This book is about how twenty-first century capitalism is re-making the roles of customer and customer service provider, shedding light on why consumer capitalism has come to feel so punishing for so many. In call centers, banks, airports, universities, public transport systems, hospitals, and other key sites, the intensification of profit imperatives alongside hyper-technologization has generated an "antagonistic interface" between customers and workers. Consumers widely report feeling trapped in the vise-like grip of frustrating and confounding systems that waste significant amounts of time.

Positioning the poorly served customer as the definitional figure of 21st century commercial relations, Diane Negra articulates a new corporate authoritarianism that allocates a broad range of digital tasks to customers. Essential to this apportionment are technology platforms with high failure rates, corporate devotion to byzantine bureaucratic procedures, and the conspicuous, constant valuing of high-status customers over low-status ones. Compliance with new stripped-down service protocols is enforced not only directly but through powerful norms and customs, and affective culture is notable for converting service encounters into transactions routinely characterized by frustration, impotence, and fury. In analyzing the service ecology and its media representations, I'm Sorry You Feel That Way reveals how the shift to customer work is now both totalized and thoroughly naturalized. As the book maps out, the changing nature of the service encounter in day-to-day life and in the cultural imagination reveal the emergence of corporate emotions seldom recognized as the assault on dignity they constitute.

"Negra brilliantly analyzes the transformation of customer service alongside its affective and mediated dimensions. Extensively researched and deeply original."—Laurie Ouellette, author of Lifestyle TV

"Once, the customer was always right. Now, the customer is always defeated, trapped in endless loops of automation and algorithmic indifference. In the supposed age of connectivity and frictionless convenience, our common experience is frustration: the indignities of trying, and failing, to reach a human in the machine. This incisive book finally explains why today's consumer experience feels so maddening—and why seeking agency in systems designed to deflect us has proven so futile—revealing the hidden architectures of power that shape these encounters. It brilliantly decodes and offers the conceptual clarity we've needed to understand and more effectively contest the everyday humiliations of consumer life under digital capitalism."—Anna Watkins Fisher, author of The Play in the System

"Negra's comprehensive and unflinching account of the toxic world of customer service is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding the intersection of culture, technology, and neoliberalism at the present moment. A cultural studies tour de force."—Anna McCarthy, author of The Citizen Machine

Diane Negra is Professor of Film Studies and Screen Culture at University College Dublin. A member of the Royal Irish Academy, she is the author, editor or co-editor of fourteen books.