As an announcement of its absolute unliveability, 24/7 is comprehensible in terms of this two-sidedness. It not only incites in the individual subject an exclusive focus on getting, having, winning, gawking, squandering, and deriding, but is fully interwoven with mechanisms of control that maintain the superfluousness and powerlessness of the subje

Spectacle, he writes, is the expropriation of that possibility; it is the production of a one-way communication that he characterizes as “a generalized autism.”

Television was only the first of a category of apparatuses with which we are currently surrounded that are most often used out of powerful habitual patterning involving a diffuse attentiveness and a semi-automatism. In this sense, they are part of larger strategies of power in which the aim is not mass-deception, but rather states of neutralization

The everyday was the vague constellation of spaces and times outside what was organized and institutionalized around work, conformity, and consumerism. It was all the daily habits that were beneath notice, where one remained anonymous.

As solitary and private as sleep may seem, it is not yet severed from an interhuman tracery of mutual support and trust, however damaged many of these links may be. It is also a periodic release from individuation—a nightly unraveling of the loosely woven tangle of the shallow subjectivities one inhabits and manages by day.

Rather, the effectiveness of 24/7 lies in the incompatibility it lays bare, in the discrepancy between a human life-world and the evocation of a switched-on universe for which no off-switch exists.

24/7 denotes the wreckage of the day as much as it concerns the extinguishing of darkness and obscurity.

There is no possible harmonization between actual living beings and the demands of 24/7 capitalism, but there are countless inducements to delusionally suspend or obscure some of the humiliating limitations of lived experience, whether emotional or biological.

As the opportunity for electronic transactions of all kinds becomes omnipresent, there is no vestige of what used to be everyday life beyond the reach of corporate intrusion. An attention economy dissolves the separation between the personal and professional, between entertainment and information, all overridden by a compulsory functionality of com