The Internet Will Die and So Will You | John West

In Episode 493 https://hiddenforces.io/podcasts/the-internet-will-die-and-so-will-you-john-west of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with computational journalist and author John West about the surprising impermanence of the Internet, the shift from human agency to platform agency, the business models that have reshaped the web, how AI could further remake our relationship to the Internet and to ourselves, and what the collapse of a shared reality means for our politics and our humanity. The conversation begins with the paradox at the heart of West's book, The Internet Will Die and So Will You. The web we've been told is permanent and indelible is in fact a deeply ephemeral place, subject to decay and disappearance in much the same way our own bodies are. Demetri and West trace the story back to the Internet's early years—a world of personal homepages and open standards like RSS—and to the phenomenon of link rot that first drew West to write about the web's impermanence, before opening onto the book's larger preoccupation with the shift from human agency to platform agency, the mechanistic logic embedded in the platforms that mediate our lives, and what it means to live deliberately in an environment engineered to keep us perpetually satiated and unconscious. From there they turn to the business models that have reshaped the web—the move from serving users to serving advertisers—and how AI's implementation into more and more facets of our lives could change that relationship for better or worse. They close on questions of truth, knowledge production, and epistemic collapse, asking how the world would have handled 9/11 in the modern media ecosystem, why people cannot live in a perpetual state of uncertainty, and what the collapse of a shared reality means for our politics and our humanity. Subscribe to our premium content—including our premium feed, episode transcripts, and Intelligence Reports—by visiting HiddenForces.io/subscribe https://hiddenforces.io/subscribe. If you'd like to join the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces Genius community—with benefits like Q&A calls with guests, exclusive research and analysis, in-person events, and dinners—you can also sign up on our subscriber page at HiddenForces.io/subscribe https://hiddenforces.io/subscribe. If you enjoyed today's episode of Hidden Forces, please support the show by: Subscribing on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/hidden-forces/id1205359334, YouTube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8URhgYos5fjHqFSO4RSIEg, Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/0TK6u251zGSlMgJKH6cOaP, Stitcher https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/demetri-kofinas/hidden-forces, SoundCloud https://soundcloud.com/hiddenforces, CastBox https://castbox.fm/channel/2629539, or via our RSS Feed http://hiddenforces.libsyn.com/rss Writing us a review on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/hidden-forces/id1205359334 & Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/0TK6u251zGSlMgJKH6cOaP Join our mailing list at https://hiddenforces.io/newsletter/ Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou Subscribe and support the podcast at https://hiddenforces.io https://hiddenforces.io/. Join the conversation on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/hiddenforcespod/, Instagram https://www.instagram.com/hiddenforcespod/, and Twitter https://twitter.com/hiddenforcespod at @hiddenforcespod Follow Demetri on Twitter at @Kofinas https://twitter.com/kofinas Episode Recorded on 08/04/2026

• 0:00Speaker 00

  What's up, everybody? My name is Amateris Grafinus, 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 conversation, John and I explore the paradox at the heart of his book, that the internet, which we've been told is permanent and indelible,

• 0:43Speaker 00

  is in fact a deeply ephemeral place, subject to decay and disappearance in much the same way our own bodies are. Our story begins with the web's early years, a world of personal homepages and open standards like RSS, and the phenomenon of link rot that first drew John to write about the web's impermanence, before opening onto the episode's larger preoccupation, the shift from human agency to platform agency, the mechanistic logic embedded in the platforms that mediate our lives, and what it means to live deliberately in an environment engineered to keep us perpetually satiated and unconscious. From there, we turn to the business models that have reshaped the web, the move from serving users to serving advertisers,

• 1:28Speaker 00

  and how AI's implementation into more and more facets of our lives could change this relationship, for better or worse. We close on questions of truth, knowledge production, and epistemic collapse, how the world would have handled 9/11 in the modern media ecosystem, why people cannot live in a perpetual state of uncertainty, and what the collapse of a shared reality means for our politics and our humanity. If you want access to all of our conversations, along with the transcripts and intelligence reports for this and other episodes, which include summary sections with key takeaways, you can access those by subscribing to one of our premium tiers at hiddenforces.io/subscribe. If you want to join in on the conversation

• 2:12Speaker 00

  and become a member of the Hidden Forces Genius Community, which includes Q&A calls with guests, discounted access to third-party research and analysis, and in-person events like our intimate dinners and weekend retreats, you can also do that on our subscriber page. And if you still have questions, feel free to send an email to [email protected], and I or someone from our team will get right back to you. And with that, please enjoy this uniquely insightful and reflective conversation about life and the internet with my guest, John West.

• 2:50Speaker 00

  John West, welcome to Hidden Forces.

• 2:53Speaker 01

  Thank you just to be here.

• 2:55Speaker 00

  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 is a great, great, great title. Tell me a little bit about you. What's your story?

• 3:31Speaker 01

  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 shoe leather reporting. I do what I call trackpad leather reporting, where I interrogate databases much more than I talk to people. I'm also an author. I've written, this is my second book. I have a novel coming out in January, so I've got that going. I have an MFA in writing, and I studied philosophy and music undergrad. I am definitely a jack-of-all-trades, master of none. But I really like that, actually, and I think it lends itself well to this moment. I win so much of what's out there rewards being a generalist

• 4:12Speaker 01

  as opposed to being someone who's hyper-specifically focused on one niche area. At least, I like to tell myself. I don't know if it's true, but I like to tell myself that.

• 4:21Speaker 00

  Do you mind telling us when you were born?

• 4:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure. I was born in 86, so I'm almost 40. I will be 40 in November.

• 4:28Speaker 00

  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?

• 4:40Speaker 01

  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 sciency person growing up. And so it's been kind of a strange shock to find myself

• 5:21Speaker 01

  doing pretty complex math at the journal to write machine learning classifiers or that kind of thing. But I think it was really important to me that I was able to find people like me online, whether it was in an AOL chatroom or on Tripod or GeoCities. Like, those were places that I really found people and became who I was. And then also, as a college-age person, I started a blog. And by today's standards, I think it would not be a very impressive readership count, but there was community there. And I really made close ties with people that I would have never otherwise met, not that I met any of them in person, but that I would have never otherwise interacted with. And I loved the experience of writing in response to something someone else wrote and being read by those people.

• 6:04Speaker 01

  That was a really exciting and invigorating experience for me.

• 6:07Speaker 00

  I found your reflections on the early web to be very relatable. And 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?

• 6:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, I said I wanted to write about link rot, which I was really interested in link rot because my blog vanished. It was my own fault in a lot of ways. I forgot and neglected the server.

• 6:43Speaker 00

  Tell people what link rot is, so they know.

