How often do you feel the need to take a break, rest, or sleep, only to be faced with the perception that it would be a waste of time? This perception triggers self-criticism, making you feel like you’re not putting in enough effort to succeed. This response isn’t normal; it results from years of projects and experiments shaped by modern capitalism. After successfully commodifying most human necessities, rest and sleep became an incongruous anomaly—an interval of time the ruling elites failed to colonize and reshape into a financialized form. How did they disrupt our private time and commercialize sleep for profit? How did we evolve from individuals who were available for a maximum of twelve hours per day into beings that are connected 24/7, with little rest or personal time? How does this new reality impact us physically and psychologically? What additional challenges does this new reality impose on us? Many are the questions that we pose ourselves as we witness a transition into a new era that might be called Techno-Feudalism.
In the past decade, there have been various approaches and experiments conducted in the United States of America, hoping to reduce the daily amount of sleep needed without affecting optimal functioning. The research, conducted by NASA and the US army, varied from taking short naps to enhance alertness without needing longer sleep periods, to controlled sleep restriction, caffeine use, the use of bright lights to simulate daylight during nighttime hours, sleeping pods, and even genetic mutation. These experiments aimed to create an efficient sleepless soldier who would be the forerunner of the sleepless worker or consumer. This notion, projected into labor, normalizes the idea of working without a break nor limit.
The electronic revolution we are living in promised more personal freedom and the ability to fulfill one’s desires and dreams, living life to the fullest. However, it seems to be doing the exact opposite, opening the door to unlimited desires that were impossible to even imagine a decade ago and tying us to our screens, altering our brain chemistry, and abolishing our state of rest. Individuals get bombarded with unlimited and unnecessary needs that are nearly impossible to satisfy, however advertised as possible in a world where resting is gratuitous and sleeping is for losers. Several studies have shown that the average adult sleeps approximately seven hours a night, a decline from eight hours a generation ago, compared to ten hours in the 19th century prior to the industrial revolution and the adoption of longer and more rigid work schedules.
This technological progress moves in one direction; it cannot be reversed. After the smartphone was introduced to the masses, they became dependent on it, spending unnatural amounts of time behind the screen, a phenomenon that can’t be changed unless dominated by a more advanced innovation. Not only did individuals become more dependent on the electronic world, but the system as a whole became dependent on it, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. Several research studies have shown that screen time among adults increased by 60% to 80% compared to pre-pandemic levels.
With the help of the pandemic, the whole world transitioned from the real physical world to the digital world. The individual’s personal and social identity has been reorganized to conform to the digital world with its system of uninterrupted markets and information flow. This world, having the semblance of a social world, and the opportunity to recreate your personality, has suspended our living, turning it into a mechanical performance in which we assimilate an ever-expanding surfeit of data, images, services, and chemicals to a toxic and fatal point.
In “The Human Condition”, Hannah Arendt explains how we live in a rhythmic balance between the exhaustion resulting from labor or activity in the world and the regeneration that regularly occurs within enclosed domesticity. We’ve been robbed of this shaded, private time we need to regenerate. The “products” we were sold were hardly just devices, they were various services that quickly became a dominant part of one’s social reality due to our submission to them caused by the fear of falling behind and being deemed outdated. Our lives have become an ever-expanding number of routines that no one has effectively chosen. Within barely two decades, a mass change happened to people’s lives from activity to immobility; billions of people started spending hours, day and night, in front of light-emitting screens instead of the various ways time was spent, narrowing sensory responsiveness.
This excessive and prolonged screen time has disastrous physical, psychological, and emotional consequences. Physically, the blue light emitted by screens can disrupt the circadian rhythm, leading to poor quality of sleep. In addition, it can cause dry eyes, headaches, and poor posture leading to neck and shoulder pain. Psychologically, constant use of social media and multitasking can lead to a decrease in attention span and difficulty concentrating in other areas of life. The consumption of large amounts of data can result in mental fatigue, stress and anxiety due to constant comparison, and addiction to technology. Emotionally, the decrease in face-to-face interactions and excessive screen time can lead to weaker social bonds and emotional disconnection, resulting in loneliness and social isolation. Not to forget that the idealized posted versions of other people’s lives can make a lot of people feel inadequate and less happy with their situation.
Instead of a string of places and events associated with family and relationships, the main thread of one’s life is the electronic platforms through which all experience has been filtered, recorded, or constructed. This phenomenon degrades any local event as real-life activities that don’t have an online importance cease to be relevant. Institutions and individuals need 24/7 exposure online to avoid professional failure.
This shift of individual life to conditions in which privacy is impossible, transformed individuals into permanent sites of data harvesting and surveillance. The most advanced forms of data analysis used by intelligence agencies are now indispensable for the marketing strategies of businesses. As shown in the documentary “The Social Dilemma” (2020), screens track eye movements as well as durations of interest in streams of information, which enables every move done in front of a screen to be quantified and analyzes to create a more accurate environment that sucks in the individual and encourages them to consume more and become more addicted due to the dopamine release.
When the industrial revolution took power from landowners in feudal states, it gave it to the owners of means of production and channeled all economic activity through markets that didn’t exist in feudalism. This transformation is occurring again, where, after the global economic crash in 2008, the technology sector was heavily invested in throughout the globe, which has led to the rise of Techno-Feudalism. Today, we work on digital platforms owned by tech giants or “feudal lords” who control nearly every aspect of our lives. Instead of crops, we provide them with our data and a portion of our earnings. For instance, every time you use Google, Apple, Uber, Spotify, or Amazon, a percentage of the price you pay is retained as “cloud rent” by their owners, which parallels ground rent in feudal terms. However, the profits generated for these techno-lords do not circulate back into the economic system as they traditionally would, but instead accumulate as capital for those lords. This lack of fluidity in the system forces central banks to print more money, which leads to the rise of inflation and the depreciation of job and life quality.
Time itself became monetized as human rest and regeneration is now too expensive to be possible in the current system of attention economy, which dissolves all separation between personal and professional, entertainment and information. Without the time of privacy away from the exposure of public activity and others, a time now stolen from us, there is no possibility of self-improvement and growth. These algorithms, which could be useful, are held by very few people whose job is to maximize “cloud rent” by transferring social relations into monetized and quantifiable forms, thus poisoning people and ruining their lives. This system doesn’t exist to satisfy human needs, it is human behavior that is being modified to fit a system that stresses and burns out the individual under such conditions, a problem that is only addressed by curing the symptoms instead of solving the root of the problem.
Edited By Christy Abou Saad and Amin Kharrat