John West on the Impermanence of the Internet, Platform Agency, and Moral Attention
John West, a computational journalist at The Wall Street Journal, argues that the web we have been warned is permanent is in fact structurally ephemeral — and that its decay is the right lens through which to think about our own. In conversation with Demetri Kofinas, he traces the modern internet as a transfer of decision-making from people to platforms, and argues that the answer is not better technology but a recovered habit of attention: treating what we make and read online with the same care we bring to things in the physical world.
Key ideas
- Ephemerality is built into the web, not a failure of it. Link rot — a link that resolves to a 404, or drifts to somewhere unintended — is the ordinary mechanism by which the web forgets. West came to the subject through his own college blog, which went dark, briefly became a German casino site, and now resolves nowhere. His claim is not that the internet is fragile by accident but that impermanence is ‘baked into the very structure of the web’, which makes the familiar warning that the internet is forever exactly half a truth.
- The internet’s modern history is a shift from human agency to platform agency. West’s formulation — that the story of the modern internet ‘is a shift from human agency to platform agency’ — is the book’s spine. The decisive moment, he says, is not the arrival of social media but the point at which an algorithm was interposed between the person you followed and the posts you saw. See Platform Agency.
- Frictionlessness is a way of not noticing. Platforms treat our relationship to what we make and read as something to be smoothed away, and West reads that smoothing as a means of gliding past our own attention. He connects it to mortality directly: sanding the edges off online life lets us behave as though we were ‘the masters of our lives and fortunes when we are very much not’.
- Open standards made the early web habitable; closed feeds made it a place we can be evicted from. RSS and the personal blog let small actors hold their own ground, with the rules of the road set in common. When Google Reader closed, West says, it was as though a street had been ripped up and the people living on it had to find new digs. Displacement online, on his account, is the same thing as loss of agency over a community you do not own.
- AI has not yet been monetised, and that — not the technology — is the open question. West declines both the boosters and the detractors, expecting AI to end up ‘somewhere doing something weirder’. His concrete worry is the business model rather than the capability: what happens when a company tweaks a model to favour whatever it is advertising, or when users must pay the full token cost. Against that he sets a genuine enthusiasm — small, self-made tools built in a week, which he says feel like the early web.
Content
From link rot to finitude
West is a computational journalist — ‘trackpad leather reporting’, as he puts it, interrogating databases rather than knocking on doors — with an MFA in writing and an undergraduate background in philosophy and music. He pitched the book as a book about link rot. What he wrote is a book about finitude told through the internet.
The pivot is personal on both sides. The blog he kept at Oberlin vanished through his own neglect, and its disappearance gave him the technical subject. The frame around it came from a long struggle with depression and addiction — hospital admissions in high school and again at college — which he describes as having changed his relationship to death by making his own continuation a live question rather than a given. Part of what made him ill, he says, was the belief that he had no limits. The book’s argument runs from there: an awareness of finitude makes a person more attuned to what is in front of them, and he wanted to bring to his digital life the attention he tries to bring to his daughter.
Platform agency and the disenchanted view of the user
The book’s claim that the modern internet is a shift from human agency to platform agency rests on a reading of the platforms’ own model of the person. West credits Marilynne Robinson — The Death of Adam and The Givenness of Things — with the underlying thought: that a disenchanted, mechanistic account of human beings has worked its way into how we understand our own choices. Platforms, on his reading, are the sharpest instance. They think about behaviour mechanistically, and that view ‘infects our own thinking about what is possible and what is desirable online’. Bring the whole self online, he suggests, and you would use these products very differently — which would be hard on their bottom lines.
Pressed by Kofinas on whether there is a moral duty to live consciously, West answers from an unexpected pairing: Martin Hägglund’s This Life, a secular and atheist argument that the absence of an afterlife is precisely what obliges us to use this one, and his own Christianity in a liberation-theology register. Both land in the same place. Attention to the domestic and the introspective is ‘the vehicle by which we practise moral attention, which is the only thing we have going for us’.
The pastoral web and the aesthetics of the natural
Asked whether the early web was more natural, West resists the category. He offers Ansel Adams, whose landscape photographs studiously omitted the indigenous people whose stewardship had shaped the land — what reads as nature is often an aesthetics of the pastoral. Geocities called its personal pages homesteading, a mixed metaphor he finds funny and telling.
