Le Journal

We spend one-third of our lives asleep. This biological fact is something that, with time and technology, is less and less taken for granted. In many science fiction stories, the future of sleep is cozy and idyllic — an elevated state living within dream world. In others, sleep is more of an evolutionary shackle that gets in the way of productivity. The latter focuses on questions that haunt anyone who feels there are not enough hours in the day. What if we didn’t have to sleep? What if sleep were optimized in a way that overrode human biology? In the 2002 James Bond movie, Die Another Day, one dark answer appears from the villain of the film, billionaire mogul Gustave Graves (Toby Jones). Graves sleeps in a pod for just minutes out of the day in order to mitigate the side effects of a bizarre gene resequencing procedure. But, because Graves is an evil Bond villain, he tries to make his not-sleeping into a productivity-centered superpower. “One of the virtues of never sleeping, Mr. Bond. I have to live my dreams,” he says glibly. “Besides, plenty of time to sleep when you're dead.”Automatically, our minds recoil. Graves is evil because he has an evil space laser and doesn’t fight fair with swords or said lasers, but the thing that subconsciously makes him wicked is that he doesn’t sleep. The connection between ultra-capitalism and sleep might not be limited to silly Bond villains. If science fiction is any guide, that one-third of our lives could either be extremely shortened or lengthened, depending on our future-tense employer. The Doctor (Peter Capaldi) and Clara (Jenna Coleman) encounter the horrors of future sleep in Doctor Who’s 2015 low-key masterpiece, “Sleep No More.” | BBC“Sleep subsists as one of the great human affronts to the voraciousness of contemporary capitalism, wrote Jonathan Crary in his 2013 book, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep. This notion was echoed by that famous altruistic Time Lord, the (12th) Doctor (Peter Capaldi), in the 2015 Doctor Who episode “Sleep No More,” in which he says: “Sleep is essential to every sentient being in the universe, but to humans, greedy, filthy, stupid humans, it's an inconvenience.” In “Sleep No More,” a far-future technology called Morpheus puts workers into sleep chambers, which “concentrates the entire nocturnal experience into one 5-minute burst.” The idea here is obvious: It forces employees to work around the clock, since their sleep has now been taken care of, supposedly, from a biological point of view. In this Doctor Who adventure, the side effect is quite literally monstrous. Creatures made of leftover sleep dust are sired, which serve as an on-the-nose consequence of this biological hacking, a kind of Frankenstein’s monster cautionary tale, making it clear that tampering with the natural circadian rhythm of humanity could result in our own demise. The message is urgent: Slow down, don’t work too much, and don’t use tech shortcuts to catch up on sleep. While the threat of human-sized sleep monsters may not seem literal, the analogy to everyone’s own sleep patterns, relative to our work schedules, is damningSix years ago, as the lockdowns of 2020 started to take effect, and certain kinds of workers stopped going into the office and clocked in from home, it seemed, for a moment, the world was forced to notice just how much sleep everyone was missing. When remote workers eliminated their commuting times, suddenly, they could, in theory, get more sleep. And yet, as Madeleine Pollard points out in her 2024 essay for Byline, “The Rise of Sleep Capitalism,” even this stay-at-home, chilled-out vibe quickly morphed into a kind of profit-oriented hustle. “With this increased focus on rest came the relentless, near-competitive pursuit of the perfect night’s sleep,” she points out. From TikTok trends like “sleepmaxxing” to “homeopathic sleep supplements” sold at $72 a packet to $300 sleep trackers that give you a nightly “sleep score.”The old idiom “early bird…

C'est l'annonce inattendue du CES 2026 à Las Vegas. Asus ROG s'associe au légendaire studio Kojima Productions pour transformer sa tablette gaming en œuvre d'art. Entre design signé Yoji Shinkawa et puissance démesurée, le constructeur taïwanais vise l'ultra-luxe pour les fans de l'univers Ludens.