• 6:45Speaker 01

  Sure, yeah. Link rot is the phenomenon where a website goes dark, where you click on that blue underlined link of text, and instead of taking you to a new website, it takes you to a 404 page, an error page. Or sometimes, there's also this idea of like, kind of like, link drift or content drift, which is, it takes you, but it redirects you to somewhere that you didn't expect to go. Maybe it's the homepage of the site, if you're lucky. Maybe it's a Bitcoin scam if you're not. And that's kind of the mechanism by which a lot of websites go dark. They kind of, first, it becomes a context drift, a content drift situation, and then it disappears. And for me, my blog, Ich bin ein Oberlerner, I went to Oberlin, Ich bin ein Oberlerner turned into a German casino and now doesn't go anywhere. And that was very sad for me. And I got kind of interested in this idea

• 7:28Speaker 01

  that the internet that we think is so permanent, and we have been warned is so permanent. It can be that, but also, it can be a deeply ephemeral place. And that ephemerality is baked into the very structure of the web.

• 7:41Speaker 00

  So when we started this conversation, I said it wasn't quite right to describe this book as X or Y or X plus Y. I feel like this book is about the finitude of human life and what it looks like to live a good life, a good human life, but told through the story of the internet somehow, of its physicality, subject as it is to the vagaries of time and nature, just as our bodies are. And as you describe in the book, how would you describe what this book is about for those who haven't read it?

• 8:11Speaker 01

  Oh, what a vexing question. I'm terrible at talking about it. I did practice before I came on in the effort to not make a fool of myself. But I do think the book is about our finitude and what we do with it. I think on my good days, I'm able to really bring an awareness of my own finitude, of my own limits, of my own, you know, I am not God, and that I have these limits, that I have this finitude. I'm able to bring that to the things that I do during my day. And it makes me more attuned and more aware of what I'm doing. And it makes me more, I guess the word is mindful. Whether it's time with my daughter, and I think to myself, instead of being frustrated that she wants to play Lion King for the umpteenth time that day, I think to myself, this is a fleeting moment, and she will not want to play Lion King with me in maybe even a few months.

• 8:55Speaker 01

  And that awareness of our finitude that we bring to our IRL lives in the best of times, I wanted to bring that to my digital life, too. Because my digital life, it feels so abundant, and it feels so ongoing. And yet, it is also marked by the same exact limits that our IRL lives have.

• 9:14Speaker 00

  So I'm probably gonna quote the book a number of times throughout this episode, but I have one quote in particular that I want to begin with because I feel like it speaks to an important theme that recurs throughout the book, and that has to do with choice. You write, quote, "The story of the internet and its modern incarnation is a shift from human agency to platform agency."

• 9:36Speaker 00

  Tell me a little bit more about that. Where do agency and choice fit into your personal philosophy and ethics? And why does this play such an important role in the book?

• 9:46Speaker 01

  I think, you know, the idea that there is a force outside of ourselves that has its own incentives, and those incentives are in contradiction to kind of human thriving. I think I've probably been most influenced in that by Marilynne Robinson, who's probably best known as a novelist, but also has written a number of fantastic books of essays. The Death of Adam being the one that probably changed the way I thought the most, but also The Givenness of Things, I think, is maybe the more recent one. She also has a fascinating read of Genesis. That's not to hear no there, but she has a fascinating book about kind of exegesis of Genesis, which I found riveting. But she talks a lot about this kind of way that modernity and the way that,

• 10:29Speaker 01

  yeah, I would say like modernity and a secularization and a kind of, she calls it naturalism, which I think is maybe an unfair word to use because it has a real scientific meaning that I think is valuable. But she talks about this idea that we've kind of let this way of disenchantment infect our choices. And I think that that disenchantment is maybe best represented by these platforms, which are deeply mechanistic in how they think about our behavior and how they think about us. And that that infects our own thinking about what is possible and what is desirable online. I think if we were to bring the full numinous self into the digital sphere, we would use social media platforms very differently than we do now.

• 11:14Speaker 01

  And I think that that would be hard for the bottom lines of these companies. And I think that that's why, well, maybe not why, but that is an upshot of their kind of mechanistic view of human reality is that it really does inhibit our ability to bring that full self online.

• 11:29Speaker 00

  Do you feel like we have a moral responsibility to live consciously and to take responsibility for our own lives? That we've been gifted this opportunity to be alive, in other words, this fleeting moment of consciousness, and that we have an ethical obligation to make the most of it? That there's something sort of deeply immoral about relinquishing control over that agency to others?

• 11:52Speaker 01

  I do think that. It's interesting, you know, Martin Haglund wrote this fantastic, he's a philosopher, I want to say he's Danish or Scandinavian, I'm actually not quite sure. But he's a contemporary philosopher who wrote a book called This Life, which is interesting because it's a secular book. I mean, it's a deeply, I mean, he is an atheist and talks about how, because we do not have a life after this one, it is our responsibility to use this one in the pursuit of justice and a rich life. I find it interesting that I resonated so much with that book because I'm a Christian and so much of my philosophy has been informed by, I would say, the kind of more liberation theology ideas around this life being an important one in that we have a responsibility to bring the kingdom of heaven here on earth, not in the sense of, well, in the sense that we have a responsibility to make this world more just.

• 12:37Speaker 01

  And I think that that emphasis toward justice actually is what informs my belief that I should spend time with my daughter. It's not a hedonistic pursuit of my pleasure and maximizing that so much as it is a belief that being able to pay attention to the domestic, to our own thoughts, to our own introspection, is actually the vehicle by which we practice moral attention, which is the kind of the only thing we have going for us, I think.

• 13:05Speaker 00

  So to bring it back to the internet's place in this story for one moment, it feels like the internet's presence was integral to the book because the internet isn't just central to who we've become. It is in some very important ways, central to who we are. And in fact, in some places, you're very explicit about this in the book. For example, when you talk about AI and how large language models have been trained on the internet. And so as more of the internet becomes written by AI, does that in some sense mean that we are destroying not just the internet, but ourselves? Can you speak to the implications of this entanglement? And what it says about who we are as this technologized or technological society?

• 13:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, totally. I mean, I think, you know, there are so many great, whether it's the medium is the message or whether it's we shape our buildings and thereafter they shape us. Or, you know, pick your kind of technological, I guess, not determinism, but you know, the way in which technology shapes us after we create it. I think that that is very, very, very true. And online, we are the products of what we have made on the web. We are so social that, and this is a social technology at its core. It's about communication. I think that like the way it has changed us cannot be really understated. It has certainly changed me and I think it has changed culture. And I don't think that those changes are necessarily bad. In fact, I think a lot of them have been fantastic and magical.

