24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep

24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (Verso, 2013) traces a two-century project: the systematic abolition of temporal boundaries between production and rest, engagement and withdrawal, day and night. The book begins with gas lighting in early nineteenth-century European cities and moves through electric illumination, the telephone, radio, television, the personal computer, email, and the smartphone — each technology progressively narrowing the temporal space in which a human being could exist without producing, consuming, or being available for production and consumption. Sleep, as the last remaining territory of human life that resisted capture, became the book's focal point and the diagnostic instrument through which the larger project became visible.