24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep

One effect of this imposition of an input/output model is a homogenization of inner experience and the contents of communication networks, and an unproblematic reduction of the infinite amorphousness of mental life to digital formats.

since no moment, place, or situation now exists in which one can not shop, consume, or exploit networked resources, there is a relentless incursion of the non-time of 24/7 into every aspect of social or personal life.

As history has shown, war-related innovations are inevitably assimilated into a broader social sphere, and the sleepless soldier would be the forerunner of the sleepless worker or consumer. Non-sleep products, when aggressively promoted by pharmaceutical companies, would become first a lifestyle option, and eventually, for many, a necessity.

The initial objective, quite simply, is the creation of the sleepless soldier, and the white-crowned sparrow study project is only one small part of a broader military effort to achieve at least limited mastery over human sleep.

The homogenizing force of capitalism is incompatible with any inherent structure of differentiation: sacred-profane, carnival-workday, nature-culture, machine-organism, and so on. Thus any persisting notions of sleep as somehow “natural” are rendered unacceptable.

There is a profound incompatibility of anything resembling reverie with the priorities of efficiency, functionality, and speed.

It is only recently that the elaboration, the modeling of one’s personal and social identity, has been reorganized to conform to the uninterrupted operation of markets, information networks, and other systems.

By the late 1970s, perhaps earlier, the word “television” conveyed and encompassed far more than the objects and networks literally denoted. Television became a nebulous but loaded figure for evoking the texture of modernity and a transformed everyday life. The word concretized, in something localizable, broader experiences of de-realization.

For him, the 1990s opened onto a hyper-industrial era, not a post-industrial one, in which a logic of mass production was suddenly aligned with techniques that, in unprecedented ways, combine fabrication, distribution, and subjectivation on a planetary scale.