The Death of the Internet and of You: John West on Why We Aren’t Gods

“We have deluded ourselves into thinking that we are as gods, and we are not.” — John West

 

Back in 2006, at the height of Web 2.0 optimism, Time made YOU person of the year. The user-generated technology of the internet, Time implied, would make all of us into digital gods of memory and forgetting. Twenty years later, the script has been totally flipped. Now we know that the internet is all-too-human. And so are we. This reminder of our mortality is the heart (if that’s the right word) of the new book by John West, the double Pulitzer Prize-winning Wall Street Journal computational journalist.

 

West’s The Internet Will Die, and So Will You is a kind of digital memento mori. His argument is metaphysical rather than political. Offline, he writes, our lives are marked by constraint. But we mistake the internet’s destruction of physical distance for limitlessness. “We have deluded ourselves into thinking that we are as gods,” he reminds us, “and we are not.” A Christian and a digital deconvert (not an uncommon combination in the technocrati), West wants us to import our mortality online. If we recognize that the internet will decay and finally die, he suggests, we will make it human. (Re)Make it, as us.

 

I’ve been making a version of this argument since The Cult of the Amateur in 2007. Only West’s version — by contrasting Bach, Ecclesiastes, and Mary Oliver with the infinite scroll — is more poetic and musical. Politer too. Noli timere, as the poet Seamus Heaney texted before he died. Be not afraid. Of life, of death. But beware of YOU. Be afraid. Timere. Very afraid.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       We Are Not Gods. The book’s thesis: offline life is marked by constraint — you cannot talk to people farther than you can shout, or hug your child while she’s at school — while online we act at a distance and mistake that “foot-loosening technology” for limitlessness. “We have deluded ourselves into thinking that we are as gods, and we are not” — the AI singularity being the theological version of the same delusion, and “a recipe for disaster, both interpersonally, but also within ourselves.” The fix is not logging off but bringing our mortality online: “this is where we live,” and the Internet’s magic only stays magical when tempered by limits — “in order for it to be magical, we need the flip side, which is that it can’t always be magic.” Andrew’s frame: in 2006, Time made YOU person of the year, promising digital gods of memory and forgetting. Twenty years on, the internet is all-too-human — and so are we.

•       The Deconvert’s Meditation. “No one is more strident than the convert or the deconvert.” West’s digital utopianism began in a middle-school computer lab, where an unhappy kid discovered he could find friends and communities online — and it died by monkey’s paw: the same mechanism that found him anime fans now routes lonely kids into pro-anorexia TikTok rabbit holes (his own Journal colleagues’ reporting) and neo-Nazi forums. “That supercharging is something that I wished for.” He concedes the lineage Andrew has worked since The Cult of the Amateur (2007) and The Internet Is Not the Answer (2015) — and goes further: “I actually think largely, Plato and Postman were right.” Culture must metabolize its technological ruptures. Or, per the Freudian slip Andrew gifted back to him for the next book: its raptures. Andrew’s verdict on the lineage: the same argument, more poetic and musical. Politer too.

•       A Few Thousand Weeks. On the Luddite summer, West channels past guest Brian Merchant: hatred of technology is usually hatred of