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This text addresses popular and academic concerns that the institution of work is being irreparably damaged by digital/media technologies.

This article examines the normative underpinnings of dystopianism in popular writing about the internet. Through textual analysis, dystopian concerns are shown to be motivated by shared normative preoccupations: that internet users are irresponsible, that they do not sufficiently value work, and that the pursuit of pleasure online interrupts and impedes users' desire and ability to become responsible subjects. Building on the antisocial thesis in queer theory and recent work on anxiety in affect studies, the article argues that dystopian anxieties work to produce discursive space for responsible subjecthood that readers are invited to occupy. In this way, it is proposed that digital dystopianism is not simply a descriptive project; it is also, and perhaps more fundamentally, a normative project linked to domination, insofar as it aims to reverse the transformations it describes, soliciting readers to assume responsibility for their bodies, minds, families, communities, and nations.

Responding to the long-standing interest of new media scholars in online participation as a mechanism for political and cultural democracy and empowerment, this article elaborates a critique of online participation. It examines the ways in which online participation has been economized at a fundamental level — the level at which data is transmitted — and argues that this economization draws into question the viability of a public/virtual sphere paradigm. In the process, it implicates public/virtual sphere scholarship in the production of a mode of power — vital or productive power — which has been under-examined in new media scholarship.

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- Acknowledgments -- Foreword: What Affects Are Good For -- Introduction -- The Parched Tongue -- Techno-Cinema: Image Matters in the Affective Unfoldings of Analog Cinema and New Media -- Slowness: Notes toward an Economy of Différancial Rates of Being -- Myocellular Transduction: When My Cells Trained My Body-Mind -- Women's Work and the Ambivalent Gift of Entropy -- Voices from the Teum: Synesthetic Trauma and the Ghosts of the Korean Diaspora -- In Calcutta, Sex Workers Organize -- More Than a Job: Meaning, Affect, and Training Health Care Workers -- Haunting Orpheus: Problems of Space and Time in the Desert -- Always on Display: Affective Production in the Modeling Industry -- The Wire -- Losses and Returns: The Soldier in Trauma -- Bibliography -- Contributors -- Index