24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep

The huge proportion of our lives that we spend asleep, freed from a morass of simulated needs, subsists as one of the great human affronts to the voraciousness of contemporary capitalism. Sleep is an uncompromising interruption of the theft of time from us by capitalism. Most of the seemingly irreducible necessities of human life - hunger, thirst, sexual desire, and recently the need for friendship - have been remade into commodified or financialised forms. Sleep poses the idea of a human need and interval of time that cannot be colonised and harnessed to the massive engine of profitability. [...] The stunning, inconceivable reality is that nothing of value can be extracted from it.

We are swamped with images and information about the past and its recent catastrophes - but there is also a growing incapacity to engage these traces in ways that could move beyond them, in the interest of a common future. Amid the mass amnesia sustained by the culture of global capitalism, images have become one of the many depleted and disposable elements that, in their intrinsic archiveability, end up never being discarded, contributing to an ever more congealed and futureless present.

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The very different actuality of our time is the calculated maintenance of an ongoing state of transition. There will never be a “catching-up” on either a social or individual basis in relation to continually changing technological requirements. For the vast majority of people, our perceptual and cognitive relationship to communication and information technology will continue to be estranged and disempowered because of the velocity at which new products emerge and at which arbitrary reconfigurations of entire systems take place. This intensified rhythm precludes the possibility of becoming familiar with any given arrangement.

One of the forms of disempowerment within 24/7 environments is the incapacitation of daydream or of any mode of absent-minded introspection that would otherwise occur in intervals of slow or vacant time. Now one of the attractions of current systems is their operating speed: it has become intolerable for there to be waiting time when something loads or connects. When there are delays or breaks of empty time, they are rarely openings for the drift of consciousness in which one becomes unmoored from the constraints and demands of the immediate present. There is a profound incompatibility of anything resembling reverie with the priorities of efficiency, functionality, and speed.

There is a pervasive illusion that, as more of the earth’s biosphere is annihilated or irreparably damaged, human beings can magically disassociate themselves from it and transfer their interdependencies to the mecanosphere of global capitalism. The more one identifies with insubstantial electronic surrogates for the physical self, the more one seems to conjure an exemption from the biocide underway everywhere on the planet. [...] The belief that one can subsist independently from environmental catastrophe is paralleled by fantasies of individual survival or prosperity amid the destruction of civil society or institutions that retain any semblance of social protection or mutual support.

Now there is actually only one dream, superseding all others: it is of a shared world whose fate is not terminal, a world without billionaires, which has a future other than barbarism or the post-human, and in which history can take on other forms reified nightmares of catastrophe.