Jonathan Crary

In the AI Story

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 not merely longer working hours but the systematic degradation of the temporal conditions — darkness, separation, boundedness — that had traditionally marked non-productive time as non-productive.

Sleep, in Crary's analysis, held a special position as the last holdout: the final temporal domain that could not be converted into productive time, the only activity humans perform that resists commodification entirely. The book documented the cultural assault on sleep through pharmaceutical interventions, the colonization of nighttime by 24-hour services, the military research into sleep-elimination techniques, and the broader cultural imperative to optimize every hour for productive use.

For AI analysis, Crary's framework is directly applicable with a crucial modification. Where earlier technologies made the productive domain available at all hours — the email that could be checked at midnight, the smartphone that could be used during the commute — AI tools make the productive domain actively compelling at all hours. The midnight email is a chore; the midnight build session with Claude can be a peak experience. This makes the colonization Crary documented far more difficult to resist, because the resistance requires the person to voluntarily forgo something that feels like the best version of themselves in favor of something that feels, by comparison, like inactivity.

Wajcman's extension of Crary's framework focuses on the specific mechanism through which AI completes the temporal colonization he diagnosed. If 24/7 capitalism made production possible at all hours, AI-era capitalism makes production compelling at all hours. The distinction matters because the remedies differ. Crary's critique pointed toward structural interventions that would re-establish the temporal boundaries late capitalism had dissolved. Wajcman's extension suggests that these interventions must now address not only the external availability of productive demands but the internal compulsion that AI's engagement patterns produce.

Crary's later work, particularly Scorched Earth (2022), extended the analysis into the ecological dimensions of digital capitalism, arguing that the temporal colonization he had documented in 24/7 was inseparable from the material extraction required to sustain the digital infrastructure that made 24/7 operation possible. The framework provides a bridge to ecological analyses of AI's material costs that Wajcman's work does not centrally address but that complement her temporal analysis.

Origin

Crary completed his PhD at Columbia in 1987 and has spent most of his career there, where he is currently Meyer Schapiro Professor of Modern Art and Theory. His earlier work on visual perception and modernity — Techniques of the Observer (1990) and Suspensions of Perception (1999) — established him as a leading theorist of attention and its relation to technology.

The turn to explicit political critique in 24/7 represented a development of the earlier attention analysis into the specifically political-economic register that has characterized his subsequent work.

Key Ideas

Sleep is the last holdout. Among all human activities, sleep alone resists commodification entirely and therefore marks the outer limit of capitalism's temporal colonization.

24/7 is an ideology, not a schedule. The temporal logic of late capitalism produces not merely longer hours but the systematic elimination of temporal domains where production is not occurring.

Cultural imperatives produce individual pressure. The 24/7 condition operates not primarily through employer mandates but through cultural norms that treat every unproductive hour as waste.

AI completes the colonization. Where earlier technologies made production available at all hours, AI makes production compelling at all hours, closing the remaining gap.

Ecological and temporal colonization are connected. The digital infrastructure that sustains 24/7 operation requires material extraction whose costs are distributed unevenly across the global economy.