Technosleep: Frontiers, Fictions, Futures 3031305981, 9783031305986

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Catherine Coveney, Michael Greaney Eric L. Hsu, Robert Meadows & Simon J. Williams

TECHNO

SLEEP FRONTIERS, FICTIONS, FUTURES

Technosleep

Catherine Coveney · Michael Greaney · Eric L. Hsu · Robert Meadows · Simon J. Williams

Technosleep Frontiers, Fictions, Futures

Catherine Coveney School of Social Sciences and Humanities Loughborough University Loughborough, UK

Michael Greaney English Literature and Creative Writing Lancaster University Lancaster, UK

Eric L. Hsu School of Creative Industries University of South Australia Adelaide, SA, Australia

Robert Meadows Department of Sociology University of Surrey Guildford, UK

Simon J. Williams Department of Sociology University of Warwick Coventry, UK

ISBN 978-3-031-30598-6 ISBN 978-3-031-30599-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30599-3 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © gremlin This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Preface

The book before you has been a long time in the making. The product of prolonged discussions and debates over the past five years or so as we further discuss in Chapter 1. During this time, we have not only lived through the ups and downs of a collective book project, but the challenges of a global pandemic, the death of a parent (SJW) and the joys of two new arrivals to our families (CC, EH). The idea of a book of this kind was first mooted back in early 2017 by one of the authors (SJW). We considered whether this was best approached as a co-edited volume but decided on balance to go with a coauthored book between the five of us. We also considered whether or not chapters should include the names of those responsible for leading them, but again decided against this given the collective nature of the book as a whole and the many different types of inputs to each chapter from us all. As for the product of our labours, we hope we do this fast-moving field of technosleep justice. It has certainly been a rich and fascinating project for us which has taken us to some interesting new places and helped push our own frontiers of knowledge in so doing. During the past two decades or so we have studied many aspects of sleep and society, including some of the technological dimensions and dynamics of these relations, but this book has encouraged us to go further and to delve deeper into these relations in contemporary times with an eye on some of the frontiers, fictions and futures at stake here in the twenty-first century and beyond. v

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This then brings us to any gaps, blinkers or blind spots in the book, which we leave you the reader to judge. We certainly don’t see the book as addressing each and every facet of this sleep and technology storyline in an exhaustive fashion. It is far too big a topic for that and would extend to many volumes. Ours, moreover, we readily acknowledge, is one of the many different theoretical and methodological ways of approaching and addressing these matters. We hope nevertheless that the book serves as a productive exploration of these issues and a catalyst for future research. Some of these future areas of research are discussed in the concluding chapter. Meanwhile, we invite you the reader to consider these entanglements between technology and your own sleep life, whether direct or indirect, proximate or at a distance. Doing so we suggest is not simply a personal but a political matter to do with the changing fate and fortunes of our slumber in contemporary times and the futures yet to come. Loughborough, UK Lancaster, UK Adelaide, Australia Guildford, UK Coventry, UK January 2023

Catherine Coveney Michael Greaney Eric L. Hsu Robert Meadows Simon J. Williams

Acknowledgements

Along the way, numerous people have helped to make this book a reality. Our thanks go to our publishing team at Palgrave Macmillan and all of our colleagues who have kindly provided input and assistance. We would also like to thank Benjamin Pollock for providing research assistance including his help in constructing the book’s index. We additionally would like to acknowledge sources of research funding. Eric Hsu received research funding from an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant (DP180101816), and from an Erasmus + Jean Monnet Project on ‘Discourses on European Union I4.0 Innovation’ (DEUI4I) to produce some of the theoretical ideas he contributed to the book, particularly those found in Chapter 5. We also wish to recognize the following persons: Katie—I would like to acknowledge the unwavering support of my husband, John and my parents Mary and Phil, who have listed to me talk about technosleep without (much) complaint for many years. I am grateful for my daughters Lily, Poppy and Rosie, my own little sleep thieves, whose rhythms and routines, wants and needs have shaped, and continue to shape my own. I would like to thank my students at Loughborough University, who have inspired me as we have discussed and debated the idea of technosleep in our classes together, and my colleagues in Criminology, Sociology and Social Policy at Loughborough University, who have given me the time and space to work on this project and encouraged me to keep going. And finally, I would like to express gratitude and vii

