Life under climate change, the mass extinction of species, aggressive rightwing populism, dramatic social inequalities, war, genocide, and militarized geopolitics does not foster a general sense of optimism concerning the current moment or the foreseeable future. It rather feels as if regions, societies, cultures, communities, and individuals were sliding into the belly of the metaphorical beast—deeper into bad, dangerous, and unpleasant zones from where they are unlikely to return unscathed or from which there may be no return at all. In this historical conjuncture, it may be that social and cultural inquiry not focusing on the deadly consequences of the Anthropocene, the exploitative practices of late capitalism, or the violent operations of power may come across as simply naive to the point of not meriting the very denominator of ‘the critical’. Since such consequences, practices, and operations have long been identified and acknowledged in critical work, and hence are to a degree already known, scholarship exploring them is likely to discover new nuances and iterations, yet unlikely to be taken by surprise.

Building on queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's (2003) broadly read polemic on the circularity of critical work, this chapter makes an argument for framing the beast and its belly as less the main foci of critical media studies scholarship than as contexts shaping mundane interactions: in doing so, it calls for attending to different scales of events and phenomena and their unavoidable simultaneity without prioritizing the one over the other. Focusing on critiques of network culture in particular, it examines the productivity of ambiguity and simultaneity in studying lives under data capitalism.