24/7 – Jonathan Crary

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 market time.”

a mordant retaliatory of razor-sharp rejectionist reason & intellectual scold. Professor Crary wields a formidable blade & spares none of our techno-dystopian intentionally incapacitating nightmare’s piss-poor explanations, factual twisting & justificatory tropes from the lacerating edge.

His argument (or gripe if you will) & the books dominant subject are “sleep” & how this essential & precious process of restoration & stasis in consumption-capacity is at odds with an ever invasive & ever increasing chronic consumerist capitalist crematory that demands greater & greater attention from ‘coerced customers’. His analysis is incredible, wonderfully strident & radical constantly avulsing the euphemistic & deflective layers of carefully engineered PR camo from the beasts face & shredding them with verity, factual clarity & moral stamina. This is a figure that refuses to capitulate to the mandatory-technological-advancements & market derived societal/behavioural integrations/impositions that vested-interest experts & technogarchs insist are essential unavoidable/inevitable & liberating despite the incapacitations & intellectual injury they constantly produce. Bold, exact, brilliantly defined & without mercy or apology he gallops through a landscape of lies, failure, duping & unfathomable technological ulterior malevolence – brutally dispatching the machines misinforming minions whilst bellowing the vital values of the human being that are being so trampled, corrupted & raped by the modern toil-substitutionary-consumerist patented-poisoned-chalice. This guy really is astute & remorseless in his slaying of bullshit – It feels like a great warrior running riot amongst an enemy encampment just cutting the spokesmen & conmen down in their droves. “Billions of dollars are spent every year researching how to reduce decision-making time, how to eliminate the useless time of reflection & contemplation. This is the form of contemporary progress – the relentless capture and control of time and experience.”

further more –

a generously funded research field of optical-ergonomics has been in place for some time. Passively and often voluntarily, one now collaborates in one’s own surveillance and data-mining” – “ the most advanced forms of surveillance and data analysis used by intelligence agencies are now equally indispensable to the marketing strategies of large business”

and onwards –

everyone, we are told – not just business and institutions – needs an “online presence,” needs 24/7 exposure, to avoid social irrelevance or professional failure. But the promotion of these alleged benefits is a cover for the transfer of most social relations into monetized and quantifiable forms. It is equally a shift of individual life to conditions in which privacy is impossible, and in which one becomes a permanent site of data-harvesting and surveillance. One accumulates a patchwork of surrogate identities that subsist 24/7, sleeplessly, continuously, as inanimate impersonations rather than extensions of the self.”

scalding! Urgent! & not’s to be fucked with!

Author: Jonathan Crary

Publisher: Verso Books