Thinking through High-Tech Hell: A Theory of the New Media Dystopia

Abstract

Examining a cluster of British and Anglo-American series from the 2010s, this book theorizes them — and, indirectly, the epochal reality that they represent — as «new media dystopias.» With this term, the author conceptualizes an emergent sub-genre of audio-visual SF which is thematically concerned with the worst effects of developments in media technologies under digital capitalism and is, ironically, produced for and distributed through digital-capitalist platforms. Across the book’s chapters, the new media dystopia is approached as an epochal structure of feeling, as a narratively reflexive sub-genre, as an aesthetically ambivalent form, and as a locale for a new kind of quixotism. Combining these perspectives, the book’s interest lies in gauging the ways and the extent to which these dystopias contribute to the historical hopelessness that seems to define the terms of our relationship with new media technologies — as well as our position within and towards contemporary capitalism.