Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep
One seemingly inconsequential but prevalent linguistic figure is the machine-based designation of "sleep mode." The notion of an apparatus in a state of low-power readiness remakes the larger sense of sleep into simply a
deferred or diminished condition of operationality and access. It supersedes an off/on logic, so that nothing is ever fundamentally "off" and there is never an actual state of rest. Sleep is an irrational and intolerable affirmation that there might be limits
to the compatibility of living beings with the allegedly irresistible forces of modernization. One of the familiar truisms of contemporary
critical thought is that there are no unalterable givens of nature—not even death, according to those who predict we will all soon be downloading our minds into digital immortality. To believe that there are any essential features that distinguish living beings from machines is, we are told by celebrated critics, naive and delusional.
Why should anyone object, they would counter, if new drugs could allow someone to work at their job 100 hours straight? Would not flexible and reduced sleep time allow more personal freedom, the ability to customize one's life further in accordance with individual needs and desires? Would not less sleep allow more chance for "living life to the fullest"?
But one might object that
human beings are meant to sleep at night,
that our own bodies are aligned with the daily rotation of our planet,
and that seasonal and solar responsive behaviors occur in almost every
living organism. To which the reply would likely be: pernicious New
Age nonsense, or even worse, an ominous yearning for some Heideggerian
connectedness to the earth. More importantly, within the globalist
neoliberal paradigm,
sleeping is for losers.
...
24/7 steadily undermines distinctions between day and night,
between light and dark, and between action and repose. It is a zone
of insensibility, of amnesia, of what defeats the possibility of
experience.
To paraphrase Maurice Blanchot, it is both of and after the disaster,
characterized by the empty sky, in which no star or sign is visible,
in which one's bearings are lost and orientation is impossible. More
concretely, it is like a state of emergency, when a bank of
floodlights are suddenly switched on in the middle of the night,
seemingly as a response to some extreme circumstances, but which never
get turned off and become domesticated into a permanent condition. The
planet becomes reimagined as a non-stop work site or an always open
shopping mall of infinite choices, tasks, selections, and digressions.
Sleeplessness is the state in which producing, consuming, and
discarding occur without pause, hastening the exhaustion of life and
the depletion of resources.
As the major remaining obstacle—in effect, the last of what
Marx called "natural barriers"—to the
full realization of 24/7 capitalism,
sleep cannot be eliminated.
But it can be wrecked and despoiled, and, as my opening examples show, methods and motivations to accomplish this wrecking are fully in place. The injuring of sleep is inseparable from the ongoing dismantling of social protections in other spheres.
Just as universal access to clean drinking water has been programmatically devastated around the globe by pollution and privatization, with the accompanying monetization of bottled water, it is not difficult to see a similar construction of scarcity in relation to sleep.
All of the encroachments on it create the insomniac conditions in which sleep must be bought (even if one is paying for a chemically modified state only approximating actual sleep). Statistics of soaring use of hypnotics show that, in 2010, around
fifty million Americans were prescribed compounds like Ambien or Lunesta, and many millions more bought over-the-counter sleep products. But it would be misguided to imagine an amelioration of current conditions that would allow people to sleep soundly and wake refreshed. At this point in time, even a less oppressively organized world would not likely eliminate insomnia. Sleeplessness takes on its historical significance and its particular affective texture in relation to the collective experiences external to it, and insomnia is now inseparable from many other forms of dispossession and social ruin occurring globally. As an individual privation in our present, it is continuous with a generalized condition of worldlessness.
The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas is one of several thinkers who have tried to engage the meanings of insomnia in the context of recent history. Insomnia, he argues, is a way of imagining
the extreme difficulty of individual responsibility in the face of the catastrophes of our era. Part of the modernized world we inhabit is the ubiquitous visibility of useless violence and the human suffering it causes.
This visibility, in all its mixed forms, is a glare that ought to thoroughly disturb any complacency, that ought to preclude the restful unmindfulness of sleep. Insomnia corresponds to the necessity of vigilance, to a refusal to overlook the horror and injustice that pervades the world.
It is the disquiet of the effort to avoid inattention to the torment of the other. But its disquiet is also the frustrating inefficacy of an ethic of watchfulness; the act of witnessing and its monotony can become a mere enduring of the night, of the disaster. It is neither in public nor fully private. For Levinas, insomnia always hovers between a self-absorption and a radical depersonalization; it does not exclude a concern for the other, but it provides no clear sense of a space for the other's presence.
It is where we face the near impossibility of living humanely.
For sleeplessness must be distinguished from an
unrelieved wakefulness, with
its almost unbearable attention to suffering and the boundlessness of
responsibility that would impose.
