Notes — John West on the Impermanence of the Internet, Platform Agency, and Moral Attention

Notes on John West in conversation with Demetri Kofinas — Hidden Forces, 10 August 2026.

Four questions — Adler’s reading frame

Q1 — What is it about as a whole? An argument that the internet’s impermanence is structural rather than accidental, used as the route into a second and larger argument about attention and finitude. West’s book began as a study of link rot and became a book about what it means to live well given limits; the conversation follows that same widening. The connective claim is that the web’s decay and our own are not merely analogous — both are conditions that only attention makes bearable or meaningful, and the platforms we use are designed to prevent us from paying it.

Q2 — How is it argued? By pairing a technical mechanism with a moral vocabulary at each step, and by personal testimony rather than data. Link rot supplies the mechanism, a dead college blog the motive. The agency claim is argued historically — a datable interposition of the algorithm between follower and post — and then philosophically, via Marilynne Robinson’s account of disenchantment, to explain why platforms hold the model of the person that they do. The epistemics section argues from newsroom practice: knowledge production is hard, therefore claims that AI will fix journalism misunderstand the work. Almost nothing is quantified; West twice declines to assert a trend he has not measured.

Q3 — Is it true, in whole or part? The historical claims are solid and checkable — RSS, Geocities, Google Reader’s closure, the algorithmic feed — and the phenomenology of displacement is well drawn. The weakest link is causal: West wants the internet to explain a shift in norms towards nihilism and vice signalling, and is honest that he cannot separate ‘the internet as such’ from ‘the particular internet we happen to have’, asking the question aloud and leaving it open. His restraint is a point in his favour — on antisemitism on X he says explicitly that he has not done a rigorous analysis [§ Consensus reality]. The disenchantment argument is the most interesting and least testable part: that a mechanistic model of the user propagates into users’ self-understanding is plausible, and no evidence is offered for it. The claim that norms historically outpace technologies, illustrated with Plato, the novel and television, is asserted rather than demonstrated.

Q4 — What of it? It gives the wiki a named concept for something it had only described from the outside — see Platform Agency, and compare the enshittification framing in Craig Newmark on Institutional Maintenance, Giving Away Control, and the Internet We Were Promised. West’s distinction between who decides and how good the product is is the useful export: it separates a question about power from a question about quality that critics of platforms routinely run together. Also useful is his reframing of the AI debate away from capability and towards monetisation, and his process-not-outcome answer to the credibility problem.

Glossary

Link rot — the ordinary decay by which a link stops resolving to what it named: it returns a 404, or drifts to an unintended destination (a site’s homepage if you are lucky, a scam if not). West’s point is that this is how the web forgets, and it is structural. [§ From link rot to finitude]

Content drift — the softer form of link rot: the link resolves, but to something other than what was linked. Often the stage before a page disappears entirely. [§ From link rot to finitude]

Platform agency — the condition in which the platform, not the person, makes the decisions that shape what the person encounters online. West’s contrast term is human agency, and his thesis is a shift from the second to the first. [§ Platform agency]

Moral attention — the practice of attending carefully to what is in front of you, which West treats as the vehicle of ethical life rather than one virtue among others. He arrives at it from two directions, a secular argument about finitude and a Christian one about justice. [§ Moral attention]

Enshittification — Cory Doctorow’s term, borrowed here, for a platform’s decay as it turns from serving users to extracting from them. West’s use is careful: he says we have not yet seen the equivalent for AI. [§ Business models]

Vice signalling — the inversion of virtue signalling: gaining credibility by saying increasingly distressing things one may not believe. West’s worry is the drift from performance to belief. [§ Consensus reality]

Footloose technologies — technologies that enable action at a distance; West takes the term from Small Is Beautiful, whose author he could not recall [?]. He calls the internet a machine to act at a distance and counts this a genuine good. [§ The pastoral web]

Key claims by section

From link rot to finitude [§ From link rot to finitude]

The internet is warned about as permanent and is in fact deeply ephemeral; ephemerality is ‘baked into the very structure of the web’. Both halves are true, which is what makes the warning misleading.
The book was pitched as a book about link rot and became a book about finitude. West’s own blog, kept at Oberlin, went dark through neglect, became a German casino site, and now resolves nowhere. The blog’s name is garbled in the captions and is not recoverable from the transcript [?source].
The bridge to mortality is autobiographical: severe depression and addiction, psychiatric admissions in high school and college, and a period in which whether he wanted to live was genuinely open. He states plainly that he is well now.
His diagnosis of his own illness includes the belief that he had no limits — an unhealthy relationship to work and productivity founded on the idea that he could simply keep going.

Platform agency [§ Platform agency]

The book’s line, read aloud by Kofinas: the story of the internet in its modern incarnation is a shift from human agency to platform agency.
The decisive moment is the interposition of an algorithm between the person followed and the posts seen — not the arrival of social media, which West says is a slippery category anyway (the follower graph means little on TikTok).
Platforms hold a mechanistic model of human behaviour, and that model propagates into how users understand their own possibilities online. West credits Marilynne Robinson — The Death of Adam, The Givenness of Things — for the underlying account of disenchantment.
Bringing the full self online would change how these products are used, to the detriment of their bottom lines. Stated as an upshot rather than an intention.
Switching costs, not the absence of ideas, are what prevent competitive entry. West notes he is predisposed to think poorly of markets and makes the pro-competition point anyway.

