Global internet decay could fuel a digital rebirth, American writer John West argues.

Technologist and Pulitzer-winning journalist John West argues in his new book, The Internet Will Die, and So Will You: On Learning to Live in Our Digital Age, that the web many people treat as permanent is fragile, distorted and repeatedly remade. His warning lands amid growing unease over privacy lawsuits, social media restrictions for children, smartphone bans in schools and the spread of generative AI material across feeds, comments and search results.

West’s central point is not simply that online life has become unpleasant. He says the internet is far smaller than people imagine, calling it “a vanishing fraction, a rounding error, of the human experience”, and far less stable than the market has encouraged users to believe. He opens with a 2001 Baltimore train derailment that damaged major fibre-optic cables and caused nationwide slowdowns, using it to show how easily the network can be disrupted.

The book contrasts today’s algorithmic economy with earlier, more personal online communities, from GeoCities to Tumblr. West recalls an old anime site he cannot delete because he no longer has access to the AOL account, while a college blog partly vanished after he stopped paying domain fees. “The things we want to last really don't, and then oftentimes the things that we kind of wish would go away hang on for way too long,” he says.

That instability, West argues, undermines the idea of the web as a reliable collective memory. He points to research showing that a quarter of links in articles on one major newspaper’s website between 1996 and mid-2019 no longer worked, while a 2016 study found that three out of four scholarly citations had drifted from their original content. A Pew report also found that more than half of Wikipedia entries contain at least one reference link that leads nowhere.

For West, the problem is not only technical decay but the culture built around engagement. He says online validation can reshape even private habits, recalling how rereading Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead left him thinking it would not count towards his annual Goodreads statistics. Such incentives, he argues, create “the exact conditions for a space to be filled by something that isn't human”.

Yet West does not present the internet as entirely lost. He says meaning can still be made online when profit is removed from the equation, citing obscure video portals and poetry journals with no revenue model. Some of these neglected spaces, he suggests, preserve the strangeness and sincerity that large platforms have pushed aside.

His final image is compost: decay redirected towards new growth. “Look, the internet is rotting,” West says. “The question is, where are we going to put our energy?” The book leaves open whether enough people will abandon outrage-driven platforms and help cultivate a more human web from what remains.