...
To take one of many possible examples from recent critical literature: several years ago a German media theorist proposed that the cell phone equipped with visual display represents a "revolutionary" break with previous technological forms, including all earlier telephones.
He argued that, because of its mobility, the miniaturization of the screen, and its ability to display data and video, it was "a truly radical development." Even if one is inclined to approach technological history as sequences demarcated by inventions and breakthroughs, the relevance of this particular apparatus will be notably and inevitably short-lived. It is more useful to understand such a device as merely one element in a transient flux of compulsory and disposable products.
Very different display formats are already on the near horizon, some involving the augmented realities of see-through interfaces and small head-worn devices, in which a virtual screen will be identical with one's field of vision.
Also, there is the development of gesture-based computing in which, instead of a click, a wave, a nod, or the blink of an eye will suffice as a command.
Before long these may well displace the apparent ubiquity and necessity
of hand-held, touch-based devices, and thereby cancel any special historical claims for what came before. But if and when such devices are introduced (and no doubt labeled as revolutionary), they will simply be facilitating the perpetuation of the same banal exercise of non-stop consumption, social isolation, and political powerlessness, rather than representing some historically significant turning point.
And they too will occupy only a brief interval of currency before their inevitable replacement and transit to the global waste piles of techno-trash.
The only consistent factor connecting the otherwise desultory
succession of consumer products and services is the intensifying
integration of one's time and activity into the parameters of
electronic exchange.Billions of dollars are spent every year researching how to reduce
decision-making time, how to eliminate the useless time
of reflection and contemplation. This is the form of contemporary progress—the relentless capture and
control of time and experience.
As many have noted,the form that innovation takes within capitalism is as the continual simulation of the new, while existing relations of power and control remain effectively the same.
For much of the twentieth century, novelty production, in spite of its repetitiveness and nullity, was often marketed to coincide with a social imagination of a future more advanced than, or at least unlike, the present.
Within the framework of a mid-twentieth-century futurism, the products one purchased and fit into one's life seemed vaguely linked with popular evocations of eventual global prosperity, automation benignly displacing human labor, space exploration, the elimination of crime and disease, and so on.
There was at least the misplaced belief in technological solutions to intractable social problems. Now the accelerated tempo of apparent change deletes any sense of an extended time frame that is shared collectively, which might sustain even a nebulous anticipation of a future distinct from contemporary reality. 24/7 is shaped around individual goals of competitiveness, advancement, acquisitiveness, personal security, and comfort at the expense of others. The future is so close at hand that it is imaginable only by its continuity with the striving for individual gain or survival in the shallowest of presents.
Technostress is the stress, anxiety, and mental strain caused by our
constant interaction with technology—often called the “dark side” of
digital tools. Coined in 1984 by Craig Brod as a “modern disease of
adaptation” from struggling to cope with new computer technologies in
a healthy way, it now covers smartphones, social media, constant
notifications, AI tools, remote work platforms, and the always-on
culture.
The brain treats technostress much like any other chronic stressor.
The amygdala (our alarm system) fires up in response to perceived
threats—whether a physical danger or endless pings, emails,
information overload, or the pressure to stay connected. It doesn’t
distinguish between a lion chasing you and a flood of Slack messages
or Zoom fatigue. This triggers the fight-or-flight response, flooding
the body with stress hormones like cortisol, keeping us in a
heightened state.
When the amygdala is over-activated, it hijacks resources from the
prefrontal cortex, the brain’s CEO for logic, problem-solving, focus,
emotional regulation, and decision-making. The result? Reduced
efficiency, foggy thinking, irritability, burnout, difficulty
concentrating, and even physical symptoms like headaches, eye strain,
insomnia, or exhaustion.
Common causes (often called techno-stressors) include:
>Techno-overload: Too much information, multitasking across
apps/devices.
>Techno-invasion: Work bleeding into personal life
(e.g., checking emails at night).
>Techno-complexity: Constant
need to learn new tools/apps/updates.
>Techno-insecurity: Fear
of falling behind, job loss to AI/automation, or privacy concerns.
>Techno-unreliability: Glitches, slow systems, or constant
updates breaking workflows.
Effects build over time: increased anxiety, depression symptoms, lower
job satisfaction, strained relationships, reduced productivity, and
higher burnout risk. In the digital age, this is amplified by
remote/hybrid work, social media comparison, and AI-driven
surveillance or algorithmic demands.
