To live meaningfully in a digital age, we must reckon with impermanence.
Theres 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 acknowledging the internets mortality--and our own--can imbue life online with 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.
"John Wests pursuit of truth and beauty in this book is both masterful and unforgettable."
--Chelsea Hodson, author of Tonight Im Someone Else
"[West] can make moments of the highest lyricism, also moments of perfect clarity."
--Shane McCrae, author of The Gilded Auction Block
"[A] melodic and observant book unafraid to circle the complexities of love and parenthood. Smart, potent, and fearless writing." --Megan Mayhew Bergman, author of How Strange a Season
"West finds possibilities for language that birth possibilities for how to be. A singular book."
--James K. A. Smith, author of Make Your Home in This Luminous Dark
"With sensitivity and wild intelligence, John West . . . enlists the power of poetry, the consolation of philosophy, and the intense scrutiny of the autobiographical to describe--lyrically and movingly--the reconstruction of the self."
--Mark Wunderlich, author of God of Nothingness
"Memoirs composed of sections are tempting to a writer, but the deeper difficulties belie the seeming ease. The overall rhythm, the weave of recurrence, the manipulation of the timeline--every element must be tuned by instinct. John West has that instinct. . . . Self-scouring at every turn, [Lessons and Carols]pays off in shocks of joy and affirms the grounding sobriety of parenthood."
--Sven Birkerts, editor emeritus of AGNI and author of Then, Again: The Art of Time in the Memoir
