The internet must be put out of its misery. Any rational observer can admit that the current iteration of the web—and the social fabric woven there—is not what they signed up for. Symptoms of advanced cultural decay can no longer be ignored. This thing is eating itself.

Giants including Meta and Google have been forced to settle massive consumer lawsuits brought over privacy violations and mental health harms allegedly caused by the addictive mechanisms of their platforms. Schools are banning smartphones as multiple countries institute social media restrictions for under-16s. Parents are in a panic about their kids aspiring to careers as social media celebrities, losing themselves in a vast ecosystem of online casinos, or joining extremist movements.

Generative AI, briefly considered an amusing novelty, is now a turbocharged slop engine for the web, filling feeds and comment sections with useless, grotesque content. As humans scroll past headlines about AI taking their jobs, confusing fantasy for reality, and contributing to cognitive decline, any consumer appeal the technology might have is turning to anguish. The data centers that power it have become increasingly unpopular, and politically radioactive.

To be online, many now admit, is to be endlessly manipulated and exploited. In December, Oxford University Press declared rage bait to be the word of the year, noting that use of the term had tripled over the previous 12 months. The lexical spike represented a heightened awareness that monetized social accounts churn out bad-faith takes and extremist content, automating this abusive behavior with generative AI, simply to profit off hostile engagement. Billionaire oligarchs have opened the floodgates to such inauthentic activity, conspiracy-mongering, and hate speech by rolling back moderation.

In short, when you hang around online in 2026, you see little worth saving. Perhaps a decade ago, you felt that the glimmers of community and joy, of artistic and intellectual exchange, were enough to balance out the toxic junk. No longer.

It’s not necessarily that people have gotten worse. “Dead Internet Theory”—the proposition that a vast majority of the interactions on the web are fake, bots talking to other bots—has accrued more supporting evidence recently. One cybersecurity firm concluded this spring that agents already outnumber human users, their traffic surging by 8,000 percent through 2025. No wonder seemingly everyone has at some point caught themselves scrolling through a wasteland of brainrot and asked, “What the hell am I even looking at?”

Underlying that question is another: “Is it always going to be like this?”With this anxiety hammering at my prefrontal cortex day in and out, I was more than intrigued by the absolutist title of technologist and Pulitzer-winning journalist John West’s new book, The Internet Will Die, and So Will You: On Learning to Live in Our Digital Age. In his discerning treatise, West confirms what many have suspected for a good while now: The platforms once seen as enduring archives of knowledge and communication are being cannibalized by ideological warfare and basic greed.

But that’s not the whole story. For one, West argues, people misperceive the “vastness” of the internet, which really amounts to “a vanishing fraction, a rounding error, of the human experience.”Moreover, it is remarkably fragile—West opens with the story of how a 2001 train derailment in a Baltimore tunnel took out a major bundle of fiber-optic cables, leading to internet slowdowns nationwide—and continually undergoes cycles of death and rebirth as a result of this natural instability.

If the internet is much smaller and less solid than imagined, West’s book suggests, then it’s crucial to recognize the forces that determine how those deaths unfold, or which pieces are preserved while others crumble. Because the market has falsely sold us the web as a comprehensive library of accumulated wisdom, each transient phase of this global network comes to define the present, for better and worse. Today we witness a dismal paralysis brought on by algorithmic incentives to churn out inflammatory garbage: Full-time influencers are in a losing arms race for attention with low-effort, high-volume channels that streamline production by delegating the creative process to bleeding-edge software.

West draws a sharp contrast between this holographic environment of monetization and a passionate, personalized internet that spanned from the primordial GeoCities to Tumblr, describing how these innovative communities have been gradually erased. While some endure in half-dead and highly corrupted form, others are lost. In middle school, West maintained a web page devoted to his love of anime; later, he kept a blog documenting his college years. Looking back as an adult, he’s vexed by the fates that have befallen each.

