We are reading Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It by Cory Doctorow for our July book club meeting on Sunday, July 26, 2026 at 3 pm.
The meeting will be held in Meeting Room B of the Main Public Library downtown. Metered street parking is free on Sundays, and there is parking available in the garage under the library (garage closes at 5).
**Note: Author Cory Doctorow has a principled stand against Amazon, and their subsidiary, Audible, so if you prefer to listen to your books, you won’t find this title on Audible. It is available to borrow on Libby through Charleston County Public Library. If you want to purchase the audiobook, try Libro.fm or Everand.com
After the meeting we’ll go out for food and further conversation.
Thanks to the generosity of our donors, SHL has funds available to ensure everyone feels welcome and able to participate. If you would like to participate in dining with us after book club but the cost presents a challenge, please email us at shl@lowcountryhumanists.org, and we can discreetly arrange to cover your costs.
About the book:
Enshittification: It’s not just you—the internet sucks now. It’s been enshittified. That was no accident, and it’s not gonna fix itself. Here’s how we’ll disenshittify it so we can have a new, good internet.
We are all living through the Enshittocene—the Great Enshittening—a time in which the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are being turned into giant piles of shit. It’s frustrating. Demoralizing. Even terrifying.
The once-glorious internet has degenerated into “platforms” that rose to dominance because they delivered convenient and delightful services efficiently and reliably. But once we were locked in to those services, the tech bosses turned on us, relying on our dependency to keep us using the services even as they got worse and worse. The platform bosses did the same to the companies that had flocked to their services to sell stuff to us. Once we were all locked in—businesses and users—the tech companies stripped out all utility, save the bare minimum needed to stave off total collapse.
In Enshittification, Cory Doctorow shows us where it comes from: not the iron laws of economics, or the great forces of history, but specific policy choices made by powerful people who ignored every warning about the consequences of those choices. These are choices that can be undone. Enshittification is a Big Tech disassembly manual, a road map for the seizure of the means of computation. It is a diagnosis, and it is a cure.