Artists working with emerging technologies are often depicted as existing “outside” of the technology industry, both by scholars exploring technology and society as well as within their own self-perceptions. Their works are alternately positioned as innovations, diagnostics, and correctives; they are frequently depicted as carrying unique perspectives that do not exist within the technology industry otherwise. However, these artists are very much subject to the norms and limitations inherent to digital technology. The protocols and ideologies of the industry have a sizable impact on the work artists can make; how they are able to share and preserve it; and even how they envision their broader cultural roles. This project examines the relationships between new media artists—practitioners who see themselves expanding, reinventing, or misusing technological expression—and the industry that controls the tools, resources, and protocols necessary for their work. Drawing on theories of art worlds, scientific infrastructure, and creative labor, I argue that the power and impact that the tech industry exerts on contemporary life also guides, influences, and shapes the creative possibilities and conventions that new media artists can harness in their practices. Additionally, using the concept of the imagined affordance, I make the case that, rather than operating externally to the industry, these artists are seen as a vital industrial resource due to their perceived ability to envision uses for emerging technologies that elude the capabilities of traditional tech workers. I use multiple methods to address these questions, incorporating traditional qualitative practices—semi-structured interviews with artists and administrators, archival and primary source research, and autoethnography—alongside a creative toolkit based on my own art practice. I demonstrate that new media artists are heavily bound up in the contemporary tech industry, in both material and ideological ways. Through this revised subject position, I argue that we can gain a more nuanced understanding of where and how the tech industry exerts control over culture and creative practice, allowing us to re-conceptualize how art can challenge the dominance of technical systems.