PERSON
Jonathan Crary
American cultural theorist whose 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (2013) documented the cultural assault on the last temporal domain not available for production — and whose framework Wajcman extends into the analysis of how AI tools complete the colonization.
Jonathan Crary is an American cultural theorist at Columbia University whose 2013 book 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep argued that the distinctive temporal logic of contemporary capitalism was the systematic elimination of temporal domains not available for production. The book's focus was sleep — the last temporal holdout that could not be converted into productive time — but the analysis extended to leisure, contemplation, boredom, and every other domain where human beings had traditionally existed without producing. Crary's framework provides an important complement to Wajcman's temporal analysis and anchors the analysis of AI's specific intensification of temporal colonization.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Crary's central argument was that late capitalism had produced a temporal environment in which the boundary between work and rest had been dissolved not by employer mandate but by the elimination of any temporal domain that was not available for production. The 24/7 condition was