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This essay analyzes how the digital media economy harnesses young people's search for meaningful work to develop new apparatuses and mechanisms of extracting value from activities that are not typically recognized as work. Drawing on interviews with net idols and an analysis of the digital infrastructure that evolved around the trend, the essay offers three arguments. First, it claims that the digital economy has adopted a particular mode of accumulation—the social factory—that has expanded sources of value extraction by blurring the boundaries between paid/productive and unpaid/reproductive labor. Second, this essay conceptualizes the net idols' production of cute culture as emotional labor and claims that the digital media economy has effectively expanded the practices through which value is extracted from women's unwaged labor far beyond the domestic sphere. Third, it demonstrates that young women did not uncritically embrace this logic. Rather, they insisted on using digital media to gain leverage in the labor market and improve their chances for upward social mobility. The essay concludes that, resonant with the ways in which women's unwaged labor in the home was instrumental to maintaining the socioeconomic order of the high-growth period, women's unpaid emotional labor remains central to a society in which labor precarity generates a demand for emotional labor. At the same time, by promoting to young people digital media as tools they can utilize to develop new skills, the digital economy makes the idea of unpaid labor more acceptable by repositioning it as a prerequisite to attain lucrative and meaningful work.

In Fukusaku Kinji's film Battle Royale, Kitano, the schoolteacher turned boot camp supervisor, begins his speech to welcome a group of middleschool graduates to the BR Camp by stating, "It is because of you that this country is going down the drain." The BR Act, he reasons, was passed to combat the mounting disorder and lack of discipline in schools. It was designed to make young people realize that their irresponsible behavior will bear consequences. We learn that Battle Royale is a three-day program in which the participants will hunt and kill each other until only one of them remains alive. The rules are strict; if the participants disobey them, their electronic neck collars will detonate. Further, if no one dies within any twenty-four-hour period, every collar will detonate simultaneously. Each student receives a backpack with food, water, a map, a compass, and a randomly selected object to use as a weapon. The fortunate ones receive a

In 2007, the number of cell phone novels posted on the popular portal, Magic Island, reached one million—a figure that has puzzled observers worldwide. Although critics ubiquitously interpret the writing and reading of cell phone novels as an escapist pastime, I see the cell phone novel movement as a response of young people to their incorporation into a precarious labor regime and their exclusion from collectivities (e.g., workplace and family) that offered their parents key resources for self‐determination. Building on textual analysis and interviews with cell phone novelists, acquisition editors at publishers, and creative professionals at cell phone novel portals, I make the following arguments. First, I claim that the cell phone novel phenomenon reveals a curious paradox. The more young people become part of a precarious workforce, the more they seek self‐fulfilling work that they are willing to perform, even if they do not receive pay for the work. Second, I demonstrate that the digital‐media economy capitalizes on this trend. Although Internet portals, such as Magic Island, promote the writing of cell phone novels as an opportunity to pursue self‐fulfilling and potentially lucrative work, these portals only acclimate youth to accept precarious employment and unpredictable work conditions. Last, I conclude that young people recognize in cell phone novels the potential to function as the medium of the political. Cell phone novelists do not simply voice their generation's anguish over their disenfranchisement. Rather, by writing these novels, they produce a conjuncture at which writers and readers come to understand themselves as new collectivities and begin to develop critical insights about work, solidarity, and future. [youth, labor, politics, cell phone novels, digital media, Japan]

Scholars propose that memes are efficient tools of political mobilization as they stimulate large masses to take up a cause. Focusing on what is called O1G activism in Hungary, I demonstrate that the role of memes in political activism is conditioned by the particular sociopolitical contexts in which they are produced. In Hungary, activists used social media to assemble databases of O1G memes, but this strategy was not conducive to building narrative capacity. These databases, however, galvanized other prominent developments. They helped make the domain of politics more inclusive by reconfiguring the affective tone of engagement from confrontation to conversation.