The discourse on media is dominated by reactionary cant.

This brief note examines two interrelated themes that I think need to be at the core of studying the media industries. Neither will be popular, because they are critical and they veer away from the norms of US graduate schooling and Englishlanguage journals. The first is that we need to focus on cultural labor. The second is that we need to focus on the environment, specifically the media’s destructive impact on the world’s ecology over centuries. These critiques sometimes help encourage workers to organize and corporations to reform, but they have yet to gain major currency in academia outside environmental science. A decent future for the cognitariat and the earth depends on the centrality of these topics to each course, publication, policy, and initiative undertaken by and about the media. Business as usual needs to be shaken up.