• 14:34Speaker 01

  The ability to, I think it was Small is Beautiful, I can't remember who wrote that book, but he talks about foot loosening technologies. The idea that that there are certain technologies that enable more action at a distance. And what is the internet if not a machine to act at a distance? And that's a wonderful thing. I do think that we therefore have a responsibility to make it better, to shepherd it and to steward it and not to view it as something given to us, but rather as something that we are in the process of curating and in the process of shepherding and cultivating. I think the metaphor of gardening, I come back to again and again in the book. It's the idea that like, just as nature will produce things if left to its own devices, we have a responsibility when we garden to make the soil richer

• 15:17Speaker 01

  and to shape that natural process into something that is deeply unnatural, actually. And I think the same is true of the internet. All too often, I think, we kind of assume the internet just is what it is and we bring to it what we bring to it. But actually, we are called, I think, to shepherd and guide that process.

• 15:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, you often bring up the regenerative nature of the internet in the book and that it requires our attention and our attending in order to persist against the forces of entropy. I mean, that's what your comments about Lickrot were about, which is that if we don't actively participate in maintaining the internet, it will die. Would you say that the early web was more aligned with nature than the modern internet? As silly as that might sound? And does that question bring up any interesting thoughts or make any interesting connections for you?

• 16:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, the category of natural is so fraught. I came across this amazing example when I was writing the book about Ansel Adams, our, you know, nature photographer, who studiously avoided pictures of the indigenous people who had shaped the landscape in his photos. And that like behind the nature photos that he was taking were generations of indigenous stewards of land. I think about that because what counts as natural is oftentimes really just a question of an aesthetics of the pastoral. GeoCities called it homesteading. GeoCities was one of those early kind of web one websites that really took off.

• 16:48Speaker 01

  And it enabled anyone to kind of make their own little plot of land online. They called it homesteading, which I always thought was very funny because it was this mixed metaphor. It's GeoCities, but you're homesteading. But they have this homesteading metaphor. And I think that there is something exciting about that pastoral kind of like, you're out there, you're creating it for yourself. I think that we have allowed a kind of buildup of structure, whether that structure is infrastructure that is largely built by the internet platforms, but also, you know, built by norms and communities. And I think that that has overwritten some of that pastoral excitement. But I don't know if I would call it more natural than versus now.

• 17:26Speaker 00

  I think that's a really interesting phrase, though, you use the aesthetics of the pastoral. Because I feel like that kind of captures what I'm trying to get at, which is, you know, you look at like parts of a city. So like maybe the village today isn't the best example, but there are parts of cities that are wilder, like you can feel the presence of the people more. Whereas there are other parts that are, you know, to use a sort of Italian word fascist and the sort of cultural sense of, you know, just very well delineated, very clean. Everything feels like it's been designed from a schema. The theory has been imposed on reality rather than reality sort of giving birth to the theory. And that's kind of what I was trying to get at when I was drawing a distinction

• 18:09Speaker 00

  between the early web, which felt much more experimental and sort of enlivening, and the modern internet, which feels like imposing. And the economics of the web are now being imposed on us as opposed to coming out of the relations of people.

• 18:24Speaker 01

  I think that's a really cogent way of putting it. I guess I haven't thought about that in terms of natural, unnatural, but I think you're exactly right, that there was an ethos in the early web and you can still find it today, but it is not, I think, the dominant mode where people are just trying things. And not just trying things, but it's like you go to some parts of New York City and you see Starbucks, Starbucks, Starbucks, or Starbucks, I don't know.

• 18:47Speaker 00

  Exactly right.

• 18:47Speaker 01

  A gym, you know, the same stuff over and over again. And then you go to other parts of New York City and you see these little stalls where people have set up, you know, a coffee shop, but it's like this guy's coffee shop and it's totally crazy and it's awesome, but it's so uniquely that person who has set it up. And it's right next to a store selling secondhand, you know, purses and it's right next to it. And there's something really generative and exciting about that, the smallness of each individual's contributions and the way that those smallnesses rub up against each other and create something really big and beautiful. I do think that something like RSS, which is the technology that powers podcasts, but also used to be the way that people read blogs, which is basically, it's just a standard,

• 19:29Speaker 01

  an open standard for how you construct a feed that tells a computer, hey, there's a new post on this podcast, hey, there's a new post on this blog. That technology enabled this flourishing in part, enabled this flourishing of blogs, enabled this flourishing of different ways of reading the web. And then it kind of faded away and was replaced by these closed off feeds, like, for example, the news feed on Facebook is one that I'm really thinking of right now, or even Twitter now X, which is even more hostile to external links. So yeah, you know, I do think that there was this much more open, willing to talk to each other way of looking at the web that has kind of collapsed into something. I really like that idea of like, it's clear delineations between platforms, clear delineations between spaces online.

• 20:12Speaker 00

  And I like that you brought up New York City because I've lived in New York City on and off since the year 2000, but I went to high school in Long Island. And so I had come up to City College when I was doing my Westinghouse project and I had, you know, been in the city. And so I've seen the city evolve and I've seen it sort of go from becoming increasingly, again, to use that word fascist, to after the pandemic, you know, moving back towards something that was more recognizable to what it was in earlier eras. And I mentioned to you the work of Ian McGilchrist before we started this conversation. And I think his framing of the left and right hemispheres of the brain and the schematization of the world versus, you know, actual reality.

• 20:54Speaker 00

  You actually have a great quote, was it from Hamlet, I think in the book about-

• 20:59Speaker 01

  There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio.

• 21:03Speaker 00

  Exactly, exactly. And I feel like that is kind of that tension between the philosophy and the world and the map and the territory.

• 21:11Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. I'm obsessed by Borges. I think I quote him about a million times in the book and I, I do think that there's, there's something strange that happens when you, there's something uncanny, I think, about the New York City that is overly schematized because it's almost like, like a facsimile of itself. It feels hollow, but I don't just mean inauthentic. It feels like exactly that. It feels like someone has taken the map and somehow constructed a real world to look just like it and not like a, a thing that you have mapped. It's the other direction. The arrow goes from map to place instead of place to map, which I think is problematic, I guess would be the word.

• 21:49Speaker 00

  What did you mean in the book when you said, we need a new way of thinking about attention online, one that takes into account our alienated stuff and our alienated selves? What is that point about alienation?

• 22:01Speaker 01

  And I think that like, we have become accustomed to thinking of our digital artifacts as not of us, as not something that we labored over. And I think someone who writes a Substack post thinks of that post as something that they wrote. But I think someone who likes a comment on Facebook doesn't necessarily think of that as an act of creation or them putting themselves out there into the world. They think of that as, I don't know, kint, if I raise my thumb up, I wonder, will, will Zoom make of the little thumbs up icon, right? Like, there's a certain way that we become removed from what we do online. And so much of what we do online creates a record of itself and that record of itself does live on for some period of time before it fades into oblivion.

• 22:45Speaker 01

  And I guess like, I think that like, attention paid to what we produce and what we, what we put out into the digital world, we should have the same care that we bring when we create something in the IRL world. And I think that all too often, the frictionless way that platforms want to treat our relationship to our stuff and to what is already on the web, makes it glide past our own attentions. And I think that that's a problem.