Moral attention [§ Moral attention]

Two routes to the same conclusion: Martin Hägglund’s This Life, secular and atheist, arguing that the absence of an afterlife obliges us to use this one; and West’s own liberation-theology Christianity, on bringing the kingdom of heaven to earth as a demand for justice.
Attention to the domestic and the introspective is the vehicle by which moral attention is practised — ‘the only thing we have going for us’.
Digital artefacts are alienated from us in a way physical ones are not: writing a Substack post feels like creation, liking a comment does not, though both leave a record that persists and then fades.
The remedy is symmetry — the same care online as offline — and the obstacle is the frictionlessness platforms cultivate, which makes our own products glide past our attention.
Removing friction is connected to death-avoidance: it lets us act as though we were masters of our lives and fortunes. Institutions do two things at once — offer real support, and paper over the fact that we will die. The illustration is a dislocated kneecap outside Kingston, an Apple Watch call, and a volunteer fire department.

The pastoral web [§ The pastoral web]

West declines the natural/unnatural framing for the early web. The category of the natural is fraught: Ansel Adams’s landscapes omitted the indigenous people whose stewardship shaped them, so what reads as nature is an aesthetics of the pastoral.
Geocities called personal pages homesteading — a mixed metaphor West finds funny and apt.
Kofinas supplies the sharper version through cities: districts designed from a schema versus districts where you feel the people. He invokes Iain McGilchrist on the brain’s hemispheres and the Hamlet line about more things in heaven and earth.
West answers with Borges: the trouble with an over-schematised place is that the arrow runs from map to territory rather than territory to map.
Open standards are the infrastructure of the habitable web. RSS enabled the flourishing of blogs and of different ways of reading; closed feeds — Facebook’s News Feed, X’s hostility to external links — replaced it. When Google Reader closed, a street was ripped up and its residents had to find new digs.
Displacement online is loss of agency over a community you do not own. West draws it from his own position as a gentrifier amid a housing crisis in Kingston, New York.

Business models [§ Business models]

The arc: from serving users to serving advertisers. West agrees with Kofinas’s blunter framing of users as livestock to be milked.
Recommendation systems serve two masters — genuine user desire and the revenue of whoever built them — and the two are often in tension. West’s example is an RSS reader with a user-configurable algorithm, which he thinks is called River [?].
AI has not yet been enshittified in the way platforms have. The open question is monetisation, not capability: a model tuned to push an advertiser’s product, and the cost of tokens once fully priced.
Against that, real enthusiasm: Mixtab, a shared-bookmark newspaper for friends, built in about a week and largely vibe-coded; a non-coder friend’s three-person Letterboxd. The why not just make it feeling resembles the early web.
Search was already dying before AI — sponsored results at the top, the good ones at the bottom, users appending reddit to reach something human. West reads that habit as evidence the web is still a social place, and notes how far Google now is from PageRank.
On metrics: quantification makes decisions portable between contexts, which is what allows institutions to operate at scale, and it reduces everything to numbers. West attributes this to a book on gamification whose title he could not recall; the phonetics of the caption suggest C. Thi Nguyen [?], and no title should be attached without checking.
‘Is it a superintelligence’ may be a category error; the useful question is what specific capabilities will do. He takes from Emily Bender’s The AI Con — with which he partly disagrees — the point that ‘AI’ bundles very different capabilities, often not in the same system.
Meaning is made by us, not found in the world; information may be external, meaning is not. West flags that he cannot see how the claim would be falsified.

Consensus reality [§ Consensus reality]

Asked how 9/11 would have played on today’s internet: the truthers existed (‘jet fuel can’t melt steel beams’), but the distribution would now carry it farther, faster and stranger.
General defence against technological alarmism: societies develop norms around a medium given time — Plato on writing, the novel, television. The worry is that the internet, social media and AI move faster than norms form.
Susceptibility is institutional as much as technological. Kofinas’s account, which West accepts: people gaslit by official sources, or whose unshakable beliefs collapsed in 2008 or during the pandemic, become reprogrammable, because they cannot live in perpetual uncertainty. He quotes Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger — they get the facts wrong but the feelings right.
From the newsroom: saying only true things and implying nothing false is extremely hard, full of judgement calls about how far a claim can be pushed. Hence scepticism about AI solving journalism by lacking bias — you have to be an embodied person among embodied people, in the muck.
West’s own epistemic rule is process over outcome: trust that someone is running a procedure more often right than not, rather than that they are right.
On nihilism online: a dead-eyed view of the world that is often right-coded but, he thinks, substantially apolitical. His most disturbing example is not political — pro-anorexia communities encouraging young girls, which he reads as the same inversion, virtue in refusing what society calls good.
Vice signalling as the inversion of virtue signalling, with the drift from saying what you do not believe to believing it. He judges hypocrisy the lesser sin.
Antisemitism appears to have increased on X relative to Twitter; West says twice that he has not done a rigorous analysis and does not know how much is contingent on the change of ownership and content moderation [?].
Free speech versus censorship is the wrong frame. There is no neutral algorithm to depart from — any constructed ranking has biases by dint of being constructed. Platform-level manipulation is a real thing for which we lack good words and frameworks. West does not deny free-speech infringement exists as a category.
The engagement mechanism is close to content-neutral and still powerful: West built a stanza-by-stanza engagement algorithm over Whitman’s Leaves of Grass as a joke and found it worked on him.