Speaker

John West

John West

John West is a computational journalist at The Wall Street Journal and the author of The Internet Will Die and So Will You, a book that reads the web’s impermanence as a way into thinking about our own.

He describes his reporting as ‘trackpad leather reporting’ rather than shoe leather — interrogating databases and writing machine-learning classifiers more often than interviewing people, which he notes is a strange destination for someone who did not think of himself as mathematical growing up. He studied philosophy and music as an undergraduate at Oberlin and holds an MFA in writing. The Internet Will Die and So Will You is his second book, published 10 September 2026; the first, Lessons and Carols: A Meditation on Recovery, is about his own experience of mental illness and addiction. A novel is due in January. He calls himself a jack of all trades and master of none, and thinks the moment rewards generalists.

West came to the internet as a nerdy tween building an anime site to make friends, and found people in AOL chat rooms, on Tripod and on Geocities; a blog he kept at university gave him a small readership and close ties with people he never met in person. That blog later went dark — briefly resurfacing as a German casino site — and its disappearance is what set him writing about link rot. He lives outside Kingston, New York, is a Christian in a liberation-theology register, and speaks openly about the depression that hospitalised him in high school and again at college, and about what recovery taught him regarding his own limits.

Core positions

The web is structurally ephemeral, and that is the useful fact about it. Link rot is not a defect to be engineered away but the ordinary mechanism by which the internet forgets. West’s move is to treat the parallel with bodily finitude as instructive rather than merely poetic: an awareness of limits is what makes attention possible, online as elsewhere.

The modern internet transferred agency from people to platforms. See Platform Agency. He dates the decisive change not to the arrival of social media but to the interposition of an algorithm between the person you follow and the posts you see, and reads the resulting condition as displacement — membership in communities you do not own.

Moral attention is the response, not better technology. West argues for bringing to digital artefacts the care we bring to physical ones, and reads the frictionlessness platforms cultivate as a way of gliding past our own attention — and, behind that, past mortality. He takes the gardening metaphor seriously: the web is not given to us but cultivated, and left alone it decays.

On AI, capability is the wrong question; the business model is the live one. He expects AI to disappoint both its detractors and its proponents, thinks ‘is it a superintelligence’ may be a category error, and asks instead what specific capabilities will do. His concrete worry is the monetisation that has not yet happened. His concrete enthusiasm is that cheap tool-building has returned some of the early web’s why not just make it spirit — he built Mixtab, a small shared-bookmark newspaper for friends, in about a week.

Knowledge production is hard, embodied work. From newsroom experience: saying only true things and implying nothing false is laborious and full of judgement calls, which is why he distrusts the claim that AI will solve journalism by being unbiased. He resolves the epistemic problem by trusting process over outcome.

In the wiki