Sleep Deprivation Torture

According to Crary, work (essentially ‘being set to work’) leads to a more docile, controlled form of life because our social reconstruction puts us in a position that could only be described as eager submission to the corporate cycle¬–essentially transforming us into drones. The 21st century now operates 24/7 around the clock, pushing us to constant activity and crumbling the binds of community, essentially damaging the basis of everyday life.

Society’s demand for our time essentially shapes our schedule, which in turn shapes our values. We willingly participate in producing profits for corporations by making media consumption part of our everyday lives. Our output as individuals is dependent on our consumption of material from smartphones

to television to Googling information. Mass synchronization is the key idea here.
The 21st century now operates around the clock, forcing us into a state of constant activities and crumbling the binds of community, essentially damaging the original values of everyday life. Since the industrial revolution, the value of “community” has taken a turn. Going from small, one-room schoolhouse communities to big blustering cities greatly transformed how we interact with one another. Expanding these small towns into cities essentially obliterated Gemeinschaft and introduced Gesellschaft, transforming community into a large group of socially isolated individuals. Before the 1960’s, “happiness could be unrelated to ownership, to acquiring products, or to individual status, and could instead emerge directly out of the shared life and action of groups” (Crary 113). Fast forward twenty years later; Crary says, “the 1980s saw the start of a sustained campaign to turn material poverty into something shameful and repellent” (113). With the introduction of the smartphones and social media, our social circles have expanded to a global scale, pushing us further and further into a state of social isolation. The introduction of the smartphone essentially represents Crary’s grasp of the social conversion that has taken place in the past century, also commonly referred to as neoliberalism. According to Creary, “Through the unlimited possibilities of filtering and customization, individuals in close physical proximity can inhibit incommensurable and non-communicating universes. However, the vast majority of these micro worlds, despite their patently different content, have a monotonous sameness in their temporal patterns and segmentations” (54). Mass synchronization, though effectively connecting us with more people, is, in fact, amplifying distance and destroying the collective experience. With social isolation and presence on the web, self-awareness has increased tenfold. We’re constantly updating statuses, editing photos and posting about our lives 24/7, making us more and more self-conscious and desperate for social validation via “likes” and attention on the web. Because we’re more connected –and, in turn, more self-aware¬¬– our vulnerabilities become totally accessible to the overarching desires of corporate America. We buy the makeup, we watch the hottest TV shows, and we wear the clothes and listen to the bands. We are constantly checking our statuses, sharing links, working, shopping, and eating. Our activity never seems to cease. In our constant fear of social rejection, we become completely unaware that our minds are enslaved by consumerism –or, as Crary would put it, “mass amnesia sustained by the culture of global capitalism”– and that we are, in fact, a mass society of socially isolated individuals. By being a mass society of socially isolated individuals, our desires are easily manipulated. In this way, we are prime targets for consumerism, willingly submitting to the corporate cycle, and transforming us into docile, compliant consumers.
According to Crary, sleep ‘stands for’ other social concerns because we often negate basic consideration for human rights in coherence with sleep.
The rapid deterioration of demand for human (living) labor doesn’t give much incentive for businesses to give much concern to health care, as rest and health pales in comparison to their economic priorities. Crary writes that “time for human rest and regeneration is now simply too expensive to be structurally possible within contemporary capitalism” (15). “Bioderegulation”, a term invented by Teresa Brennan to “describe the brutal discrepancies between the temporal operation of deregulated markets and the intrinsic physical limitations of the humans required to conform to these demands.” (15).
Society’s lack of care for sleep is also concerning when considering ethical standpoints regarding torture.

Crary states “the denial of sleep is the violent dispossession of self by external force, the calculated shattering of an individual”. Studies also show that “rats will die after two to three weeks of sleeplessness”, clearly illustrating how dangerous and wrong depriving an individual of sleep truly is, yet “numerous opinion polls show that a majority of Americans approve of [sleep deprivation] torture” and “mainstream media discussions consistently reject the assertion that sleep deprivation is torture, rather, it is considered “psychological persuasion”. The use of sleep deprivation torture in Guantanamo, and the fact that this form was authorized by the pentagon brings gives is concerning when thinking about ethical values regarding basic human

rights.
Sleep, like water, also seems to be universally hard to come by.

Crary writes, “just as universal access to clean drinking water has been programmatically devastated around the globe by pollution and privatization, with the accompanying monetization of bottled water, it is not difficult to see a similar construction of scarcity in relation to sleep.” Sleep is essentially put on the back burner when outlining values for conventional life. This can clearly be seen by the statistics of rapidly increasing use/sales of hypnotics, for example, “in 2010 around 50 million Americans were prescribed compounds like Ambien or Lunesta, and many millions more bought over-the-counter sleep products”. It’s hard to believe that use of these products would allow people to experience the same benefits of an actual good night’s rest. It’s concerning to think of our increasing dependence on drugs like hypnotics and amphetamines to simply get though the week. Essentially we are BUYING our sleep, and BUYING our time awake, how is this ethical when concerning basic human rights? It’s concerning to think how well we actually function as humans considering this drug use. Crary states, “to believe that there are any essential features to distinguish human beings from machines is, we are told by critics, naive and delusional” (14), which calls to mind the question, at what point does this take away from our

humanity?
All in all, as Crary states, “as the corrosion of sleep intensifies, it may become clearer how the solicitude that is essential for the sleeper is not qualitatively different from the protectiveness that is required by more immediately obvious and acute forms of social suffering” (28). Sleep, it seems, is hard to come by, and proper rest has no monetary value. As a result, we negate basic human rights with regard to sleep.