Kofinas presses the point through cities: parts of New York where you can feel the presence of the people, against parts where everything looks designed from a schema, the theory imposed on reality rather than arising from it. West takes it to Borges and the map: what unsettles him about an over-schematised place is that the arrow runs from map to territory instead of the other way. What he will say about the early web is not that it was more natural but that its ethos was experimental — many small contributions rubbing against each other — and that this ethos survives without being dominant.
Alienated stuff, alienated selves
The book asks for a new way of thinking about attention online, one that accounts for ‘our alienated stuff and our alienated selves’. West’s distinction: a person who writes a Substack post thinks of it as something they wrote, while a person who likes a comment does not experience that as an act of creation at all. Yet both leave a record, and both fade. His prescription is symmetry — bring to what we make and read online the care we bring to what we make in the physical world — and his diagnosis is that platforms are designed to make it glide past.
He grounds the counter-case in an accident. Living outside Kingston, New York, he slipped on a walk, dislocated a kneecap, and could not move or make himself heard; an Apple Watch got the call out and a volunteer fire department carried him to the road on an ATV. He returns to that fire department as an institution built for a world full of contingency — and reads institutions generally as doing two things at once, offering real support and papering over the fact that we are going to die.
Advertising, intermediation, and AI’s unwritten business model
On the arc of the last two decades, Kofinas puts it bluntly: the web went from serving users to serving advertisers. West agrees, and locates the hinge inside social media rather than at its birth — the shift from I follow you and see your posts to an algorithm decides which of your posts I see. He notes the term has become slippery anyway, with the follower graph meaning very little on TikTok. Recommendation systems, he says, serve two masters: real user desire, and the revenue of whoever built them.
He borrows Cory Doctorow’s enshittification for what happened to the platforms, and observes that we have not yet seen the equivalent for AI. His worries are specific — a model quietly tuned to push an advertiser’s product, and the cost of tokens once they are fully priced. His enthusiasm is equally specific: he built Mixtab, a small social site where he and friends collect bookmarks into a shared edition of a newspaper, in about a week, mostly vibe-coded; a non-coder friend built a three-person version of Letterboxd. The ‘why not just make it’ feeling, he says, resembles the early web.
On search, he is blunt that it was already dying — sponsored results at the top, the good ones at the bottom, and users appending reddit to queries to reach something human. He takes that habit as evidence the internet is still a social place. He also cites a book on gamification, whose title he could not recall, for the double edge of metrics: quantification makes decisions portable between contexts, which is what allows large institutions to work, and it reduces everything to numbers.
Knowledge production and the collapse of shared reality
Asked what 9/11 would have looked like on today’s internet, West says he is glad the distribution channels for conspiracy did not exist then — the truthers were a presence, but the material would now spread farther, faster and stranger. His general defence against technological alarmism is that societies usually have time to build norms around a new medium; his worry is that the internet, social media and AI all move faster than norms can form, which is what makes them unlike television or the novel.
On why people are susceptible, he accepts Kofinas’s institutional account — that people who have been gaslit, or who watched an unshakable belief collapse in 2008 or during the pandemic, become reprogrammable because they cannot live in perpetual uncertainty — and adds a practitioner’s note. It is extremely hard, at a newspaper, to say only true things and not imply false ones; knowledge production is thorny, judgement-laden work, and the claim that AI will solve journalism by lacking bias misses that you have to be an embodied person among embodied people, in the muck. His own resolution is to trust process over outcome: not that the speaker is right, but that they are running a procedure more often right than not.
The conversation closes on values. West rejects the free-speech-versus-censorship frame as a poor fit for platforms, on the ground that there is no neutral algorithm to depart from — any constructed ranking has biases by dint of being constructed, and platform-level manipulation is something we lack good words for. He notes an increase in antisemitism on X without claiming to have measured it, and describes building an engagement algorithm over Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, stanza by stanza, as a joke that worked on him — evidence that the mechanism is close to content-neutral and still powerful.
Related
- John West — guest
- Demetri Kofinas — host
- Platform Agency — the concept this episode centres on
- Craig Newmark on Institutional Maintenance, Giving Away Control, and the Internet We Were Promised — the same decay story from the builder’s side, and the other place Doctorow’s enshittification appears in the wiki