Technostress by Alexia Georghiou
24/7 by Jonathan Crary
Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep
One seemingly inconsequential but prevalent linguistic figure is the
machine-based designation of "sleep mode." The notion of an apparatus
in a state of low-power readiness remakes the larger sense of sleep
into simply a deferred or diminished condition of operationality and
access. It supersedes an off/on logic, so that nothing is ever
fundamentally "off" and there is never an actual state of
rest.
Sleep is an irrational and intolerable affirmation that
there might be limits to the compatibility of living beings with the
allegedly irresistible forces of modernization. One of the familiar
truisms of contemporary critical thought is that there are no
unalterable givens of nature—not even death, according to those who
predict we will all soon be downloading our minds into digital
immortality. To believe that there are any essential features that
distinguish living beings from machines is, we are told by celebrated
critics, naive and delusional.
Why should anyone object, they would counter, if new drugs could
allow someone to work at their job 100 hours straight? Would not
flexible and reduced sleep time allow more personal freedom, the
ability to customize one's life further in accordance with
individual needs and desires? Would not less sleep allow more chance
for "living life to the fullest"?
But one might object that human beings are meant to sleep at night,
that our own bodies are aligned with the daily rotation of our planet,
and that seasonal and solar responsive behaviors occur in almost every
living organism. To which the reply would likely be: pernicious New
Age nonsense, or even worse, an ominous yearning for some Heideggerian
connectedness to the earth. More importantly, within the globalist
neoliberal paradigm, sleeping is for losers.
...
24/7 steadily undermines distinctions between day and night,
between light and dark, and between action and repose. It is a zone
of insensibility, of amnesia, of what defeats the possibility of
experience.
To paraphrase Maurice Blanchot, it is both of and after the disaster,
characterized by the empty sky, in which no star or sign is visible,
in which one's bearings are lost and orientation is impossible. More
concretely, it is like a state of emergency, when a bank of
floodlights are suddenly switched on in the middle of the night,
seemingly as a response to some extreme circumstances, but which never
get turned off and become domesticated into a permanent condition. The
planet becomes reimagined as a non-stop work site or an always open
shopping mall of infinite choices, tasks, selections, and
digressions. Sleeplessness is the state in which producing, consuming, and
discarding occur without pause, hastening the exhaustion of life and
the depletion of resources.
As the major remaining obstacle—in effect, the last of
what Marx called "natural barriers"—to the full realization of 24/7
capitalism, sleep cannot be eliminated. But it can be wrecked and
despoiled, and, as my opening examples show, methods and motivations
to accomplish this wrecking are fully in place. The injuring of sleep
is inseparable from the ongoing dismantling of social protections in
other spheres. Just as universal access to clean drinking water has
been programmatically devastated around the globe by pollution and
privatization, with the accompanying monetization of bottled water, it
is not difficult to see a similar construction of scarcity in relation
to sleep.
All of the encroachments on it create the insomniac conditions in
which sleep must be bought
(even if one is paying for a chemically modified state only
approximating actual sleep). Statistics of soaring use of hypnotics
show that, in 2010, around fifty million Americans were prescribed
compounds like Ambien or Lunesta, and many millions more bought
over-the-counter sleep products. But it would be misguided to imagine
an amelioration of current conditions that would allow people to sleep
soundly and wake refreshed. At this point in time, even a less
oppressively organized world would not likely eliminate insomnia.
Sleeplessness takes on its historical significance and its particular
affective texture in relation to the collective experiences external
to it, and insomnia is now inseparable from many other forms of
dispossession and social ruin occurring globally. As an individual
privation in our present, it is continuous with a generalized
condition of worldlessness.
The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas is one of several
thinkers who have tried to engage the meanings of insomnia in the
context of recent history. Insomnia, he argues, is a way of imagining
the extreme difficulty of individual responsibility in the face of the
catastrophes of our era. Part of the modernized world we inhabit is
the ubiquitous visibility of useless violence and the human suffering
it causes. This visibility, in all its mixed forms, is a glare that
ought to thoroughly disturb any complacency, that ought to preclude
the restful unmindfulness of sleep. Insomnia corresponds to the
necessity of vigilance, to a refusal to overlook the horror and
injustice that pervades the world. It is the disquiet of the effort to
avoid inattention to the torment of the other. But its disquiet is
also the frustrating inefficacy of an ethic of watchfulness; the act
of witnessing and its monotony can become a mere enduring of the
night, of the disaster. It is neither in public nor fully private. For
Levinas, insomnia always hovers between a self-absorption and a
radical depersonalization; it does not exclude a concern for the
other, but it provides no clear sense of a space for the other's
presence. It is where we face the near impossibility of living
humanely. For sleeplessness must be distinguished from an unrelieved
wakefulness, with its almost unbearable attention to suffering and the
boundlessness of responsibility that would impose.
