24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep

By Jonathan Crary

“A fascinating short book” on the perils of 21st-century capitalism and its near-complete takeover of our everyday lives (New York Times Magazine)
 
24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep explores some of the ruinous consequences of the expanding non-stop processes of twenty-first-century capitalism. The marketplace now operates through every hour of the clock, pushing us into constant activity and eroding forms of community and political expression, damaging the fabric of everyday life.

Jonathan Crary examines how this interminable non-time blurs any separation between an intensified, ubiquitous consumerism and emerging strategies of control and surveillance. He describes the ongoing management of individual attentiveness and the impairment of perception within the compulsory routines of contemporary technological culture. At the same time, he shows that human sleep, as a restorative withdrawal that is intrinsically incompatible with 24/7 capitalism, points to other more formidable and collective refusals of world-destroying patterns of growth and accumulation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Jun 4, 2013
• ISBN: 9781781683118

Reviews for 24/7

[woj2000 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

There is a thesis statement early in the book that provides all the insight you can expect to glean from it: “Sleep is an irrational and intolerable affirmation that there might be limits to the compatibility of living beings with the allegedly irresistible forces of modernisation.” Beyond that, expect the pointless name-dropping of philosophers and classic literature, passages of florid metaphor that do not actually say anything interesting, and spurious claims about the future. I gave up milking meaning from this stone about halfway through.

[archidose-991096 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Not long ago I was telling my ten-year-old daughter about the early days of the internet, back in the early 1990s, when the future of cyberspace was unknown. It was an optimistic time, with many people (it seemed) seeing the internet as a truly free "space" untainted by commercial concerns. The internet my daughter knows is far from that optimistic vision, with every website, app, game, or other networked creation saturated with advertising, purchases, and the like. Having come of age as an adult when the internet evolved, I find the current reality unfortunate but also unavoidable; the latter given the enormous number of people going online and therefore the enormous potential for companies to make money. With our waking lives split between work, home, and transit, and the internet having infiltrated each aspect, our only relief from being told what to buy (or our actions -- our browsing and seeing -- making money for others) is found in sleep. But Jonathan Crary writes that this apparently impenetrable part of our everyday lives could someday be infiltrated by military and/or neoliberal entities. If doubtful, just think of how smartphones have transformed our sleep, with many people checking their phones in the middle of a night's sleep. Or of how images we absorb during the day may enter our dreams alongside those formed from our "real-life" experiences. By delving into various aspects of our 24/7 reality via numerous philosophical foundations, Crary made me consider how apparently free choices are determined to a large degree by corporations seeking profit, but also how those same corporations have limitations (for now) over how much of our lives they impact.