Person or product?

Subject or object?

The same question keeps finding me in different rooms. In courtrooms: is this a person, or a number the defense is trying to discount? In churches: what makes a human being irreplaceable? Anywhere AI reaches: if a machine can do what you do, what’s left that’s actually you?

I believe the answer—that you are a subject, not an object; a someone, not a something—matters more than anything I could tell you about myself.

And that’s what this is about: finding yourself in a world trying to reduce you to something else.

Cameron Michael Fathauer

Latest Essay

  • v a p o r

    v a p o r

    This summer my name is going to travel farther than I could ever carry it on my own. Some will say something I’m cautious about every time I hear it: “You’re famous now!” I’ll smile and thank them, but the…

Recent Writing

Writing

Browse all essays →

  • Nice Shot, Cam

    Nice Shot, Cam

    “Nice shot, Cam.” A seminary student named Keagan said it to me last week during an intramural basketball game at my alma…

  • A Book That Shouldn’t Exist

    A Book That Shouldn’t Exist

    “It shouldn’t exist. It does. Read it and reckon with what that means.” AI models have read my book dozens of times.…

  • Ten years of marriage

    Ten years of marriage

    I proposed to Chelsea when I was seventeen. She said yes. A month later, my head went through a windshield. Despite the…

Saving the Subject

The Book

Saving the Subject

How I Found You When I Almost Lost Me  ·  2024

A first-person philosophical argument for why you exist, written by someone who almost didn’t. It makes the case that we are subjects — whos made for relationship — not objects, whats measured by use. An identity that stays intact even when the brain or the body is broken.

“It shouldn’t exist. It does. Read it and reckon with what that means.”

Cameron Michael Fathauer

About

From a hospital bed to the bar exam

At 17, a severe brain injury took a third of my skull and redirected my path from seminary to law school. Over the next decade I finished college, graduated law school while raising triplets plus one, and became licensed attorney by twenty-four. That wasn’t ambition. It was survival. It was me searching for light in a darkening mind.

“No one can be themselves by themselves.”

More about me →

Law Practice

Personal Injury Law

Practicing alongside the same attorney who fought for me after my injury. I’d be grateful to serve you too!


I write about identity, culture, AI, and faith.

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