it can take a distance from itself. Yet even to pose the question in these terms yields interesting results.

The Marx connection#

The theme of the meeting bears directly on our file on Karl Marx, published today.

Sartre's late work, the Critique of Dialectical Reason, was an attempt to build a bridge between existentialism and Marxism. Sartre called Marxism “the unsurpassable philosophy of our time”, while holding that individual praxis had gone missing inside it.

Alienation is the concept where the two traditions meet. And the argument over digital labour — the work on labour process theory we also cover today — is precisely where that meeting has taken up residence in 2026.

Taking part from Turkey#

Because the meeting is online, the geographical obstacle falls away. For researchers in Turkey it becomes possible to join an international gathering without the cost of travel and accommodation.

The tradition of reading Sartre in Turkey is a strong one. From the 1960s onwards Nausea, Being and Nothingness and Existentialism Is a Humanism were translated into Turkish and found a wide echo in literary circles. But that interest stayed largely literary and popular; academic work on Sartre's technical phenomenological apparatus is comparatively scarce.

A meeting of this kind is an opportunity to close that gap.

Registration and contact#

The programme and details of participation are announced through the society's website. Contact: dsawyer@laverne.edu

It can be followed alongside the other autumn 2026 events listed in our Conferences section.

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This report forms part of our conference calendar. Details of the programme may change; for confirmed information, readers are advised to contact the organisers.