Beller’s concepts are abstracted from history and political usefulness- can’t solve their offense.

The Message is Murder presents less the culmination of a long research project and more of a first attempt to gather disparate threads together to see where they might lead. As such, Beller’s book is a bit fragmented in its approach, developing the beginnings of an investigation on a particular topic before quickly moving on to the next. In his effort to criticize media studies for its lack of engagement with race, he neglects to mention any examples that do, in fact, meet this criteria, such as the work of scholars like Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Lisa Nakamura. While he argues for a historical understanding of media formations, his arguments are rooted less in the historical record and more in the persuasive rhetoric of the polemic. He coins provocative terms like “fractal fascism” and “platform totalitarianism” without delving too deeply into how these terms might be concisely developed and employed. These terms, however, lend themselves well to the polemical argument that Beller develops.