Cory Doctorow at The Brattle Theatre

Harvard Book Store welcomes Cory Doctorow—blogger, journalist, activist, and author of more than thirty books—for a discussion of his new book Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It. He will be joined in conversation by Randall Munroe—creator of the webcomic xkcd and the New York Times bestselling author of What If?.

There are two ticket options for this event.

1. Book-Included Tickets: Includes admission for one and one hardcover copy of Enshittification pre-signed by Cory Doctorow.

2. Admission-Only Tickets: Includes admission for one.

Note: Books bundled with tickets may only be picked up at the venue the night of the event, and cannot be picked up in-store beforehand. Ticket holders who purchased a book-included ticket and are unable to attend the event will be able to pick up their book at Harvard Book Store up to 30 days following the event. This offer expires after 30 days. Please note we cannot guarantee signed copies will be available to ticket holders who do not attend the event.

Enshittification: it’s not just you—the internet sucks now. Here’s why, and here’s how we can disenshittify it.

We’re living through the Enshittocene, the Great Enshittening, a time in which the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are turning into giant piles of shit. It’s frustrating. Demoralizing. Even terrifying.

Enshittification identifies the problem and proposes a solution.

When Cory Doctorow coined the term enshittification, he was not just finding a funner way to say “things are getting worse.” He was making a specific diagnosis about the state of the digital world and how it is affecting all of our lives (and not for the better).

The once-glorious internet was colonized by platforms that made all-but-magical promises to their users—and, at least initially, seemed to deliver on them. But once users were locked in, the platforms turned on them to make their business customers happy. Then the platforms turned to abusing their business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. In the end, the platforms die.

Doctorow’s argument clearly resonated. Once named, it became obvious that enshittification is everywhere, so much so that the American Dialect Society named it its 2023 Word of the Year, and was cited as an inspiration for the 2025 season of Black Mirror.

Here, now, in Enshittification the book, Doctorow moves the conversation beyond the overwhelming sense of our inevitably enshittified fate. He shows us the specific decisions that led us here, who made them, and—most important—how they can be undone.

Cory Doctorow is a Canadian, British, American blogger, journalist, and activist. For more than twenty-three years, he has worked with the Electronic Frontier Foundation on campaigns to further and safeguard our human rights online. He was coeditor of the weblog Boing Boing for nineteen years and now maintains a daily(ish) newsletter at Pluralistic.net. He has written more than thirty books, including nonfiction books, many science fiction novels, collections of short stories and essays, young adult novels, graphic novels, and even a picture book. He was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Laws by York University and an Honorary Doctor of Computer Science from the Open University. He has been inducted into the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame and was awarded the Sir Arthur C. Clarke Award for Imagination in Service to Society. He holds visiting professorship and research appointments at MIT, the University of North Carolina, Cornell University, and the Open University. Born in Toronto, he now lives in Burbank, California.

Randall Munroe is the author of the webcomic xkcd and the New York Times bestsellers What If?, What If? 2, Thing Explainer, and How To. A former NASA roboticist, he left the agency in 2006 to draw comics on the internet full time. The International Astronomical Union has named an asteroid after him; that asteroid, 4942 Munroe, is large enough that it could cause a mass extinction if it were to hit Earth. He lives in Massachusetts.

Masks are encouraged but not required for this event.

Event Venue

The Brattle Theatre, 40 Brattle St., Cambridge, United States