24/7 Quotes

“Sleep is an uncompromising interruption of the theft of time from us by capitalism.”
― Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep

“Through the appropriation of public spaces and resources into the logic of the marketplace, individuals are dispossessed of many collective forms of mutual support or sharing. A simple and pervasive cooperative practice like hitchhiking had to be inverted into a risk-filled act with fearful, even lethal consequences. Now it has reached the point of laws being enacted in parts of the United States that criminalize giving food to the homeless or to undocumented immigrants.”
― Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep

“One of the many reasons human cultures have long associated sleep with death is that they each demonstrate the continuity of the world in our absence.”
― Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep

“The denial of sleep is the violent dispossession of self by external force, the calculated shattering of an individual.”
― Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep

“There are now very few significant interludes of human existence (with the colossal exception of sleep) that have not been penetrated and taken over as work time, consumption time, or marketing time.”
― Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep

“Because one’s bank account and one’s friendships can now be managed through identical machinic operations and gestures, there is a growing homogenization of what used to be entirely unrelated areas of experience.”
― Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep

“According to the Tiqqun collective, we have become the innocuous, pliable inhabitants of global urban societies.7 Even in the absence of any direct compulsion, we choose to do what we are told to do; we allow the management of our bodies, our ideas, our entertainment, and all our imaginary needs to be externally imposed. We buy products that have been recommended to us through the monitoring of our electronic lives, and then we voluntarily leave feedback for others about what we have purchased. We are the compliant subject who submits to all manner of biometric and surveillance intrusion, and who ingests toxic food and water and lives near nuclear reactors without complaint. The absolute abdication of responsibility for living is indicated by the titles of the many bestselling guides that tell us, with a grim fatality, the 1,000 movies to see before we die, the 100 tourist destinations to visit before we die, the 500 books to read before we die.”
― Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep

“In many different ways, the attack on values of collectivity and cooperation is articulated through the notion that freedom is to be free of any dependence on others, while in fact we are experiencing a more comprehensive subjection to the “free” workings of markets. As Harold Bloom has shown, the real American religion is “to be free of other selves.”
― Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep

“An attention economy dissolves the separation between the personal and professional, between entertainment and information, all overridden by a compulsory functionality of communication that is inherently and inescapably 24/7. Even as a contemporary colloquialism, the term “eyeballs” for the site of control repositions human vision as a motor activity that can be subjected to external direction or stimuli. The goal is to refine the capacity to localize the eye’s movement on or within highly targeted sites or points of interest. The eye is dislodged from the realm of optics and made into an intermediary element of a circuit whose end result is always a motor response of the body to electronic solicitation. It is out of this context that Google and other corporate players now compete for dominance over the remains of the everyday.”
― Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep

“Stiegler cites the advent of widespread internet use in the mid 1990s as a decisive turning point [...] in the impact of these industrial audiovisual products. Over the last two decades, he believes, they have been responsible for a 'mass synchronization' of consciousness and memory. The standardization of experience on such a large scale, he argues, entails a loss of subjective identity and singularity; it also leads to the disastrous disappearance of individual participation and creativity in the making of the symbols we all exchange and share.”
― Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep

“This is a decisive trait of the era of technological addictiveness: that one can return again and again to a neutral void that has little affective intensity of any kind.”
― Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep

“[...] whatever remaining pockets of everyday life are not directed toward quantitative or acquisitive ends, or cannot be adapted to telematic participation, tend to deteriorate in esteem and desirability. Real-life activities that do not have an online correlate begin to atrophy, or cease to be relevant. There is an insurmountable asymmetry that degrades any local event or exchange. Because of the infinity of content accessible 24/7, there will always be something online more informative, surprising, funny, diverting, impressive than in one's immediate actual circumstances. It is now a given that a limitless availability of information or images can trump or override any human-scale communications or exploration of ideas.”
― Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep

“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.”
― Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep

“24/7 is a time of indifference, against which the fragility of human life is increasingly inadequate and within which sleep has no necessity or inevitability. In relation to labor, it renders plausible, even normal, the idea of working without pause, without limits.”
― Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep

“In its profound uselessness and intrinsic passivity, with the incalculable losses it causes in production time, circulation, and consumption, sleep will always collide with the demands of a 24/7 universe. The huge portion 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...Sleep poses the idea of a human need and interval of time that cannot be colonized and harnessed to a massive engine of profitability, and thus remains an incongruous anomaly and site of crisis in the global present.”
― Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep

“Nie ma nic dziwnego w tym, że obserwujemy systematyczne redukowanie czasu snu, jeśli wziąć pod uwagę, o jaką ekonomiczną stawkę toczy się gra.”
― Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep

“To paraphrase Maurice Blanchot, it [24/7] 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. p.17”
― Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep

“[...] 24/7 has produced an atrophy of the individual patience and deference that are essential to any form of direct democracy: the patience to listen to others, to wait one's turn to speak.”
― Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep

“The myths of the egalitarian and empowering nature of this technology have been cultivated for a reason. Police agencies of the global order can only be gratified by the willingness of actives to concentrate their organizing around internet strategies, by which they voluntarily kettle themselves in cyberspace, where state surveillance, sabotage, and manipulation are far easier than in lived communities and localities where actual encounters occur. If one's goal is radical social transformation, electronic media in their current forms of mass availability are not useless -- but only when they are subordinate to struggles and encounters taking place elsewhere. If networks are not int the service of already existing relationship forged out of shared experience and proximity, they will always reproduce and reinforce the separations, the opacity, the dissimulations, and the self-interestedness inherent in their use. Any social turbulence whose primary sources are in the use of social media will inevitable he historically ephemeral and inconsequential.”
― Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep

“Obviously, political activism means creatively using available tools and material resources, but it should not entail imagining the tools themselves to have intrinsic redemptive values.”
― Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep

“Fredric Jameson and others have detailed the operation of a cultural prohibition, at the structural level, on even the imaging of alternatives to the desolate insularity of individual experience within the competitive workings of capitalist society. possibilities of non-monadic or communal life are rendered unthinkable. In 1965, a typical negative image of collective living was, for example, that of the Bolsheviks moving sullen working-class families into Doctor Zhivago's spacious and pristine home in the David Lean movie. For the past quarter-century, the communal has been presented as a farm more nightmarish option. For example, in recent neoconservative portrayals of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, measures taken against private property and class privilege on behalf of collective social formations are equated to the most monstrous crimes in world history. On a smaller scale, there are the countless narratives of cult-like communes of obedient converts ruled by homicidal madmen and cynical manipulators. Echoing bourgeois fears in the late nineteenth century following 1871, the idea of a commune derived from any form of socialism remains systemically intolerable. The cooperative, as a lived set of relations, cannot actually be made visible -- it can only be represented as a parodic replication of existing relations of domination. In many different ways, the attack on values of collective and cooperation is articulated through the notion that freedom is to be free of any dependency on others, while in fact we are experience a more comprehensive subjection to the 'free' workings of markets. As Harold Bloom has shown, the real American religion is 'to be free of other selves.' In academic circles, the right-wing attach on the cooperative is abetted by the current intellectual fashion of denouncing the idea or possibility of community for its alleged exclusions and latent fascisms. One of the main forms of control over the last thirty years has been to ensure there are no visible alternatives to privatized patterns of living.”
― Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep

“As disciplinary norms lost their effectiveness, television was crafted into a machinery of regulation, introducing previously unknown effects of subjection and supervision. This is why television is a crucial and adaptable part of a relatively long transition (or changing of the guard) lasting several decades, between a world of older disciplinary institutions and one of 24.7 control.”
― Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep

“One of the goals of Google, Facebook, and other enterprises [...] is to normalize and make indispensable [...] the idea of a continuous interface--not literally seamless, but a relatively unbroken engagement with illuminated screens of diverse kinds that unremittingly demand interest or response. Of course there are breaks, but they are not intervals in which any kind of counter-projects or streams of thought can be nurtured and sustained. 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 communication that is inherently and inescapably 24/7.”
― Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep

“Modernity, contrary to its popular connotations, is not the world in a sweepingly transformed state. Rather, as some critics have shown, it is the hybrid and dissonant experience of living intermittently within modernized spaces and speeds, and yet simultaneously inhabiting the remnants of pre-capitalist life-world, whether social or natural.”
― Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep

“Many who celebrate the transformative potential of communication networks are oblivious to the oppressive forms of human labor and environmental ravages on which their fantasies of virtuality and dematerialization depend. Even amonth the plural voices affirming that 'another world is possible,' there is often the expedient misconception that economic justice, mitigation of climate change, and egalitarian social relations can somehow occur alongside the continued existence of corporations like Google, Apple, and General Electric. Challenges to these delusions encounter intellectual policing of many kinds. there is an effective prohibition not only on the critique of mandatory technological consumption but also in the articulation of how existing technical capabilities and premises could be deployed in the service of human and social needs, rather than the requirements of capital and empire. The narrow and monopolized set of electronic products and services available at any given moment masquerades as the all-enveloping phenomenon of 'technology.' Even a partial refusal of the intensively marketed offerings of multinational corporations is construed as opposition to technology itself. To characterize current arrangements, in reality untenable and unsustainable, as anything but inevitable and unalterable is a contemporary heresy.”
― Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep

“The myth of the lone hacker perpetuates the fantasy that the asymmetrical relation of individual to network can be creatively played to the former's advantage. In actuality there is an imposed and inescapable uniformity to our compulsory labor of self-management. The illusion of choice and autonomy is one of the foundations of this global system of auto-regulation. In many places one still encounters the assertion that contemporary technological arrangements are essentially a neutral set of tools that can be used in many different ways, including in the service of an emancipatory politics. The philosopher Giorgio Agamben asn refuted such claims, countering that 'today there is not even a single instant in which the life of the individuals is not modeled, contaminated, or controlled by some apparatus.' He contends convincingly that 'it is impossible for the subject of an apparatus to use it 'in the right way.”
― Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep

“Death, in many guises, is one of the by-products of neoliberalism: when people have nothing further that can be taken from them, whether resources or labor or power, they are quite simply disposable.”
― Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep

“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.”
― Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep

“One of the underpinnings of this assumption is the popular truism that today's teenagers and younger children are all now harmoniously inhabiting the incluse and seamless intelligibility of their technological worlds. This generational characterization supposedly confirms that, within another few decades or less, a transitional phase will have ended and there will be billions of individuals with a similar level of technological competences and basic intellectual assumptions. With a new paradigm fully in place, there will be innovation, but in this scenario it will occurwithin the stable and endring conceptual and funcitonal parameters of this "digital" epoch. However, the very different actuality of our time is the calculated maintenance of an ongoing state of transition. There never will be a "catching up" on either a social or individual basis in relation to continually changing technological requirements. For the vast majority o f people our perceptual and cognitive relationship to communication and information technology will continue to be estranged and disempowered because of the velocity wat 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. Certain cultural theorists insist that such condition can easily be the basis for neutralizing institutional power, but actual evidence supporting this view is non-existent.”
― Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep

“Tiqqun kolektifine göre, küresel kent toplumlarının zararsız sakinleri olduk. Doğrudan bir zorlamanın olmadığı durumda bile, bize yapmamız söylenen şeyi yapmayı tercih ediyoruz; bedenlerimizin, fikirlerimizin, eğlencemizin yönetilmesine ve bütün hayali ihtiyaçlarımızın bize dışarıdan dayatılmasına izin veriyoruz. Elektronik hayatlarımızın izlenmesi sonucunda bize tavsiye edilen ürünleri satın alıyor, sonra da satın aldığımız şeyler hakkında başkaları için gönüllü olarak yorumlar bırakıyoruz. Her tür biyometri ve gözetleme ihlaline boyun eğen, toksik yiyecek ve suyla beslenip şikayet etmeden nükleer reaktörlerin yakınında yaşayan uysal tebaayız.”
― Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep