Toward an Evil Media Studies proposes that media should not be studied only through representation, meaning or critique, but through the operative stratagems by which media systems capture, manipulate, automate and produce reality. Fuller and Goffey define “evil media studies” not as a discipline or a study of morally bad objects, but as a practical-theoretical method for analysing informal techniques embedded in networked media. Their central move is to bypass representation: digital media are infrastructural, programmed and material; they do not merely signify, they act. Algorithms, databases, interfaces, protocols, advertising systems, bots and data structures shape behaviour through capture, suggestion, inattention, repetition and machinic commonplaces. The text uses the language of evil to escape the innocence of rational critique and to take seriously deception, trickery, hypnosis, persuasion and manipulation as effective operations. Rather than asking whether media are true or false, the authors ask whether they work. Their “stratagems” examine how glitches, bugs, typographical errors, user fatigue, viral marketing, domain squatting, data validation and automated systems become productive forces. In this sense, media power does not only repress; it seduces, redirects, classifies, structures and exploits small deviations of attention or agency. The essay also challenges the separation between natural and formal language, showing how code, databases and interfaces continue older struggles around rhetoric, sophistry and control. Its most important contribution is to treat media as a field of material tactics, where power operates below representation and often below conscious attention. Evil media studies therefore suspends moral comfort in order to understand the technical, affective and semiotic mechanisms through which contemporary digital culture governs perception, labour, desire and action. The conclusion is not that media are simply malicious, but that their real force lies in ambiguous operations where theory and practice, accident and design, communication and control become inseparable.