The Internet Will Die, and So Will You: On Learning to Live in Our Digital Age

To live meaningfully in a digital age, we must reckon with impermanence.

There’s rot in the foundation of the web. A cherished blog vanishes while an adolescent fan page refuses to stay deleted. Supreme Court citations disappear while AI-generated spam grows like weeds, feeding ever-more-ravenous algorithms. The “cloud” shrouds the messy reality of our digital lives: We will die, and so will everything we make.

In The Internet Will Die, and So Will You, Pulitzer-winning journalist and technologist John West blends incisive reporting, cultural critique, and philosophical meditation to reveal how we arrived at this uncanny moment―following tunnel fires to link rot and tracing defunct anime tributes to large language models. Drawing on Mary Oliver and John Green, Bach cantatas and TikTok memes, Ecclesiastes and Instagram captions, West charts a path forward. We can reclaim depth over breadth, the sabbath over the scroll, and the agency to remember and forget on our own terms.

Attention is precious and our lives are fleeting. As currently designed, the web hides these truths. Platforms sell the illusion of infinite feeds, perfect memory, and frictionless abundance. But only when we acknowledge the internet’s mortality―and our own―can life online have genuine meaning.

John West is a writer and technologist. He reports the news with code at the Wall Street Journal, where his work has won multiple awards, including two Pulitzer prizes. He is the author of Lessons and Carols: A Meditation on Recovery and The Internet Will Die, and So Will You: On Learning to Live in Our Digital Age.