...
To take one of many possible examples from recent critical literature:
several years ago a German media theorist proposed that the cell phone
equipped with visual display represents a "revolutionary" break with
previous technological forms, including all earlier telephones. He
argued that, because of its mobility, the miniaturization of the
screen, and its ability to display data and video, it was "a truly
radical development." Even if one is inclined to approach
technological history as sequences demarcated by inventions and
breakthroughs, the relevance of this particular apparatus will be
notably and inevitably short-lived. It is more useful to understand
such a device as merely one element in a transient flux of compulsory
and disposable products. Very different display formats are already on
the near horizon, some involving the augmented realities of
see-through interfaces and small head-worn devices, in which a virtual
screen will be identical with one's field of vision. Also, there is
the development of gesture-based computing in which, instead of a
click, a wave, a nod, or the blink of an eye will suffice as a
command. Before long these may well displace the apparent ubiquity and
necessity of hand-held, touch-based devices, and thereby cancel any
special historical claims for what came before. But if and when such
devices are introduced (and no doubt labeled as revolutionary),
they will simply be facilitating the perpetuation of the same banal
exercise of non-stop consumption, social isolation, and political
powerlessness,
rather than representing some historically significant turning point.
And they too will occupy only a brief interval of currency before
their inevitable replacement and transit to the global waste piles of
techno-trash. The only consistent factor connecting the otherwise
desultory succession of consumer products and services is the
intensifying integration of one's time and activity into the
parameters of electronic exchange.
Billions of dollars are spent every year researching how to reduce
decision-making time, how to eliminate the useless time of
reflection and contemplation.
This is the form of contemporary progress—the relentless capture and
control of time and experience.
As many have noted,
the form that innovation takes within capitalism is as the
continual simulation of the new, while existing relations of power
and control remain effectively the same.
For much of the twentieth century, novelty production, in spite of its
repetitiveness and nullity, was often marketed to coincide with a
social imagination of a future more advanced than, or at least unlike,
the present. Within the framework of a mid-twentieth-century futurism,
the products one purchased and fit into one's life seemed vaguely
linked with popular evocations of eventual global prosperity,
automation benignly displacing human labor, space exploration, the
elimination of crime and disease, and so on. There was at least the
misplaced belief in technological solutions to intractable social
problems. Now the accelerated tempo of apparent change deletes any
sense of an extended time frame that is shared collectively, which
might sustain even a nebulous anticipation of a future distinct from
contemporary reality. 24/7 is shaped around individual goals of
competitiveness, advancement, acquisitiveness, personal security, and
comfort at the expense of others. The future is so close at hand that
it is imaginable only by its continuity with the striving for
individual gain or survival in the shallowest of presents.
...
Technostress by Alexia Georghiou
Technostress is the stress, anxiety, and mental strain caused by
our constant interaction with technology—often called the “dark
side” of digital tools.
Coined in 1984 by Craig Brod as a “modern disease of adaptation” from
struggling to cope with new computer technologies in a healthy way, it
now covers smartphones, social media, constant notifications, AI
tools, remote work platforms, and the always-on culture.
The brain treats technostress much like any other chronic stressor.
The amygdala (our alarm system) fires up in response to perceived
threats—whether a physical danger or endless pings, emails,
information overload, or the pressure to stay connected. It doesn’t
distinguish between a lion chasing you and a flood of Slack messages
or Zoom fatigue.This triggers the fight-or-flight response, flooding
the body with stress hormones like cortisol, keeping us in a
heightened state.
When the amygdala is over-activated, it hijacks resources from the
prefrontal cortex, the brain’s CEO for logic, problem-solving, focus,
emotional regulation, and decision-making. The result? Reduced
efficiency, foggy thinking, irritability, burnout, difficulty
concentrating, and even physical symptoms like headaches, eye strain,
insomnia, or exhaustion.
Common causes (often called techno-stressors) include:
Techno-overload:
Too much information, multitasking across
apps/devices.
Techno-invasion:
Work bleeding into personal life
(e.g., checking emails at night).
Techno-complexity:
Constant
need to learn new tools/apps/updates.
Techno-insecurity:
Fear
of falling behind, job loss to AI/automation, or privacy concerns.
Techno-unreliability:
Glitches, slow systems, or constant
updates breaking workflows.
Effects build over time: increased anxiety, depression symptoms, lower
job satisfaction, strained relationships, reduced productivity, and
higher burnout risk. In the digital age, this is amplified by
remote/hybrid work, social media comparison, and AI-driven
surveillance or algorithmic demands.
Impressum