24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep

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

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.

As Harold Bloom has shown, the real American religion is “to be free of other selves.”

Bhopal remains a stark disclosure of the discordance between corporate globalization and the possibility of security and sustainability for human communities.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.