• 23:10Speaker 00

  Death is a topic that you meditate on quite a bit in the book. How much of the appeal of removing friction from our lives, and as you say, gliding past our own attention, is a way of distracting us from the knowledge that we're going to die?

• 23:25Speaker 01

  I mean, I hesitate to be this guy, but I do think a lot of it. You know, I really do think that as we've gained more, I mean, mastery is the wrong word because it seems like mastery until all of a sudden it isn't. It seems like mastery until a hurricane. It seems like mastery until you realize that there's a leak in your house. It seems like mastery until, you know, until nature reasserts itself. I think we're still much more at the whims of not just our fellow man, but of the kind of implacable forces of the world around us than we like to believe. I live in a small town. I live in Kingston, New York, just outside Kingston, New York, and it's a very small town. And I sometimes think about how it's all just people doing stuff here.

• 24:05Speaker 01

  I slipped on a walk and dislocated my kneecap and I wasn't able to move and I was calling for help, but no one could hear me. And fortunately I have my Apple Watch on and I was able to call for help. And the volunteer fire department came out and pulled me out on an ATV to the road where I was taken to a hospital. And it was, you know, it was a scary experience. It was a loss of control for sure. And I think about this volunteer fire department all the time as like this kind of remarkable institution that was built up to provide support in a world that is full of contingency that is sometimes, you know, doesn't treat us well. I think that like, we build up institutions for two reasons. One is to offer real support and then the other is, I think, to paper over the kind

• 24:49Speaker 01

  of horrifying and also beautiful fact that we are all going to die. And when we are online and we have sanded away the edges of moving from place to place online or of, of reacting to someone online, I think we are in essence, acting as though we are truly the masters of our lives and fortunes when we are very much not.

• 25:12Speaker 00

  How long has this been a subject that you've contemplated?

• 25:17Speaker 01

  My first book was called Lessons and Carols. Meditation on Recovery was the subtitle. And it was about my own struggles with mental health and addiction. And I think I was a pretty happy-go-lucky kid. I didn't, I was not plagued by questions of existential dread, but I have really struggled with pretty severe mental illness that really changed my relationship to death. And I think it was an open question for a long time of whether or not I wanted to live and whether or not I was going to take steps to kill myself. It landed me in the psych ward more than once. I'm doing great now. I just want to like preface this, kind of like, I'm doing very well. I'm quite happy. I feel very content in my life.

• 25:59Speaker 01

  But that struggle, I think, really changed my relationship to death because it opened the door. It became not something that, not a given, that life was the choice and became really hard to ignore that one way or the other, I am going to die. I think that that really changed how I thought about my life as I became more and more aware that one of the reasons that I struggled was that I believed that I had no limits, that I could continue to, I mean, I think I knew, obviously I had to sleep, I had to do things, but like, but it always frustrated me that I couldn't just keep going and keep creating and keep whatever-ing, you know, working or whatever the thing was.

• 26:40Speaker 01

  And I've developed a lot of unhealthy relationships to work into productivity because I thought I could just do it. And I think at a micro level, it's important to realize and recognize our own limitations. And, you know, I'm never going to run a marathon. I'm never gonna, you know, there are all sorts of things that I'm just never going to do at this point in my life and that's okay. And the biggest one of those is I am not going to live forever. I think that that is the one that stands behind all the others.

• 27:05Speaker 00

  What is the connection between depression and this realization or this desire to do everything?

• 27:13Speaker 01

  I think I wanted to prove, not just to myself, but to the world around me, that I was worthwhile or worthy and in so doing, kind of like bolster my self-esteem. And when you peg your self-esteem to something outside of yourself like that, I think it's always risky and especially so when you have kind of a melancholic mind to begin with.

• 27:34Speaker 00

  Also very common for a young, ambitious man. How old were you when this happened to you? When you first began to become depressed?

• 27:42Speaker 01

  It was in high school and I struggled with it off and on through my twenties and maybe into my thirties a little bit too, but it has changed. And I don't doubt, and I think part of knowing my limits is I don't doubt that I will suffer another depressive episode again. I like to believe that it will be less severe and more manageable, more weatherable, as I've gotten better at doing things like sleeping and eating and drinking water and, you know, and doing those, those life things. And then also meditating and praying and, and being in a relationship with people around me. All of those things help, but I also think that there is an element that is maybe unchangeable, some part of my DNA or brain chemistry that is just the way it is. But yeah, it was high school when I first got super depressed and the first time I

• 28:27Speaker 01

  went to a psych ward was in high school and then again in college. And those experiences definitely, I didn't pick up that I had to slow down until my late twenties, but that was the start of that process.

• 28:39Speaker 00

  So I would love to ask you more questions about this, but we're here to talk about your latest book, so maybe another time. I found the portion of the book where you meditate on place and belonging to be relatable, both in the physical sense of home and in the digital sense. And this is where the internet comes back again into the conversation because it really does feel like a place to me, at least the internet that I grew up on with its AOL instant messenger and its clunky websites that would slowly render in front of me or the familiar sound of my dial-up modem. I mean, how important is place and one sense of belonging in this story? And is there a sense in which people can or could feel at home on the internet in

• 29:24Speaker 00

  some of its various spaces or places?

• 29:29Speaker 01

  I think part of the reason I view the web as place is because I am integrally involved in constructing parts of it, right? Like, I made a homepage for myself. I made, I don't know, like, I've made a million little websites that are really only for me and a few friends. And that's been such a wonderful experience. That's it. I know people have places online, whether it's Reddit or Facebook comments of groups. You know, my partner and I are in some parenting groups that I've gotten pretty involved in. And like, it's been really wonderful to like, feel like that's a place, even if it's on this platform that I don't trust, or whatever, right? Like, I think it's been really wonderful to be on these Facebook communities sometimes. And that can be a really generous place to be. And it can feel like a place, in part because you go back and you see the same neighbors. You go back and you see the same norms and tropes replayed over and over again. And I

• 30:14Speaker 01

  think that like, there's something about the repetition of social norms that feels homey, or home in some way.

• 30:23Speaker 00

  Well, so like, physical places change, right? I mean, I mentioned that I lived in New York City on and off since the year 2000. And I've seen at least four or five different phases in that city's life since I was a boy. And it's still changing. But it still has physical permanence in a way that the internet doesn't or can't. Is there something about our increasingly digital existence, and in particular, our time spent primarily on internet platforms and inside these walled gardens that leaves us more dispossessed, and I guess homeless today? And is that especially relevant if we expand the conversation to include AI?

