The Abolition of Night

The abolition of night is the long arc of temporal colonization that Crary traces in 24/7. The project begins with gas lighting in early nineteenth-century European cities — the first technology to extend the productive day past sundown. Electric illumination in the late nineteenth century completed what gas had begun. The telephone abolished the distinction between present and absent. Radio and television colonized domestic time. Email colonized the interval between tasks. The smartphone colonized the pocket, the bathroom, the bed. The AI collaborator, arriving in the winter of 2025, completes the sequence by eliminating the last remaining form of temporal friction in the creative process: the gap between having an idea and being able to build it.