PERSON
Jonathan Crary
The cultural theorist who proved that technologies of perception do not merely assist the observer but produce a new kind of observer—and who, in 24/7, named the 24-hour assault on sleep as capitalism’s final frontier.
The question Jonathan Crary has asked across three decades of scholarship is deceptively simple: what kind of person does a technology of vision produce? His 1990 book
Techniques of the Observer demonstrated that the camera obscura did not help seventeenth-century Europeans see better—it made them into a new kind of observer, isolated, monocular, separated from the world by the very apparatus that claimed to represent it. The stereotype and the smartphone follow the same logic, and Crary became indispensable to anyone trying to think about
large language models before they knew it. His 2013 masterwork
24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep traced the two-century project of abolishing the temporal boundaries between work and rest—from Edison’s contempt for sleep through the smartphone’s colonization of the pocket—arriving, a decade before the
[YOU] on AI moment, at a diagnosis of a world in which every hour of human life had been made available for economic extraction. What he could