In the midst of an ever-growing digital mediation of human relations, Gabriella Lukács recovers the invisible labor of women that served as a base for the development of Japan’s digital economy. In order to consider the effect that our online presence has on the meaning of labor, Lukács’s book Invisibility by Design: Women and Labor in Japan’s Economy focuses on how women were deprived of entrepreneurial success, and despite playing an important role in developing Japan’s digital economy were excluded from attaining entrepreneurial success within it (4). In this context, the digital economy is defined as all business activities conducted on the Internet. For Lukács, because the industries that transitioned to or formed within this new economy reproduced social gender stereotypes, they fostered women’s failure to develop professional careers. Under the guise of providing platforms where anyone could gain popularity and promote their talents, these industries harnessed women’s free affective labor without their knowledge. To prove the effect of this interaction between industries and women entrepreneurs, Lukács draws from materialist, feminist, and affective theories in an ethnographical analysis of the career of women photographers, net idols, amateur traders, and cell phone novelists. She demonstrates how their after-work projects to learn coding, reply to fan mail, update their pages regularly, and write novels was a significant investment with little profit. In this sense, the book successfully highlights individuals within the broader and more abstract subject of the historical emergence of the digital economy because it establishes a dialogue between the testimonies of the women in question.In the first chapter, Lukács identifies the female photographers of the 1990s as the first wave of women to massively engage with digital technologies such as point-and-shoot digital cameras. She focuses her discussion on the emergence of the term “girly photography” to distinguish female photography from the technical and serious male counterpart, and how these gendered disparities were channeled by industries to cater most digital cameras’ advertisement toward young women (31–34). This trend popularized the construction of women as photographers preoccupied with daily life and banalities that eventually led to the widespread use of photography as we experience it today. Furthermore, it set an economic practice of how to utilize female labor that also framed later interactions between digital industries and women doing digital labor. Net idols, for example, were ranked on fan-created platforms where people voted for their favorite idol. Most fans were male, however, and thus women felt compelled to exhibit male-constructed roles of femininity to achieve success (73). To do this, net idols adapted their personalities to sell themselves as caring, cute, and interesting, therefore setting a precedent for a way in which the commodification of human capital could occur via the internet (75). Lukács further suggests that net idols created the online economy that provided an opportunity for what later developed into the blogging platform industry (62). She identifies online mechanisms that obscure the surplus labor not only of the idols but also of female traders and cell phone novelists. With the examples related to product advertisement and online revenue from blogging platforms, the author stresses the marginalization inherent to the role women played and how industries in the digital economy rely on the free labor of online users.Such economic dynamics, Lukács contends, were prompted by the recession after the Japanese asset price bubble burst in the late 1980s (8). This event destabilized the traditional model of salaried work characterized by job security and benefits like health insurance. The economic effects of the crisis increased waged work that did not include any of the benefits received by salaried workers (9). Within this dire employment situation, many began striving for what Lukács calls “meaningful work” or work that felt worthwhile, and women in particular turned toward the internet to create these new opportunities and to rearticulate the definition of work. Urged by their exclusion from the patriarchal work environment and inspired by female photographers, women were highly motivated to invest long hours on online projects as a means to achieve full-time careers. However, the author demonstrates that, in the search of success outside salaried work, these women ended up embodying normative femininity, which neutralized their efforts to break free from this type of labor. The system invisibilized their labor and obscured their pivotal support for the new economy, which succeeded in monetizing emotional connections like those of net idols and cell phone novelists with their fans. As such, Lukács argues that, while highly dynamic, the digital economy was dependent on the free engagement of different populations to sustain the growth of online services and platforms.The author’s stated purpose seems quite daunting in the introduction: proving that the invisible labor of women was central to the development of Japan’s digital economy, but the subsequent chapters refine the book’s scope and effectively ground its claims. Interviews with different female entrepreneurs, along with historical contextualization, illustrate the hardships endured by women who pursued professional careers through online platforms. The interviewed net idols, for example, speak about feeling happy working on their web-based projects, until it became exhausting to keep up with their fans’ demands to constantly produce new content and answer fan mail (61). Thus, their time and creative investment in online platforms became as overwhelming and stressing as their regular jobs. Lukács deftly articulates how this desire for accomplishment led women in these spheres to believe they were standing up for themselves when in truth they were working without remuneration for platforms that profited and expanded thanks to this kind of free labor. She builds a solid economic and social claim for why women failed to acquire professional careers by having to navigate through traditional expectations of femininity. Such is the case of online traders who lied about the difficulty of trading and presented it as a work that anyone could successfully do within less than an hour a day. Using this strategy, women avoided being perceived by the media as irresponsible housewives who neglected household responsibilities, but then were labeled amateur traders rather than professional ones since they did not spend enough time working (119).There are many qualities that make the book a valuable asset not only for East-Asian studies but also within media, technology, and feminist studies at large. The interdisciplinary methodologies employed by Lukács in combination with her direct prose imbue the text with a clarity that makes it useful for a general audience and specialists alike. Nonetheless, in the epilogue Lukács says that digital economies are more detrimental than helpful to cybernauts, implying but not deeply addressing that this is the case globally and not only in Japan (158). While her main arguments about Japan are well supported, the brief mention of similar examples in Western culture do not present sufficient information regarding online economic relations to assume that the reality of the Japanese online economy is true for other countries. A similar issue arises when she states that the photographs of women photographers and net idols included in the chapters prove how women were trying to question gender norms (37). After reading the author’s discussions, it was difficult to connect her reading of the photographs with the actual images. Although the photographs do depict an act of self-reflection, they do not substantiate Lukács’s claims on the questioning of gender norms, which are based more on the interviews with photographers than on the pictures themselves. That being said, these shortcomings do not undermine the innovative work done by the author. Rather, they represent avenues to be further studied and consequently highlight Lukács’s book as a must read for everyone interested in the effect of the Internet on contemporary society.