• 31:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think I've often struggled conceptually with, like, gentrification. I am often a gentrifier in communities that I live in, right? Like, whether in Kingston, New York, right? Like, there's a housing crisis in Kingston, New York. I come from, I was in Boston before, not Brooklyn. But I think there's a lot of anger among people who have lived in Kingston for a long time, that there are all these people coming from the city in this post pandemic moment, and they are buying up all the homes, or renting all the homes. And that means that there's less space for other people. And I think about this, like, loss of agency over the community that you are in, as one of the hallmarks of, homelessness is a good word for it, right? Displacement, I think, is another. And I

• 31:46Speaker 01

  think, in some ways, online, we are always at risk of displacement, because we own, we do not own the communities that we are members of very often. You know, you, you see it in the sense of, like, the blogosphere was a different place, in part because people ran their own blogs. Although that went away pretty quick, as Blogspot and these other hosting providers came into being. But I think there was this kind of moment that I really think about a lot, when the place of the blogosphere was held down by a lot of small actors operating in community with each other, and with the rules of the road set by open standards, which are kind of like the roads. RSS was Greta Jav, and 12th Street was, you know, the Google Reader. And then, when Google Reader went away, they

• 32:29Speaker 01

  ripped up 12th Street, and all of a sudden, you know, the people who lived there had to find new digs. And I think that, like, the displacement online that we feel is about a loss of agency. And I think it comes back to that loss of agency. When we change our own communities, I think that feels really great. When we don't have a say in how those communities are changed, I think that's what feels like displacement.

• 32:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think that's spot on. I mean, I think that the early web was more empowering. And the early blogosphere felt very much like we each had our own little islands, and we connected with each other. But the modern internet feels like one giant river, and we're just all thrown into it. And oftentimes, the sensation is one of drowning. So, how do you feel like AI? So, let me take a step back and say this. I feel like the golden age of the internet was post-Google. Until Google, the internet was this, like, rich Amazonian jungle with thousands of tribes living right next to each other, that couldn't communicate with each other because they didn't speak the same language. They couldn't even find each other. They didn't even know they existed.

• 33:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:25Speaker 00

  And then, Google changed that, because it made everything findable. But as Google evolved, so did its business model. And then, social media came. And it, as you have said in the book, shifted the center of gravity on the internet. First of all, tell me what you meant by that, when you talk about social media. How important was social media in particular, and the advertising business model? And how important is that evolution for the nature of our online relationships, and how the internet works today?

• 33:52Speaker 01

  Yeah. I think social media, which sometimes feels like an apt name, and sometimes doesn't. And I actually think that that conceptual rubberiness, or slipperiness, to the word is important, in terms of how I think about it. You know, you had different epochs, even within social media. The MySpace era, which felt very different than the News Feed Facebook era, which felt very different than TikTok, which people call social media, and yet, the follower graph means very, very little on there. And so, there's this, like, element of, I think, social media, I guess what I'm trying to say is, I think, social media itself is a fuzzy term. And the shift that I think, if I could go back and edit my own book, I think a shift that I would want to draw a lot of attention to, is the

• 34:35Speaker 01

  moment when it went from being about, you know, I follow you, and I see your posts, to I follow you, and an algorithm sits between you and me, and decides which posts I see.

• 34:46Speaker 00

  Right, exactly.

• 34:46Speaker 01

  And I think that that moment is when the center of gravity truly shifted. Although I will also say, that like, the idea of an open follower graph remains something that I think would be a really wonderful, and potentially generative way to experience the web. If instead of having it locked in place, it was a portable graph.

• 35:03Speaker 00

  To overcome the switching costs.

• 35:04Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly. It's kind of one of those classic, like, you know, we think about markets. I think I am often predisposed to think poorly of markets, and want to decommodify all sorts of things. But actually, I think that there's a useful thing that competition could offer on the web. And it would be wonderful if it were possible for other entrants to come into the market, and try their hand at social media networks. But I think that switching cost that you just described, just like, makes it really, really hard to overcome the inertia of Facebook, or LinkedIn, or whatever it is.

• 35:35Speaker 00

  How do you feel like the nature of that monetized intermediation has affected our sense-making abilities?

• 35:42Speaker 01

  I think so much. And I think it's, it's interesting. I've been using, or trying to use, an RSS reader. I think it's called River. I can't remember exactly what it's called. But the idea is, it kind of would choose your own algorithm for how it mediates your RSS feed. And you can set all sorts of very personalizable things about it. And you get back, like, you know, this post from the Drift, I'm gonna read it first. This one from the random blog I still follow. I get that, you know, that one's gonna hang around longer on the feed, or be upranked. And it's very powerful to have these algorithm recommended systems. But I also think that, like, they are the servants of two masters all too often. They're the servants of the users who have real desires. But they are

• 36:25Speaker 01

  really driving revenue for whatever company has built them. And that oftentimes is in tension with what I actually want.

• 36:32Speaker 00

  Well, I feel like that's also a powerful way of describing the shift that's happened in the last 20 or 30 years on the internet, which is, it went from being one that was focused on servicing the users, to being one that was focused on servicing the advertisers. And that the modern web works the way that it does, because we are there as sheep to be sheared, as cows to be milked, for these giant corporations. Would you agree with that?

• 36:56Speaker 01

  I do think so.

• 36:57Speaker 00

  And does AI make that worse? I mean, in some ways, AI, I feel like, AI holds the promise of improving the epistemic outcomes of the internet. Because, you know, social media is not there to inform you, it's there to, to engage you. And to generate more engagement, and more time spent on platform, so that advertisers can milk you more. Or so that they can milk the advertisers who sell their stuff to you. AI is judged on a completely separate, from the user standpoint, is judged on a completely separate set of criteria, which is essentially like, quality. What's one vector of it? Quality, predictability, accuracy of information. Is that a function of the technology? Or is that a function of the fact that we don't yet have a wrapper, or a business model, that's going to monetize

• 37:42Speaker 00

  it, and monetize it according to whatever those incentives will be? Just as social media started off being a social form of media, and a social network, and became basically a pipeline for advertising?

• 37:53Speaker 01

  Right. I think that we have not yet seen the, to use Cory Doctorow's word, which I think is a useful word, incentivification of AI, in quite the same way that we have of the platform technologies, which are now, have pivoted quite hard toward, away from user interest. Although, I will say, I think that they would argue that they are just revealing the preferences of their users in these kind of market system that they've set up. I would dispute that. But I think that that's what they would say. I do think that we have yet to see how AI is going to be monetized in this way. But I think AI is this wonderful, it can be a really wonderful technology. I mean, I'm very torn about a lot of AI, which maybe came through in the book, I don't know. But like,

• 38:33Speaker 00

  I think it did, I think it did, actually. I think you did a great job of both highlighting its efficacy and its value, but also stating where it could be sort of problematic. I think where people often get caught up is they fall either or on the topic.

