He was referring, of course, to the Berlin Wall that the Soviet Union erected in the city of Berlin, dividing a nation and a city. But, paradoxically, today we read it in a different light. In the past, the Berlin Wall was a physical wall that enclosed the freedom and dreams of the people of East Germany. Now, capitalism has erected an invisible "wall" for us. And under the catalyst of globalization, this "wall" is enclosing almost the entire human world.
Jonathan Clary describes this "wall" as follows. Clary describes this "wall" as follows: "The expansion of capitalism in the 21st century is manipulating our lives at every turn, forcing us into an endless rush, distracting us, impairing our perceptions, and destroying every aspect of our daily lives. Human life has been wrapped up in a continuous state of non-stop running without intermission."
In Clary's view, the expansion of modern capitalism has not given people more freedom, as it boasts, but has instead subjected us to more and more control, so much so that today, sleep, which is a physiological necessity for human beings, is facing an end. In response to this situation, Clary developed the concept of "24/7" capitalism. Clary's book, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the End of Sleep (24/7 for short), centers its analysis around this concept.
"24/7" is Clary's expression for the continuity of time, meaning a continuous week, 24 hours a day of endless work. This symbol, in Chinese custom, is usually written as "7*24". Of course, the form of writing is unimportant, but what is important is that Clary pinpoints capitalism's great desire for human control: to take over every moment of an individual's time.
Examples of this "endlessness" can be found all around us: on the subway, buses, trains, and airplanes, time that should be free during journeys is now being utilized for work, thanks to the development of mobile communications technology; today's movies and television productions are filled with advertisements for commodities that should be leisure time. Today's movies and television productions are heavily filled with advertisements for commodities, and time that should belong to leisure is forced to continue to be bombarded with passive consumer information; the control of electronic devices over human life is even more pervasive, and it is increasingly difficult for people to get rid of the influence of the Internet and smartphones, which bring a huge amount of information to people, but never tell us what is useful and what is not useful.
What's even more paradoxical is that we ourselves are consciously choosing to accept the control and influence of the "24/7" model. As the French sociologists Luke Boltanski and Eve Boltanski and Eve Shapiro in their analysis of contemporary capitalism. As French sociologists Luke Boltanski and Eve Shapiro point out in their analysis of contemporary capitalism, "it is those who are able to participate, liaise, communicate, respond, or deal with things on an ongoing basis in an information environment that are prized by the forces at work". So while television programs have long since achieved 24-hour rolling broadcasts, and the stream of information created by individual users on the Internet is updated all the time, people are addicted to chasing after these images and information. This situation leads to the fact that people actively try to blur the boundaries between private time and work time, work and consumption, "always doing something, moving, changing - that's what gives you prestige, not stability, which is often synonymous with inactivity "
In fact, active exploration of the 24/7 model has been around for a long time, except that many of the cases sound, on their own, as if they were full of science fiction. Clary begins 24/7 by telling the "story" of the U.S. Department of Defense. For the past five years, the U.S. Department of Defense has spent a lot of money on researching an animal, the white-crowned sparrow. The White-crowned Sparrow is known for its ability to stay awake for up to seven days during migration. The purpose of this U.S. Department of Defense research is to study the brain activity of the white-crowned sparrow during long periods of sleeplessness, with the expectation that knowledge can be gained that can be applied to humans to help people realize that they can work continuously without sleep and remain highly productive and efficient.
The United States is not yet a "pioneer" in this field. Back in the late 1990s, Russia and the European Union announced plans to build and launch satellites to reflect sunlight back to Earth. The program envisioned launching a series of satellites that would be stitched together to create a 200-meter diameter reflector. When fully open, the reflector could illuminate a 10 square kilometer area of the Earth. Initially, the program was designed to provide illumination for industrial production in alpine regions. Later, it was announced that the program would be further expanded to provide nighttime illumination for entire metropolitan areas, in order to achieve the goal of "all-night illumination".
