The Internet Will Die and So Will You | John West
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What's up everybody? My name is Ameder Grafinas, and you're listening to Hidden Forces, a podcast that inspires investors, entrepreneurs, and everyday citizens to challenge consensus narratives and learn how to think critically about the systems of power shaping our world. My guest in this episode of Hidden Forces is John West, a computational journalist at the Wall Street Journal and the author of The Internet Will Die, and So Will You, a meditation on the impermanence of the web, the finitude of human life, and what it means to live well in the digital age. Over the course of our conversatio
Thank you. Just to be here.
It's great to have you on, John. So I originally agreed to read your book under false pretenses. I thought this was a book about the internet. It's certainly not fair to say that it's a book about the internet, though you talk quite a bit about the internet. And I feel like it's also not fair to say that it's a book about life or death, nor is it really fair to say that it's a book about both. It feels like something entirely different and special and beautiful in a really poignant way. Before we get into the book, which is the title of the book is The Internet Will Die and So Will You, which
Sure. Yeah. Well, first of all, thank you so much for those kind words. Yeah. I am a journalist at The Wall Street Journal. I do computational journalism, so I do kind of a mix of computery stuff. I rarely am out there, you know, shoe leather reporting. I do what I call trackpad leather reporting where I, you know, interrogate databases much more than I talk to people. I'm also a author. I've written this is my second book. I have a novel coming out in January, so I've I've got, you know, that going. I have an MFA in writing, and I studied philosophy and music undergrad. I am definitely a jack
know if it's true, but I like to tell myself that. Do you mind telling us when you were born?
Yeah. Sure. I was born in 'eighty six, so I'm almost 40. I will be 40 in November.
So what role would you say that the internet played in your life as a child and as an early adult and now in your late 30s? And how has it influenced your sense of self and identity?
I was quite a nerdy kid growing up. I had a lot of obsessive interests that It didn't make me a total pariah, but I do think it's safe to say that I was not very popular. And I found the internet as a tween. I wrote my first ever website dedicated to anime in an effort, I think, to mostly make friends and kind of demonstrate to my new friends that, oh, no, I'm serious about anime too. And that experience of sitting in the computer lab, teaching myself to indent HTML properly was, I think, really formative. I did not think of myself as a particularly mathy or science y person growing up, and so
I found your reflections on the early web to be very relatable. There were moments in the book in which your comments felt almost like a eulogy of the old internet that we grew up with. When you first sat down to write this book, or better yet, when you first pitched it to your publisher, how did you describe it? What did you tell him or her that it was going to be about?
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