The Internet Will Die and So Will You | John West

**Demetri Kofinas** (0:00)
What's up, everybody? My name is Demetri Kofinas, and you're listening to Hidden Forces, a podcast that inspires investors, entrepreneurs, and everyday citizens to challenge consensus narratives and learn how to think critically about the systems of power shaping our world. My guest in this episode of Hidden Forces is John West, a computational journalist at The Wall Street Journal and the author of The Internet Will Die and So Will You, a meditation on the impermanence of the web, the finitude of human life, and what it means to live well in the digital age. Over the course of our conversation, John and I explore the paradox at the heart of his book, that the internet, which we've been told is permanent and indelible is in fact a deeply ephemeral place subject to decay and disappearance in much the same way our own bodies are. Our story begins with the web's early years, a world of personal home pages and open standards like RSS, and the phenomenon of link rot that first drew John to write about the web's impermanence, before opening onto the episode's larger preoccupation, the shift from human agency to platform agency, the mechanistic logic embedded in the platforms that mediate our lives, and what it means to live deliberately in an environment engineered to keep us perpetually satiated and unconscious. From there, we turn to the business models that have reshaped the web, the move from serving users to serving advertisers, and how A.I.'s implementation into more and more facets of our lives could change this relationship, for better or worse. We close on questions of truth, knowledge production, and epistemic collapse, how the world would have handled 9-11 in the modern media ecosystem, why people cannot live in a perpetual state of uncertainty, and what the collapse of a shared reality means for our politics and our humanity. If you want access to all of our conversations, along with the transcripts and Intelligence Reports for this and other episodes, which includes summary sections with key takeaways, you can access those by subscribing to one of our premium tiers at hiddenforces.io.
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John West, welcome to Hidden Forces.

**John West** (2:53)
Thank you, Jazz, to be here.

**Demetri Kofinas** (2:55)
It's great to have you on, John. So I originally agreed to read your book under pretenses. I thought this was a book about the Internet. It's certainly not fair to say that it's a book about the Internet, though you talk quite a bit about the Internet. And I feel like it's also not fair to say that it's a book about life or death, nor is it really fair to say that it's a book about both. It feels like something entirely different and special and beautiful in a really poignant way.
Before we get into the book, which is the title of the book is The Internet Will Die and So Will You, which is a great, great, great title. Tell me a little bit about you. What's your story?

**John West** (3:31)
Sure.

**Demetri Kofinas** (3:31)
Yeah.

**John West** (3:31)
Well, first of all, thank you so much for those kind words.
Yeah, I am a journalist at The Wall Street Journal. I do computational journalism, so I do kind of a mix of computer-y stuff. I rarely am out there, you know, shoe leather reporting. I do what I call trackpad leather reporting, where I interrogate databases much more than I talk to people. I'm also a author. I've written... This is my second book. I have a novel coming out in January, so I've got that going. I have an MFA in writing, and I studied philosophy and music undergrad. I am definitely a jack of all trades, master of none, but I really like that, actually, and I think it lends itself well to this moment when so much of what's out there rewards being a generalist as opposed to being someone who's hyper-specifically focused on one niche area. At least I like to tell myself. I don't know if it's true, but I like to tell myself that.

**Demetri Kofinas** (4:21)
Do you mind telling us when you were born?