• 38:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And I think AI is never going to live up to the promises of its detractors or its proponents. I think it's probably true about it. I think we'll always be somewhere, doing something weirder. That said, I think one of the things I'm most excited about AI for, is the way it has empowered, I think, a more experimental and creative way of using the web. So, I made this thing called Mix Tab, which I would have never made without AI. I vibe coded quite a bit of it. And I'm an experienced software engineer, but like, I don't have the time to make this. And what I made was a tiny social media site, where my friends and I can have bookmarks, and we click a button, and it creates a new edition of a newspaper that we share, and we can talk about in our own space, online. I just made that in like, a week. And I would have never done that. My friend, who's not a coder,

• 39:33Speaker 01

  made a little way of talking to me and to another friend about, like, what he's watched. It's like a letterbox, but just for three people. And he just made it. Like, why not? Right? And I think that there's this kind of like, well, why not just make it? Feeling that a lot of people are having right now, that really, to me, feels a lot like the early web did. I shudder to think what will happen when some enterprising AI company decides that, well, what if we just tweak the model to, you know, hawk whatever the product is that we're advertising for, in line with the recommendations that they give, in a chatbot? Or, you know, what's gonna happen when we actually have to pay the full token costs of what we're doing? I mean, I think it's gonna be very expensive. That said, like, I have a pretty top-of-the-line MacBook, and I'm able to use local models

• 40:18Speaker 01

  quite effectively. I think there's something really beautiful about the idea of a, of a vector space, with like, all of our human knowledge that we have accumulated and put online for decades and decades, being not just accessible, but queryable. I mean, it's an exciting time to be a technologist, even if it is a somewhat terrifying time to also be a technologist.

• 40:36Speaker 00

  How do you think this changes search and discovery on the internet?

• 40:40Speaker 01

  I hope search as we knew it isn't dead.

• 40:43Speaker 00

  Wasn't it already dying?

• 40:45Speaker 01

  It was already dying.

• 40:46Speaker 00

  I used to go on Google and get great search results. Now, I just get a bunch of sponsored crap. And I always tried to remember to scroll to the bottom of the page where the best results are, rather than the top, which is how Google used to work.

• 40:58Speaker 01

  I think about the way that people have been appending Reddit to their search queries in an effort to get the Reddit results for things, because that's more trusted oftentimes than the results that are just natively given back from Google. And I think that one of the reasons that that appeals to me is it it gets at this idea that the internet is still a social place. And Google in offloading, you know, I mean, like, we are way far away from PageRank, which was the algorithm that was written, I think originally, that kind of like revolutionized Google's search results. We were pretty far away from that now. There's a lot more going on when you make a Google search. And I think that, like, in some ways, the more social and authentically human

• 41:40Speaker 01

  you can peg things to, the better it'll be. I read a fantastic book by Sitin Nguyen about gamification. I can't remember what exactly it was called. The Score? I think it was called The Score. And it was all about how metrics and the kind of reductions we make when we metricize things and quantify things make it possible to have large scale institutions, because they make decisions portable from context to context. But then they also had the flip side. They have this horrible thing, what they do when they reduce everything down to numbers, which is itself really horrible. I think that in the best case scenario, the web could be a way to, and AI could actually help synthesize and make human scale conversation and meaning more portable. I think unfortunately, that's

• 42:24Speaker 01

  probably not the way the AI companies are thinking about their products. I think they're thinking much more about how can we win or take all this whole thing. But I think that, like, if I were gonna append Reddit to the end of my search result to make it good again, like, the reason that that works is because I'm going to try to find what people are actually saying, and not what an algorithm that is heavily gamified is going to tell me is the right thing to choose or look for.

• 42:48Speaker 00

  So, speaking of meaning, what would you say is the difference between information or structured information and meaning? And what role do humans have to play in all of that?

• 42:58Speaker 01

  I think meaning is something we bring to the world. It is not an independent fact of the world outside of it. I think data or information maybe could be something that is external to us. I mean, there's information theory about what can be carried and things, but we make meaning. And I don't know that that's like a falsifiable distinction that I'm drawing. Like, I don't know if there's like a way that you could convince me that that's not true, or a way that I can convince someone who holds the other position that that's true. But I do really think it's an important facet of what I think makes us essentially human, that we are the meaning makers.

• 43:29Speaker 00

  I feel like that's also central, though, to the debate of whether or not AI is conscious or AI is intelligent.

• 43:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:37Speaker 00

  In the way that human beings are intelligent.

• 43:39Speaker 01

  Yeah. I think that there's a Wittgenstein quote that the questions, oh, boy, I'm gonna mess this one up, but it's like, you know, the questions which used to vex me, you know, he basically is, I can't even remember the paraphrase quote that I was gonna do, but basically Wittgenstein is saying, you're asking the wrong questions all too often. That, like, these philosophical problems that used to vex him, they're actually answered by not asking the question. I think that it is not a very useful question if AI will achieve superintelligence. I think it is a very useful question to wonder, like, what are the specific capabilities of artificial intelligence systems going to look like? You know, Emily Bender wrote this book with someone else, I think, about, called The AI Con. And one of the things that I took from that book, which I disagree with in parts, but one of the things I took from the book was, AI is a set of technologies

• 44:24Speaker 01

  that has been rolled together and packaged kind of as artificial intelligence. And it's a bunch of very different capabilities, oftentimes not even in the same systems that we're talking about when we when we say artificial intelligence. I think it is very useful and generative to wonder and try to shape those capabilities. I don't know if it's actually a useful, like, question in terms of, like, actionable insight to wonder, is it a superintelligence? In fact, I think it might be a category error. And a lot of the fights that we have over, like, is it like a person or is it not, are kind of missing the point. And maybe I'm just revealing my own bias against it being a person, but but are kind of missing the point of like, well, what is it actually going to do? And what are its capabilities actually?

• 45:08Speaker 00

  Well, I felt like I found also your musing on this topic to be relatable in the book, which is why I brought it up. I have one more question about, that brings us back to the conversation we're having about social media, because you wondered openly in the book what the run up to the Iraq war would have been like if we had the modern internet media ecosystem that we have today. Now, we're not exactly dealing with the precisely same analogy with Iran, at least not yet. So I don't know if it would be good to use this as an example. If we had today's internet in 2003, or in 2002, in the run up to the war, or in 2001, with the 9/11 attacks, even better, honestly, to use that example, what do you think that would have looked like? And how would that have manifested

• 45:52Speaker 00

  in sort of consensus reality?

