Wired Columnist Urges Letting Today's Internet "Die", Citing Journalist John West's Book on the Web's Decay
Wired senior writer Miles Klee argues in an opinion piece that people should abandon the platform-dominated internet, drawing on journalist John West's book about the web's fragility. West holds that the internet has always gone through cycles of death and rebirth.
In an opinion piece published on 28 October 2026, Miles Klee, a senior writer at the technology magazine Wired, argues that today's internet should be "put out of its misery". He contends that a web dominated by large platforms and AI-generated content no longer offers most users enough value. His argument draws on a new book by Pulitzer-winning journalist and technologist John West, The Internet Will Die, and So Will You.
The problems Klee cites
Klee notes that companies such as Meta and Google have had to settle major lawsuits over privacy violations and alleged mental health harms linked to addictive platform design. Schools are banning smartphones, and several countries restrict social media for under-16s. In his view, generative AI now floods feeds and comment sections with useless content. Oxford University Press named "rage bait" its word of the year for 2025, noting that use of the term had tripled in 12 months. A cybersecurity firm concluded that automated agents already outnumber human users, with their traffic rising 8,000 percent through 2025.
West's argument
West says the internet's apparent vastness is an illusion and that it is highly fragile. He opens with a 2001 train derailment in a Baltimore tunnel that damaged a bundle of fiber-optic cables and slowed internet service across the US. He also points to link rot: 25 percent of links in New York Times articles from 1996 to mid-2019 were inaccessible, and a Pew report found that over half of Wikipedia entries contain at least one dead link in their references.
West suggests that some of the most worthwhile corners of the web are ones almost nobody sees, such as YouTube videos with very few views or poetry journals that earn no revenue. Klee writes that the internet as it exists will not vanish soon, but its cracks may leave room for new forms. West uses compost as a metaphor: rot harnessed for a purpose. Klee himself doubts that enough people can be mobilized to make it work.