American art critic and author Jonathan Crary explores the true depth, scale, and devastating effects of technological disruption. Crary is a professor of Modern Art and Theory at Columbia University and was originally known as a chronicler and theorist of the onset of perceptual modernity, charting the multifarious effects of new media technologies on our human senses. With his 2014 book 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, where the extremes of our current accelerated techno-modernity are explored through the figures of insomnia and exhaustion, Crary expanded his reach. This short book bore witness to Crary’s polemical flair and the originality of his premise, and it resonated into media studies, philosophy of technology, and debates in a variety of other fields.
Crary’s most recent book, Scorched Earth: Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World (2022), paints a jarring portrait of the unholy alliance of capital and the internet. Crary calls the Digital Age a “disastrous terminal stage of global capitalism.” In a foray into damaged landscapes, the book gathers evidence for the shattering of our natural, social, and perceptual worlds, and fits them together in a provocatively dismal picture of our era. At the same time, it is a plea for us to recognise and protect features of our personal life-worlds and sensibility, which might go extinct before we even realise they should be red-listed.
In preparing for this interview, I set out to discuss the world-historical future of the internet and the position of the critic in a time overwhelmed by the quasi-material forces of our technological infrastructures. In our video conversation – ironically haunted by technological mishaps – Crary circles around the emergence of his latest books, the impulses that led him to write them, and the reactions they have elicited.
All your books are about how our perception changes and our world changes with it, through the progression of new technologies in the modern era. While these themes are constant, there is a notable gap with respect to style and method between your books from the 90s and your two latest titles 24/7 and Scorched Earth, which are more rhetorical and appear more intended to stir up debate. What got you into this pamphlet-like form of writing?
The two books that I wrote on nineteenth-century visual culture both took shape through relatively familiar research processes. Each of them involved long periods of reading and immersion in the physical space of libraries.
I was in the middle of working on a book about Turner’s art when the opportunity to write 24/7 arose. I had been preoccupied with one particular painting by Turner, called Regulus [1828/1837]. The title refers to a Roman general during the Punic wars who was captured by the enemy, and before he was put to death they cut off his eyelids as part of the punishment. And Turner produced this extraordinary rendering of an incandescent sun above the harbour and towers of a city. But it’s a disturbing image that’s meant to put you as the spectator in the position of a doomed captive, looking at the sun with no eyelids, in other words, of facing the blinding solar glare with no way to evade that brightness.
I began to think about some of the larger implications of what it would mean to imagine incessant illumination as a fatal or terminal experience. Seeing without eyelids means that you don’t have that on and off, that rhythmic human experience of the eyelid that closes and opens, closes and opens. So I was led to think about this duality, along with other binary oppositions – like day and night, waking and sleeping – that were a crucial part of the pre-modern world. Now we’re living in a world of light, heat, and constant activity that is never turned off. And the human body is left to fend for itself within the midst of these new conditions that are not allowing rest, that don’t afford protection. It’s a world where there is no off-switch, so to speak, a world in which sleep is no longer an inevitable necessity, but rather becomes an aberration in relationship to all of the machinic and data-driven processes that operate non-stop.
I was impressed by idea of a double bind in modern life that you set forth in 24/7, but also in your earlier work, where we are constantly disciplined toward an intensification of our productive capacity through concentration, while, on the other hand, also subject to this pressure of distraction that is pulling us in the opposite direction.
Yes, this is a pervasive reality. At the same time, concentration and attention have their temporal limits. There is a point after which it becomes impossible to keep attending to something, when there is a need for a break. I used this idea to explore the incompatibility of the 24/7 world of capitalist production with sleep and recuperation, those essential rhythms of on and off, of labor and its pause, which human life and the Earth need for survival. I explored these ideas through films, literature, technology, political events, and popular culture, in a way that allowed me to depart from more academic framings of a problem.
In 24/7 you write about how sleeplessness has become an epidemic, while at the same time sleep is perceived as a waste of time, an obstacle to productivity that can be minimised. The resulting problem of exhaustion and burnout, which is really the loss of capacity to regenerate, comes back in your new book Scorched Earth, where the techno-capitalist colonisation of the inner and the outer world leads to a kind of desertification, leaving behind a wasteland.
In one sense, you can say that I mapped out the idea that we live in a 24/7 world, and now, five or six years later, we are seeing the consequences of that.
Colonies are all about extraction of resources: gold, spice, timber, cotton, sugar, muscle power. It continues today with the extraction of cognitive work, attention, personal data. But even in the logic of colonisers, there must be some concern with keeping the colonised subject alive and working. Where do we draw the line between colonisation and plunder, raw and simple?