• 45:56Speaker 01

  Man, I am glad that we did not have the distribution method for the conspiracy theories that we have now under 9/11. I mean, 9/11 truthers were a thing. I remember them. And I'm sure they're still a thing. But the kind of grime of that experience, you know, I would go places and I would see people, you know, jet fuel can't meant steel beams was the refrain. And I was, it was young enough that I was like, oh, that's kind of weird. But now I think it would be a lot more dangerous. I think we would see that spread farther and faster and stranger than before. I thought about a lot in the book, which I think I didn't pin down as much as I wanted to. I don't think I still haven't gotten there

• 46:36Speaker 01

  where I can pin it down, is this idea that, like, one of the reasons technologies are not as destructive as they're oftentimes advertised as, you think about, like, whether it's the novel, which was gonna, like, ruin society, television, which was going to, you know, every technology comes with this promise of, oh, no, what's it gonna do? Writing, Plato famously said, we're gonna, I'll forget everything, which we did kind of did, but like, that didn't matter, you know? Anyway, I think, like, one of the reasons that technologies are oftentimes less damaging than we first think, is that we have time to develop social norms around their use and how they're deployed. And I think that the internet and AI and social media all moves so much faster than our norms are capable of keeping up with.

• 47:20Speaker 01

  And I think that's one of the things that makes them somewhat different than, say, television, where we have more time, or definitely the novel, or definitely writing, which took a lot longer to be deployed.

• 47:30Speaker 00

  But you also did a good job in the book of highlighting why people are susceptible to conspiracies. In part because, while they may get the facts wrong, they get the feelings right, to quote Naomi Klein in her book, Doppelganger. And there's also an institutional factor, which is that when people are being regularly gaslit by the official purveyors of truth, or even more consequentially, when their longstanding beliefs about the world, things that they held to be unshakably true, are suddenly, as was the case during the 2008 financial crisis or COVID, revealed to be untrue, or even worse, to be outright lies, they become highly susceptible to being reprogrammed into believing an entirely

• 48:14Speaker 00

  new reality that is just as, if not more absurd, or otherwise unbelievable, simply because they need something to hold on to. And I think this is because people, in the end, cannot live in a perpetual state of uncertainty. They need to believe in something that's concrete, even if it's not true. And part of the challenge, I think, of the modern world is that it reveals that truth is far less concrete than many thought it was, that it isn't as easily definable as we told ourselves that it was.

• 48:46Speaker 01

  Yeah. I think about how hard it is at the journal to say only true things and not even imply false things. And like, how much work goes into every article I write? And every article that I'm even touching, where it's like, I want to say only true things in this article. I don't want to imply anything false. I don't like, it is so hard. And I think it's an underappreciated fact that knowledge production is not easy, and that it is thorny, and that there are oftentimes, not value judgments exactly, but like, like, there are oftentimes judgment calls made about, like, can we get that far? Can we say that thing that we think is true, but we're not positive yet, you know? And that knowledge construction being a tenuous human thing that we have to do, I think, like,

• 49:29Speaker 01

  I oftentimes, I look at, like, the AI company, like, there's every so often I see a thing that's like, oh, you know, we're gonna solve journalism with AI. And we're gonna, like, have the AI, which doesn't have these biases, like, you know, supposedly doesn't have these biases, solve journalism in some meaningful way by being more truthful and more whatever. And I think, like, you have to be an embodied person with other embodied people at some level. And you have to be in the muck, trying your best to produce real knowledge from that. And that is a really, really, really hard task. And I think it's underappreciated just how hard it is. And something I underappreciated until I got into journalism, was just how challenging it was to say true things. And I think that, like, you're right, that people

• 50:10Speaker 01

  need something that they can hold on to. And for me, it is, it is much more about process and less about outcome. So I'm, tend to be much more trusting of, like, I try to trust, not that the people who are saying the thing are right, but I try to trust that the people are, when they are doing a process, that is more often right than not.

• 50:30Speaker 00

  I mean, that's, of course, that makes sense. I mean, that's the key insight, right? Like, that's why you could develop a protocol for assessing credibility that isn't contingent on your having prior knowledge about a given topic. Of course, having prior knowledge about the topic is helpful, but the process is what matters. And the better you are at assessing that process and the protocol that someone else is bringing to the conversation, the better you are at assessing out who is a good faith thinker and who isn't.

• 51:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:00Speaker 00

  You know, in the years leading up to the pandemic, and during the pandemic, there was a part of the American left that became sort of epistemically tyrannical. They were heavily invested in proselytizing what they viewed as being certain canonical truths. And everyone had to accept them. And if you didn't accept them, or you were skeptical about them, you could be slandered, you could be canceled, you'd be called a conspiracy theorist, take your pick. And in response to that, it feels like a big portion of what we now think of as the American right has gone in the opposite direction. If something is officially true, it must be false. Everything feels like a conspiracy, and everything is

• 51:42Speaker 00

  an opportunity to slaughter one sacred cow or another. And there's a kind of what feels like a catalyzing force and an unraveling energy at the center of society. And in the sort of organizing mythologies of the modern world, I don't know how much of that is really technological, or how much of it is just made worse by technology and the platforms that we've been speaking about today. And, you know, I don't know if you've seen Christopher Nolan's recent depiction of The Odyssey. I haven't, but I did watch a thoughtful analysis of it by Ezra Klein on his podcast recently. You're nodding, so maybe you did. What did you think of it? And how does what he had to say connect to this, do you feel?

• 52:25Speaker 01

  It's funny, I actually listened to that, the podcast episode where I think you read his, I think it was not that, I don't know. I listened to the episode about The Odyssey from Ezra Klein this morning when I was making breakfast. So it's funny that you bring that up today. I think, I do think that there's a certain nihilism at the heart of a lot of digital communities right now.

• 52:43Speaker 00

  Agreed.

• 52:43Speaker 01

  And I don't know if it's actually, I don't think it's exclusive to some of the actors on the right, or on the left for that matter, who hold this kind of like, to me, it's like a dead eyed view of the world that is very sad. And I don't think it's, I mean, I think it is oftentimes right coded, but I don't know if it's actually, I think it can be kind of an apolitical phenomenon in a lot of ways. I think about some reporting that some colleagues did that I was able to help out with a little bit, which was about these pro anorexia online communities that encourage young girls especially to lean into their anorexia. And thinking about that as like, just, I was in some ways more horrified by that than any political actor I'd seen before.

• 53:24Speaker 01

  But I think it's the same impulse in some ways that is like lean into the things that society has for so long told us are like, good. You know, the idea that like, you should be healthy and they're saying, no, you should not be healthy. It's not saying, actually, it's healthier to not eat. It's oftentimes saying, no, you should not be healthy. Like, it is a virtue to not be healthy. I think about the term vice signaling, which I always thought was an interesting term, that there was this idea on the left that people were virtue signaling. And now you have this kind of weird inverse of it, where people actually gain credibility by saying increasingly distressing things that even they might not think are okay, right? That they don't believe, but then maybe they do end up believing them at some point down the road.

• 54:06Speaker 01

  I mean, like, that is a thing that I definitely see online a lot of, is like this kind of inversion, where like, it used to be you would say the right thing and maybe you wouldn't believe it. And I actually think that that is the lesser of those two sins by quite a bit. To say something you don't believe, but you think it's a good thing to say, versus say something that you, you don't believe, but you think it's a bad thing to say, I would much rather have virtue than vice.

