The Weekly Reading List - June 9

The declining internet, Yeats and Byzantium, Freya India on our new religion, and R.E.M.

Welcome to The Weekly Reading List, in which I compile a list of readings, along with some other media, for you to enjoy in the week ahead.

Comment down below with what you’re reading, what you think others should read, or a topic you’re pondering.

The Enshittification of Everything

Over the past few years, I have tried to stop swearing. I found that relying on swearing often meant I was missing a chance to more richly describe the matter at hand. It was a crutch, I was relying on it too much, and so I threw the crutch away and started finding ways to walk without it.

But sometimes, a well-placed swear really sums up how you feel. And that brings us to the Enshittification of the internet.

The internet feels worse. It is hard to explain, exactly, but most websites have become bloated, it is harder to find quality content, and the rise of generative AI has led to an explosion of mediocrity. The question is why.

Cory Doctorow tries to answer that question. He writes:

Here is how platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

I’ve known about this idea for a time, and in fact it came up over beers with some friends, but I found myself pondering it as I was looking for images to use in a YouTube video. Google Images has been overrun with AI-generated images of historical figures. They are everywhere, and there is no way to filter them out. They look awful and feel soulless. Google Images has been made worse; it has been enshittified. Google Images is a synecdoche for the internet.

I can’t help but feel we’re in the final stage with Google products — and maybe everything else that once made the internet great.

Substack is an exception, currently. I just hope it remains.

Sailing to Byzantium

W.B. Yeats, Style Icon

We don’t feature much poetry here on Walking Away, but we really should. So how about this excerpt from Yeats’ ‘Sailing to Byzantium’?

O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

You can read the whole thing at Poetry Foundation.

I did not know about Yeats’ relationship with Byzantium until recently. I read the Sarantine Mosaic, a duology by the eminent fantasy author Guy Gavriel Kay. This pair of books is heavily inspired by the Byzantine Empire. A great city, Sarantium, undergoes a series of political epicycles while a mosaicist finishes his work on a cathedral dedicated to holy wisdom. At the end of the book is an epigraph from Yeats’ A Vision — a strange book to say the least. In that epigraph, you see a description of a scene in Byzantium which Kay then brought to life in Sarantium. The first book of the pair is fittingly titled Sailing to Sarantium.

I then discovered that Yeats’ relationship to Byzantium has been the subject of scholarly attention for decades. Just google ‘Yeats Byzantium JSTOR’ and see what pops up.

Our New Religion

Freya India

, who writes the Substack GIRLS, wrote on the topic of ‘our new religion’ – a new set of popular beliefs, culture rituals, and liturgies – and what she thinks are its primary failings.