The efforts and visions of nations around the globe in this area, whether or not they are currently being realized, are at least representative of how humanity imagines its future society: that it can live in a state of perpetual illumination. Thus, Clary perceived that mankind was taking the initiative to promote the "24/7" paradigm, and saw it as a kind of "technological emancipation" or "social progress". Clary opposes this by pointing out that the 24/7 paradigm is no different from all the technological products of capitalism that have preceded it, in that they have led "the user to perform its daily tasks and functions more efficiently". So the "digital economy" we live in today is no different from the machine-controlled era of the Luddites in the 19th century, or the massive spread of the assembly line in the 20th century. New technologies such as big data and the Internet of Things, which are so highly sought after and massively promoted today, are essentially helping to expand capitalist socialized production.
With this kind of guidance from Clary, we are also clearly chasing the thread that "the history of the last 150 years is precisely the history of 'revolutions and re-revolutions' in modes of production, circulation, communication, and imaging technologies," but one that is that "has led to the endless conversion of individual viewing behaviors into information that not only consolidates control technologies, but also turns into a form of surplus value in a market that is based on the accumulation of data on user behavior." In this context, private experience also becomes a commodity that can be produced on a large scale, and the world has no place for the "loner," which is the essence of "24/7" capitalism.
Clary's description and critique of 24/7 capitalism benefits from a spectrum of left-wing intellectuals from Marx to Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre, a left-wing intellectual genealogical tree, much of it comes from his own identity as an art critic. This identity has made him particularly sensitive to the visual experience of human society, and through it he has sought out the unrecognizable incision through which contemporary capitalism has been able to encroach on the life of the individual.
Interestingly, Clary's analysis in 24/7 often reminded me of another sociologist, George Rizal (1962), who was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AASA). George Ritzer. Ritzer refers to contemporary capitalism and the globalization that dominates it as "McDonaldization," that is, the patterning and homogenization of human lifestyles and modes of production. This tendency is, in fact, the same homogenization and patterning of human visual experience that Clary observes, and the consequent appropriation of the private sphere by capitalism. The views of the two authors are, in fact, different formulations of the same proposition. Interestingly, they both refer to the sociological concept of "stratification". In Riesel's case, hierarchy is seen as a cage of "rational control"; in Clary's case, it is called a "prison continuum". So if Rizal looks at capitalism's patterning from a spatial perspective, Clary dissects capitalism's desire for control from a temporal perspective.
Sleep, as the "ultimate place" in the private sphere, is rightly the ultimate goal of "24/7" capitalism. Blurring the lines between sleep and wakefulness, between dreaming and reality, has naturally become the direction of today's new technological endeavors, culminating in the sci-fi schemes of the United States, Russia and Europe.
But for modern society, sleep is not only the "last treasure" to be defended, it is also an important tool in the fight against capitalism. Clary points out that sleep ensures the existence of a world of phases and cyclical patterns, the latter of which are essential to life. In this context, the rejuvenating inertia of sleep runs counter to the paradigm espoused by 24/7 capitalism. Thus, "sleep is a radical interruption, a refusal of the unrelenting heaviness of global capitalism."
I was often reminded of the German movie Goodbye Lenin as I read Clary's 24/7. In that movie, Christina, a single mother who is a fan of the socialist system, suddenly falls into a coma on the "eve" of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and wakes up to the collapse of the socialist system in East Germany. In order not to irritate Christina, her children take great pains to recreate a socialist environment in their hospital room.
While most critics may see in the film a dystopia of the system, I personally believe that what is noteworthy about the film is the powerful assimilative power of capitalism over heterogeneous cultures. The director, Wolfgang Beck, utilizes many of the characteristics of capitalism in his film. Baker uses many characteristic visual elements in the film: socialist-inspired TV news, giant Coca-Cola billboards, brightly colored Western cars, the removal of Lenin's statue ...... These elements present, in visually striking imagery, the differences between the East and the West as they once were. Of course, there is no doubt that capitalism eventually won the "war" not only outdoors, but also indoors where mothers had to accept the end of capitalism's victory.
But whatever the outcome, the efforts of the children in "Goodbye Lenin" to create a kind of "dream world" in which time is suspended until Nov. 9, 1989, have succeeded in the short term. As the movie shows, such dreams often inspire people to create heterogeneous worlds and fight against homogenization. And as Clary writes at the end of 24/7, it may be true that in sleep, the most mundane and uninteresting place of everyday life, more important beginnings and new chapters in human history can be played out.