• 54:27Speaker 00

  So that's also a really great point. I actually heard an episode a long time ago on a podcast where they talked about the virtues of hypocrisy for exactly this reason. And I feel like this is also instructive, because so much of the complaint that has produced the current moment in our politics is a result of the outrage over the hypocrisy displayed for decades by people in power, be that Nancy Pelosi going maskless at a hair salon at the same time as she was lecturing us about lockdowns, or numerous other examples of official corruption by politicians in the US and Europe. And as a result, many people have been drawn to this strong man archetype, who doesn't

• 55:08Speaker 00

  give a shit and is open about his corruption, as had been the case with Trump, because at least we didn't have to put up with both the corruption and the lecturing. But in the case of Trump, that corruption has gone so far beyond anything that persisted under previous administrations, that we've swung from a condition whereby hypocrisy was necessary to hide malfeasance, to one where corruption is totalizing and might makes right. And it's really all about power and who has more of it and who wields it, which I don't know that that's really relevant to the larger conversation about the digital world, but

• 55:47Speaker 00

  I do think that the inability to arrive at consensus truths and observations about epistemic reality and the important role that internet platforms and their business models have played in enabling this are an important part of the answer for why we are here.

• 56:06Speaker 01

  I agree. And I agree especially with the idea that like, the internet, well, I think the internet has enabled some of this vice signaling, for lack of a better word. And I think that like, the idea that power is the coin of the realm and that there aren't other ways of thinking about how we should act, I think that that is in part, the destruction of societal norms around, around goodness and virtue, I think have been driven in part by the internet. And I don't know if it's the case that it's, the internet would always have been this way, or if it's the particulars of the internet we have now. Like, is it the case that we're just too connected and that we are this connected and

• 56:49Speaker 01

  able to create sub communities and sub communities of sub communities and sub communities of sub communities, sub communities, independent of location, that we're going to get these kinds of like, extreme reactions? Is it a driver of extremism that we have this fracturing world online? Or is it the case that like, the particulars of the internet we have now have driven it this way? I mean, I don't know. I don't know what it means that, look, like, I haven't done a rigorous analysis of this, but I see a lot more antisemitism on X now than I did on Twitter before. And I don't know if that contingency of like, had Elon Musk not bought this platform and had not dismantled some of the content moderation and, you know, would I see that phenomenon? And again, I haven't done a rigorous analysis, so take that with

• 57:31Speaker 00

  It's not just on X, it's everywhere.

• 57:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's everywhere. Yeah.

• 57:34Speaker 00

  And that's because it's good for engagement. But just as Piers Morgan will bring on people like Nick Fuentes or someone recently who wrote, and I'm not saying that he shouldn't bring them on if he's going to challenge them, that's not my point. My point is just to say that, you know, these kind of explosive topics are good for engagement. And that's what drives the modern internet.

• 57:52Speaker 01

  Yeah. And the engagement algorithm as, I made this like, kind of pointless thing called Leaves of Grass Talk, which was Leaves of Grass, the famous one by Wall Women, and I took it stanza by stanza and I embedded each stanza with a AI model, and then I made a little engagement algorithm. So the longer I spent, I dwelled on each stanza, the more stanzas I would get like that. And I thought it was just a dumb exercise that was not going to work, and it actually kept me engaged. I mean, it was remarkable that like, we have this almost content neutral way of understanding the world, but it has content ramifications for the content we have. And I think that that like, and the power of it, the way it exercised control over my psyche, even on something that was not at all, it was like a poem from the 19th century,

• 58:36Speaker 01

  like, I don't know, you know, like, it works. It's very powerful.

• 58:39Speaker 00

  That's why the framing of free speech versus censorship was always such a bad framing. And it's gotten so much play, but it just never applied to the digital world, certainly not to the one we live in today of one of platform economics and mediated conversations, because everything you say is ultimately amplified or suppressed based on the economics and other sort of decisions of the platforms and their algorithms.

• 59:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, the idea that there is a neutral algorithm that we are tweaking to produce results that we want or don't want, right? Like, it's crazy. Like, it is not the case that there is a neutral algorithm that would equally amplify voices on the left and the right. That is a desire you might have, like, you might want to like, create an algorithm that does that, but that is not the default state of an algorithm. The algorithm is going to have biases, one way or the other, whether it's towards engagement or towards your friends or toward your, you know, like, like, there are going to be ways that the construction of an algorithm, which is a constructed thing, will by dint of how it's constructed, impact some voices more than others. And that is just the truth.

• 59:41Speaker 00

  Right.

• 59:41Speaker 01

  And so I've always found it interesting. I think there are examples of free speech infringement on the internet. I'm not trying to say that that does not exist as a category, but I think platform level manipulation of algorithms, I would not call, it's not like a censorship thing, it's something else. And I don't think we have good words or good frameworks for it yet.

• 1:00:00Speaker 00

  It's about values, though. So I, you know, I would, if I, we had the internet that I would prefer, it would be one that would elevate truth, let's say. That would be one of the core sort of metrics of success, how truthy is this statement? For some people, that's not important, or that's not what they value. So it's really a reflection of values. And, you know, the modern internet and the modern sort of state of discourse on social media reflects the values of our society embedded in the algorithms that promote or suppress the voices of the people that use the platforms. John, this was a great conversation. I really enjoyed reading this book. Again, I emailed you when I first started reading it, because as I said to you in the beginning, this, I was brought in under false pretenses. I did, I thought this is going to be a book about the internet, it wasn't exactly about the internet, but I also kind of was.

• 1:00:44Speaker 00

  So if people are interested in reading it, again, the title of the book is The Internet Will Die and So Will You. The book publishes when?

• 1:00:52Speaker 01

  September 10th.

• 1:00:54Speaker 00

  Okay, so they can preorder it when this episode comes out. Also, if they're interested in learning more about your previous book, that one is titled Lessons and Carols, A Meditation on Recovery. If people want to follow you, read your other work, you're also a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, how can they do that?

• 1:01:08Speaker 01

  I'm active on Blue Sky and LinkedIn and Instagram, sort of. I'm John West at all of those places.

• 1:01:15Speaker 00

  Well, thank you so much for coming on, John.

• 1:01:17Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:01:19Speaker 00

  If you enjoyed listening to today's episode, you want to join in on the conversation by becoming a member of the Hidden Forces Genius Community, which includes Q and A calls with guests, access to special research and analysis, in-person events and dinners. You can do that at hiddenforces.io/subscribe. And if you still have questions, feel free to send an email to [email protected] and I or someone from our team will get right back to you. Today's episode was produced by me and edited by Stilianos Nikolaou. For more episodes, you can check out our website at hiddenforces.io.

• 1:01:58Speaker 00

  You can follow me on Twitter, @Kofinas, and you can email me at [email protected]. As always, thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.