“I really wanted to delete my anime site,” West tells WIRED. “I don't have access to the AOL account anymore, and I couldn't do it.”Instead, it lives on as a zombie page, cluttered with spam ads and dead-end links. As for the college blog, he had neglected to pay domain fees toward the end of his time writing it, and so the final year of posts disappeared. “I kind of got obsessed with this idea that 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,” West says.

These shifting sands are a far cry from the flawless, collective, permanent memory that internet users originally believed they were building. “‘Forever’ is such a strong word, and it's the wrong word,” West says. Online spaces are memento mori, the same as individuals who self-promote across them (and that includes certain longevity-obsessed biohackers). Sure, there was a time when a celebrity could be “canceled” for tasteless posts unearthed years later, but in 2026, it’s not so easy to surface specific messages when you go hunting for them in your AI-powered Gmail account.

Zeitgeist-defining platforms like Vine can be vaporized in an instant, a fact reinforced in January 2025, when Americans posted farewell TikTok videos ahead of an expected US ban on the app.

This random ephemerality, West points out, has eroded any confidence in claims previously backed up by hypertext cross-references, and thus any kind of consensus truth. An analysis of hyperlinks in articles on The New York Times website between 1996 and mid-2019 found that 25 percent of all links were inaccessible. According to a 2016 study, “three out of four citations in scholarly articles have drifted—the websites they purport to cite no longer say what they once did,” he writes. “Over half of Wikipedia’s entries contain at least one link in its references section that goes nowhere, a Pew report found.”

The impulse to drive engagement spreads to users themselves: West noticed, for instance, that when he recently reread a favorite book, Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, he had the nagging thought that while he loved returning to the novel for the fourth or fifth time, he wouldn’t be able to count it toward his annual Goodreads stats. West says this fixation on the internet’s hollow validations creates “the exact conditions for a space to be filled by something that isn't human.”

Wouldn’t it be liberating, then, to actually deny our attention to astroturfed outrage, engineered virality, and influencer sponcon? To let the mainstream digital economies propped up by AI-enabled surveillance finally fall to ruin? If what the titans of the industry have to offer us these days are “pervert glasses” and the suppression of ads for a probably unflattering documentary, why are we helping them stay in business? Leaving their platforms for dead might be the last lever of power available to the masses.

Doing so could free people to explore dormant corners. West notes that some of the most interesting parts of the internet are the ones that nobody sees, like web portals to streams of YouTube videos that have almost no views. “Some of it’s fucking weird and creepy, but a lot of it’s just people singing a song and having a blast,” he says. West also cites the bustling, zero-revenue, circulation of poetry in web journals as proof that “you can find meaning and make meaning online all the time,” provided there is no financial motivation.

When you eliminate what the platforms want you to fixate on, it’s clear what you’ve been missing, and how you were steered away from it. Your opinions are shaped in a bubble by avatars you’ve never met, weaponized against equally hermetic rival camps. The internet doesn’t really have winners, unless you count the few without the sense to stop chasing relevance at any cost. That’s why the main characters are so malleable in their beliefs; never afraid to pivot, betray, and discard what they once held to be the core of their identity. And that’s when they stood for anything to begin with.

Absent a sudden, lasting outage due to a fresh and severe catastrophe, the internet as it exists won’t perish anytime soon. There are, however, splintering cracks in its facade, which may create room for emergent and strangely evolved life-forms. There’s no reason to assume that the present tech empire will rule the century to come; the organic and anarchic web stands to mount a triumphant renaissance if (or when) it falls.

“Look, the internet is rotting,” West says. “The question is, where are we going to put our energy?”A metaphor he often turns to in his book is compost. “Compost is just rot harnessed for a purpose,” he says. Can a decaying internet be fertilizer for something better? It’s a rosy notion, but speaking as a perennially failed composter—it’s just too gross, and I’m too lazy—I have my doubts about whether enough hardy, patient gardeners can be mobilized to make our digital landscape bloom once more. Then again, as West’s book sought to remind me, I am destined to die as well.

Maybe I’ll be mixed in with the soil. Let us know what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor at [email protected].