Well, that’s a huge question, and we’d have to look back to the 1500s and some of the initial projects of conquest, genocide, and extraction. We are only now waking up to the global and environmental consequences of five hundred years of European/North American hegemony. In the book, I have a brief interlude about Western science and how today there is an effective prohibition on any historical or ideological critique of science. We’ve elevated it into a sanctified sphere of objective truths. Climate change has been positioned as this problem for which Western science has the answer or will have it soon. The reality is that modern science, as shaped by the needs of capitalism, bears much responsibility for damaging the earth system. As it took shape in the 17th and 18th centuries, Western science was a crucial underpinning of white supremacy and misogyny, as well as for the instrumental reduction of the natural world into raw material for exploitation.
In addition to your critique of science, you present an all-out critique of the internet. A part of your logic in the latter critique is a claim that it is at this point naive to think that the internet could simply change hands, that we can have a better or more benign, non-exploitative, internet. You call it “the internet complex,” in reference to the military industrial complex: something that has attained a momentum and logic of its own and that no one really controls anymore. Plausible as all this seems in general terms, it is an enormous challenge you set for yourself and the reader, to imagine a coming world-historical period where the internet is not a ubiquitous, all- encompassing part of our lives. How would we even begin to withdraw or retreat?
Right now there aren’t many ways in which most people can realistically withdraw. My argument is that the internet and late-stage financialised global capitalism are synonymous and intrinsically co-dependent. Without the economic framework of capitalism, the internet would either collapse or morph into something diminished and unrecognisable from what it is today. I cite a few of the many theorists who see the precariousness and unsustainability of capitalism, such as Robert Kurz, Wolfgang Streeck, and David Graeber. The internet will be with us as long as capitalism remains an operative system. But should it persist, the likelihood of catastrophic planetary disaster becomes a certainty.
But even if the question is too binary and simple, it is nonetheless interesting because you’re touching on the notion of an historical inevitability that is so deeply connected with the internet and – I think – felt by everyone. Not only do we depend on these technologies, but they are changing, and we need to keep up with them. There are many things that sort of makes it into the ultimate “apparatus of capture,” to use Deleuze and Guattari’s phrase.
My response to that widespread sense of inevitability and resignation was to draw on the historical tradition of the political pamphlet. I wanted to craft a text that would be a provocation, that would incite strong reactions. There are perhaps a few thousand books that have been written about the internet and social media during the last ten or fifteen years, books that pursue some kind of critical engagement with the problems, downside, or perils of the technology that everyone is working and living with. But 99 per cent of that mountain of books conclude with remedial proposals about how we can improve things, lessen the pathologies of social media or somehow enact restrictions on surveillance and data mining. They all presume that the internet is “here to stay.” Instead, I wanted to pose the idea of radical refusal in relation to a system that is utterly unreformable. Interestingly, the response to the book has been much stronger outside the English-speaking world, for example in Brazil.
It is striking that countries with strong and, in fact, ongoing colonial experiences better recognise your stark descriptions of the global situation as their own. The Western mind is to some extent cocooned in a very safe space where we are not really confronted with the real consequences of not only the internet, but global capitalism and its capacity to suck the life out of living landscapes, of rural and Indigenous cultures. And what it does to the social fabric is not readily obvious to everyone in the Global North.
For better or for worse. I’m writing within the context of North America, and I think it’s important to see the internet as having some distinctly American features to it. There’s something intrinsically American about the model of the solitary participant in the system. The way in which the internet and social media are used now is an extension of what’s been part of American culture for a very long time: the celebration of the autonomous individual who has no fundamental dependence on a community. That’s the pathological underside of American “freedom,” conceived as freedom from responsibility to other people. But that model, as much as it’s been exported globally, is simply not tenable. There are places in the Global South, for example, where for all the ways in which global capitalism has damaged the fabric of social relations there’s still a way in which some of the substance of community and of kinship persists in spite of the atomisation that the marketplace and commodification demands.
This brings us to the core metaphor of the book, that of the “scorched earth,” which refers to the military strategy where you destroy resources and infrastructure that could be useful for the enemy as you retreat. What you seem to say is that this is the point where colonisation is at now: more and more things need to be destroyed for modernity to push on – not just freedom, but the very capability to live and thrive. It keeps happening in the external world, but it is increasingly a matter of social and psychological regenerative powers being devastated because their very substrate is harmed beyond repair. To what extent does the metaphor of the earth as a substrate correspond to the substrate of social life, the body or the psyche as something that guarantees growth?
Yes, clearly these correspondences are there. I drew on some of the nuances of the word “scorch.” It comes from the Old French “escorcher,” which can mean to flay something, tear the skin off. More recently, it can mean to heat or burn the surface of a material so that the colour is eradicated or shriveled away, and that’s part of what I took away from it: a scorched earth is not one that is totally destroyed, but it is terribly diminished and disfigured, divested of its colour, its sensory richness. It’s about dispossessing society and the natural world of those textures that support the ways in which people subsist and connect with each other, and can have experiences of beauty and the interconnectedness of living beings. Certain kinds of experiences are damaged by the kinds of depleted perceptual environments that we’re mandated to inhabit on a daily basis. I feel like I’m sketching out the possibility of a kind of aesthetic critique, but also an ethical one, of capitalism’s manufacture of a scorched earth.
So, what we are talking about, in a sense, is the appropriation, domestication, and dominance of spontaneous communication and exchange, whether it is that between organisms in nature or between humans in a society. You speak of the demeaning experience of constantly being reduced to numbers, to likes, to shares, to dollars…
The philosopher Alain Badiou has talked about how global neoliberal culture has divested people of having a purpose, or of even having ideas. In a sense, we are becoming emptied of many of the elements that constituted forms of self-awareness in other earlier moments of modernity. Which brings me back to 24/7 because there I was considering the fate of both reverie and daydreaming in our lives today. The creative flux and drift of daydreaming is being extinguished by the enforced receptivity to whatever happens to be on our screens. It is interesting because people used to say, “oh, you are being nostalgic for an earlier era,” whereas now people are beginning to realise that there are some serious consequences to the way in which the new texture of perception is imposed on people.
Do you feel that you touch on a taboo with respect to talking like a Luddite or being anti-technology and so forth?
I’ve actually heard very little of that, and I think this a symptom of how techno-cheerleading is less and less credible. Not even the negative reviews of the book go in that direction. Rather, they say that “Crary makes some good points, but he goes too far, he’s too extreme,” you know, things like that. Uncritically endorsing the impact of digital technologies is less and less an option for anyone presuming to being a serious thinker. But at the same time, as I said earlier, criticism is acceptable only if it’s moderate and reformist.
Technology is apparently always made to help us. But it is always two-sided.
When I talk to groups of students or artists, one of the things they ask is what are some positive uses of the digital technologies of the internet, of the ways in which they’re engaging with them. My response is that it’s not a question of identifying positive or negative uses, but of nourishing an imagination of radically different ways of living and working with others. Equally important is to develop an understanding of the fundamental incompatibility between a system that serves neoliberal global capitalism, and a survivable planet. I tell them that the notion of green capitalism is a dangerous oxymoron.
You take on the untenability of internet activism, and you seem to suspect that a lot of potentially revolutionary energy is being sucked up by more or less inefficient groupings on the internet. You even quote revolutionary and activist groups who made this observation themselves, who ditched online practices because they saw them as being counterproductive. But here, as in many other cases, opting out doesn’t seem to make things immediately easier.
Well, at this moment, activists have to make do with whatever resources, whatever tools are available. What I’m arguing against is any kind of delusion – I will use that word again – that there’s something intrinsic to network technology that has emancipatory possibilities and special capabilities that previous systems didn’t have.
The internet seems like a permanent fixture of our world, something we simply must live in and with and work around. I am reminded of Frederic Jameson’s infamous quote, that it is easier to imagine the destruction of the world than a world without capitalism.
Yes, people tend to forget that this observation was made in the context of the 1990s and the claims of people like Margaret Thatcher that “there is no alternative” to free-market capitalism or of Francis Fukayama that history had culminated in the triumph of capitalism.
Jameson’s quote was originally meant to be critical, but has now become a truism that confirms and further reifies our position as hostages of our current infrastructure, where we lose sight of both future alternatives and what we have lost. It is reminiscent of the phenomenon in ecology that they call falling baseline syndrome. We forget what used to be the normal way of life. As our circumstances change, we develop a blindness to the very changes that we are subjected to. In the last part of Scorched Earth you talk about the erosion of what we thought would be the basics of human interaction: the exchange of glances, reading the expressions on each other’s faces, improvising, having time to listen. Capitalism as facilitated by the internet – the internet as hijacked by capitalism – causes a kind of erosion of our social worlds on par with that of ecosystems.
These problems are obviously crucial. There are some people who will respond by talking about these changes as if they’re inevitable historical transformations rather than the result of a specific configuration of very powerful institutions and what they impose. But the corrosion of memory, empathy, and the communicative resources that allow people to share their ideas and hopes has not happened accidentally. Powerful mechanisms for producing docility and conformity operate by eliminating or marginalising those spheres where those basic forms of human interaction can occur. And these processes of capture, that you mentioned earlier, are accelerating. None of us are prepared for some of the consequences of the new AI applications. For example, the likelihood that in a few years 95 per cent of the verbal content on the internet will be non-human. The staggering asymmetry between ourselves and these machine capabilities produces a kind of existential capitulation. We’re looking at what Agamben called the violence done to the linguistic essence of human beings, violence to the very possibility of dialogue.
