Sleep Mode
This essay was originally published in October 2021 as part of the catalogue for 24/7, an exhibition by Eugenia Lim at STATION Gallery. The exhibition presented a new body of sculptural work that explored sleep as the final frontier of late capitalism.
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In March this year, Google launched the Nest Hub 2 smart display. Part of ‘ongoing efforts to support people’s health and happiness’, its headline feature is a ‘Sleep Sensing’ system powered by Soli, a proprietary miniaturised radar technology. As the bedside device bathes its somnolent human subject in low power radio waves, an algorithm activates ‘cough and snore tracking’ audio sensors, feeding nocturnal soundscapes, ambient room conditions, and millimetre precise movement data into a machine learning model that analyses sleep patterns. The recent profusion of sleep-tracking apps—part of a burgeoning global sleep-wellness industry projected to generate revenues of more than $135 billion by 2023—has led to the rise of a new clinical disorder. In a ‘perfectionist quest to achieve perfect sleep’, individuals afflicted with orthosomnia are seeking treatment for self-diagnosed sleep disturbances to optimise their daytime efficiency.¹
Radar was originally developed as a defence technology. As Jonathan Crary notes at the outset of 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, ‘war-related innovations are inevitably assimilated into a broader social sphere’, connecting military-industrial research to forge the ‘sleepless soldier’ with the emergence of a pervasive 24/7 environment for continuous work and consumption that demands a similar model of machinic performance.² Central to Crary’s claim that sleep represents one of the great human affronts to the voraciousness of contemporary capitalism—until sleep itself is subjected to the tyranny of productivity metrics—is the relationship between time and financialisation. Even as we exist in a state of continual disequilibrium produced in the disjunction between the biological contours of circadian rhythms and the temporalities of networked systems, our waking hours are ever more aligned with the uninterrupted functioning of markets and the relentless commodification of ‘previously autonomous spheres of social activity’.³
Eugenia Lim, Sleep no more (Zonotrichia leucophrys gambelii), 2021
According to Crary, the intrusion of the market into what were once unannexed times and spaces has naturalised the inequality of scale between global systems and individual, circumscribed lives. In a range of recent works by Eugenia Lim—including ON DEMAND (2019), EASY RIDERS (2021, with APHIDS), and The People’s Currency (2017)—we see this same scalar tension reframed as an opportunity to explore new forms of solidarity and mutuality that might emerge from the diverse lived experiences of an atomised, but interdependent, 24/7 world. Whether focused on the precarious urban terrain of the gig economy rider, or the Shenzhen factories that form crucial nodes in enveloping processes of global consumption, Lim asks us to acknowledge how we are implicated in the externalities produced by these systems, and seeks to create space in her work for resistance and collective agency despite the erosion of organised labour and the dehumanising algorithmic logic shaping large swathes of the contemporary digital economy.
By rendering the invisible visible—or in the case of the pieces that comprise 24/7, a deliberate absence of the corporeal labour (from fulfilment workers to ‘Flex’ drivers) on which Amazon’s world domination is built—Lim’s work plays an important role in highlighting the sprawling, always-on infrastructure required to sustain our on-demand desires. Jesse LeCavalier has suggested the advent of this architecture of fulfilment reflects a new era of ‘logistification’ as transformative as earlier periods of industrialisation, mechanisation, and automation. Aiming to ‘flatten, connect, smooth, and lubricate’—necessitating predictability and control—logistical practices, which reach their zenith in the anticipatory AI models driving Amazon’s end-to-end inventory management, work to produce an overspecified version of the world that ‘leaves as little room for chance as possible’.⁴ While media tend to fixate on performative experiments in hyper-local futurism like drone delivery (another military-civilian transfer), it is in more mundane industrial estates where the planetary scale pursuit of seamless efficiency results in the dismantling or mutation of structural obstacles like national borders and labour laws.
Eugenia Lim, Leisure Wear/Work Wear, 2021
Within Amazon’s vast network of fulfilment centres, labour hire casuals are expected to maintain a constant ‘Amazon pace’ somewhere between a brisk walk and a jog, their performance monitored to the second.⁵ As humans rapidly cede space in these facilities to indefatigable robots, the dream of machinic functioning persists in ‘emotional wellbeing’ initiatives like the AmaZen booth, where harried and anxious workers are encouraged to steal a moment to ‘recharge [their] internal battery’, a restorative metaphor usually applied to the therapeutic qualities of sleep.⁶ Four months after Amazon unveiled—and quickly deleted—its AmaZen announcement, reports emerged that founder Jeff Bezos was an early stage investor in Altos Labs, an anti-ageing startup aspiring to reverse time through biological reprogramming at the cellular level.⁷ By literally recharging his internal battery, Bezos is part of a small club of super-rich men hoping to outrun death, achieving the ‘escape velocity’ necessary to live forever.
Borrowed from celestial mechanics, this metaphysical leap beyond the limits of a prevailing gravitational force was also evoked in a collection on accelerationist aesthetics published the same year as 24/7.⁸ Left accelerationism, popularised by Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek amid the stasis of the post-crash Occupy movement, is animated by a belief that the infrastructure of techno-capitalism represents a platform capable of being repurposed towards collective ends, taking seriously Frederic Jameson’s provocation that Walmart can be understood as a form of utopia.⁹ While the term has since been mired in associations with an anti-humanist technophilia and even far right extremism, Williams and Srnicek’s insistence on the emancipatory possibilities of digital technologies harnessed to progressive politics—reflected in key demands like full automation, a reduced working week, and universal basic income—aligns with an emerging web of ideas, encompassing everything from xenofeminism to platform cooperativism, which offers a potent vision of an alternative future.
Much of this energy is being actively channelled into sketching the outlines of a post-work world (including accounting for the unpaid labour of social reproduction), where the reclamation of ‘temporal autonomy’ creates the conditions for the return of sleep to our everyday reality.¹⁰ In Greek mythology, the god of sleep, Hypnos, was the twin brother of death. Despite its association with the underworld, sleep was not only interpreted by ancient writers as a time of psychic healing, but also a way of cheating death and attaining a form of immortality.¹¹ That is, sleep was not a way to avoid life, but to embrace it.
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1. Kelly Glazer Baron et al, ‘Orthosomnia: Are Some Patients Taking the Quantified Self Too Far?’, Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine, vol. 13 no. 2 (2017).
2. Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (2013) 3.
3. ibid 74.
4. Jesse LeCavalier, The Rule of Logistics: Walmart and the Architecture of Fulfilment (2016) 7.
5. Patrick Hatch, ‘In Amazon’s “Hellscape”, Workers Face Insecurity and Crushing Targets’, Sydney Morning Herald (7 September 2018).
6. Matthew Gault, ‘Amazon Introduces Tiny “ZenBooths” for Stressed-Out Warehouse Workers’, VICE (28 May 2021.
7. Antonio Regalado, ‘Meet Altos Labs, Silicon Valley’s Latest Wild Bet on Living Forever’, MIT Technology Review (4 September 2010).
8. Alex Williams, ‘Escape Velocities’, e-flux Journal, no. 46 (2013).
9. See Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek, Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics (2013); Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek, Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work (2015); Frederic Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic (2009) 421.
10. Helen Hester, ‘Family Matters: In the Bubble of the Nuclear Household’, Architectural Review, no. 1479 (March 2021).
11. Helen Askitopoulou, ‘Sleep and Dreams: From Myth to Medicine in Ancient Greece’, Journal of Anesthesia History, no. 1 (2015) 71.