In connection with the problem of violence, I’m interested in something that René Girard described in his late work, and which no one else is really articulating, what he called the inexorable “escalation to the extreme,” which he saw in climate change, in terms of the destruction of the natural world, the expansion of military technologies and their violent deployment. And now, the horrific levels of deaths in the Ukraine war, which neither side seems interested in stopping, confirms Girard’s hypothesis. Equally relevant is present-day America, where uncontained violence, with all the mass shootings, massacres of children, and killings by police has risen to a new threshold of social dissolution.
Staying with Girard, there is certainly the problem of how society is to contain the latent violence of human life and life in general. But at the same time, he is fixated on jealousy and competition, from his early theories of triangular desires to his writings about the Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz and war. We could put the two together and say that competition contains a latent threat of violence, which becomes toxic, even apocalyptic, when it can no longer be contained, or when it suffuses society on every level as in neoliberal society. For Jürgen Habermas, for instance, in his latest book on digital technologies and the public sphere, the real apocalypse comes when the very idea of a shared public sphere of mutual care, a shared process of deliberation, disappears. In the last part of your book, you present elements of a very different society, drawing on Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas.
Even if it is minor, my optimism is that these intersubjective experiences can still happen and be sustainable on a local level. The idea that it could happen in some larger networked form, I think, isn’t taken seriously by anyone now.
I suppose we could point to the pragmatists, John Dewey or, even before that, William James. In your earlier books about modernity and the senses, you point out that James was interested in the phenomenon of attention and how attention is a means of building a world because it is wedged, somehow, between involuntary automatic responses and a voluntary effort. You can expand your voluntary attention and, in this way, you can expand your own world-making, shape your lifeworld, in a sense. This is also what is at stake in our relationship to the internet in general and social media more specifically, when we let ourselves be hijacked by systems that force and shape our attentional world-making. If we can step up and step out, I suppose someone must be doing it already. Do you see any movements that you are optimistic about?
The movements to be optimistic about are the ones we don’t know much about. By being off the radar, they’re able to act more autonomously, creatively. You know, Andreas Malm, the Swedish historian and activist, gave this blurb on the back of my book where he says that I am “a ruthless critic of all that exists.” He is paraphrasing a well-known line from a letter Marx wrote to Arnold Ruge in 1843, and it’s an early affirmation of a revolutionary praxis that rejects a reformist politics of working within existing institutions. We’re faced with a related situation today with many people and groups still under the illusion that governments and corporations can be pressured to act on climate and environmental issues. So, to get back to your question, the most effective political activity will increasingly occur on a regional level. It’s happening in many parts of the world where communities and groups are fashioning minimal forms of resistance and social survival. As large-scale processes of collapse intensify, whether to ecosystems or to supply chains, the tasks will be very local. People who live in cities will have different challenges than those in rural areas, but in some sense the problems are going to be the same. It will be having enough food for people to eat, housing, clean water, and at least rudimentary medical care. Anything much beyond these will be secondary.
What about the culture that sustains such common efforts and solidarity? Isn’t this also the crux of the problem – that social and inter-human support systems are deteriorating together with the material conditions for life?
Well, you’re posing important ethical questions. The materialistic global consumer culture that has penetrated almost everywhere works to prevent the possibility of a commons and of solidarities based on mutual support. Already in the 1930s, the philosopher Edmund Husserl despaired at the degradation of what he called “lifeworld,” which was the world shared in common with others and with nature. It was where we could live beyond the merely instrumental and functional possibilities of a social or natural environment. It’s only within the sensory immediacy of lifeworld where there emerges the ethical imperative to take responsibility for others and for the future of the world. Within the insularity and artificiality of our digital milieus, it’s very difficult for anyone to understand the importance of that responsibility.
The disappearance of a unified global world of market democracies, that was so celebrated after the 1990s, is one thing that has changed since 2020, but the other big thing is what has happened to the very communicative possibilities of network technology. There is a whole new industry of identifying false news and misinformation. It is not just the demise of the idea from early in the 1990s and early 2000s about the internet as the engine of democratisation, that it would be this egalitarian field of multiple, plural voices. It’s also not just that certain platforms are being closed off, are being restricted, being policed in so many ways. It’s not just coming from the right; it’s coming from everywhere. One of the big issues right now is the difficulty of actually having dialogue or having conversations collectively because of the extraordinary cautiousness with which people are saying things. The internet is an instrument of communication that can easily be turned into an instrument of intimidation and terror and of discipline in a variety of ways.
I think and hope that a book can be more than a holdover of an earlier era, that a book, especially a short book, has an important role to play in the midst of the extreme ephemerality or evanescence of whatever is on the internet.