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appreciation towards my coauthors—without you this book would not have been possible. It has been a pleasure and a privilege to learn from you and work with you on this project. Mike—I’d like to express huge thanks to Lucy Alcock for her unstinting support and effortless wisdom. And equally huge thanks to my coauthors—I feel lucky to have worked with such an inspiring and supportive team. Eric—I am extremely grateful for my ever-encouraging partner, Lisa Kurtze, and the joyful life and family we have made together, and for every minute we have gotten to spend with our newborn son, Felix Kurtze-Hsu, who finds new ways of making us smile. I would also like to thank my parents, Jin-Ming and Shirley Hsu, for their immense love and support. To my coauthors, it puts a big smile on my face to have the opportunity to have my name next to all of yours. And lastly, I would like to show my appreciation for the following persons in no particular order: Geoffrey and Janet Kurtze, Peter Hsu, Ben Kurtze, Anthony Elliott, Daniel Biro, Diamando Davidian, Anthony Scotland, Steve, Rob, and Nick Dean, Rina Yamamoto, Masahiro Ogino, Yoshinori Takata, Keisuke Saito, Cassie Hilditch, Ingrid Biese, Ramona Marinache, Megumi Kaji, Caroline Ellison, Sesame, Sarah Esau and Louis Everuss. Rob—I feel very fortunate to have been a member of the Surrey Sociology of Sleep Group. I remain indebted to Jenny Hislop, Tom Daly and Sue Venn for those early years; Sarah Nettleton and Jo Neale for helping shift my thinking and Christine Hine and Gary Pritchard for introducing me to some of the complexities of social media and sleep. Particular thanks will always be reserved for Professor Sara Arber. Projects have also brought me into contact with great people like Neil Stanley, Jason Ellis, Simon, Eric, Katie and Mike. The pandemic meant that working on this book crossed the work/home divide in more difficult ways than usual and I would like to thank Sonia, Ben and Josh. Thanks also to Mum and Dad and to Leslie (Roy) Freeth—the latter of whom is probably somewhere strumming a banjo and pondering horses. Simon—Thanks to all those who have helped in some way in the shaping of my work on sleep over the years and the making of this book on the ‘Technosleep’ storyline. Particular thanks of course to my coauthors Katie, Rob, Eric and Mike: we’ve had some stimulating discussions and debates along the way, not all of which are covered in the pages that

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follow and it’s been a pleasure and a privilege to work with you all on this book (ad)venture. Thanks too, on the family front, to Ruth, Jacob and Adam for keeping me going through thick and thin, and to Alfie (our endlessly enthusiastic Working Cocker Spaniel) for those regular rhythmic reminders it’s walk time again! Last but certainly not least, thanks as always to my parents, Alan and Betty Williams, both of whom have now sadly passed away, my mother during the writing of this book, but without whom none of this would ever have been possible. January 2023

Catherine Coveney Michael Greaney Eric L. Hsu Robert Meadows Simon J. Williams

Praise for Technosleep

“What makes for “good” sleep in an age of hyper-capitalism and commodification, rising sociopolitical turmoil and uncertainty globally, and the techno-medicalization of everyday life? Technosleep: Frontiers, Fictions, Futures is a compelling and inventive investigation into the contemporary social and technopolitical contexts of sleep in Western countries. From wearable devices that collect sleepdata or “algorithmic sleep,” that is under the constant, watchful eye of marketers, to drugs and home remedies and rituals, Technosleep considers all of the sociotechnical interventions into how sleepers do sleep, especially in our late capital age of sleeplessness. Technosleep emphasizes how sleep is not simply a biological necessity but a set of complex and diverse social practices, and that what counts as restful sleep is constantly in flux, and increasingly, elusive. Technosleep is essential bedtime reading!” —Mary F.E. Ebeling, Professor of Sociology, Drexel University. Author of Afterlives of Data: Life and Debt Under Capitalist Surveillance (University of California Press, 2022)

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Contents

1

Introduction: Technosleep—Frontiers, Fictions, Futures Starting Points: On Sleep and Technology Conceptualising Technosleep Theorising Technosleep Researching Technosleep Outlining Technosleep References

1 3 5 9 11 13 18

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Contextualizing Sleep Sleep Has Many Histories Sleep Has Many (Unequal) Presents Sleep Has Become a Matter of Concern Sleep Became (Un)knowable Sleep Is a Site and Source of Entanglement Conclusions—Towards Technosleep References

21 22 25 28 31 34 36 39

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Tracking Sleep The Quantified Sleeper: Sleep as a Technologically Mediated Reality Making Sleep Visible: Sleep as Dataobject Acting On and With Sleep Data

47 49 52 56

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Algorithmic Injustices? Normativity and Exclusion Big Sleep Data: A Life of Its Own? Conclusions References

59 65 68 71

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Transforming Sleep? Light and Sleep Masks and Machines Pharmaceuticals and Sleep Sleep and Dream Engineering (Bio) Hacking Sleep? Techno Transformations of the Places and Spaces We Sleep Conclusions References

75 77 79 82 88 91 94 97 99

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Machinic ‘Sleep’ Can Technology Sleep? Sleeping Technologies as Actants The Differences Between Human and Technological Sleep The Problem of Essentialism Interfacing Human and Technological Sleep Through the Prism of Metaphor The Ethical Dimensions of Technological Sleep Conclusions References

107 108 110 112 115

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Technosleep in/as Science Fiction Technologizing Sleep The Vulnerability of Sleep The Limits of Sleep Sleep Regained Conclusions References

133 136 140 143 148 150 151

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Stratified Technosleep Futures Sociology of ‘The Future’ Technosleep Imaginaries Technoscientific Imaginaries Posthuman Imaginaries

153 154 155 156 166

116 121 123 127

CONTENTS

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Inequalities and Inequities Conclusions: The Future of Technosleep Futures? References

170 175 177

Conclusions: Technosleep, Frontiers, Fictions and Futures Frontiers… Fictions… Futures… Concluding Comments References

183 187 189 190 194 195

Index

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About the Authors

Catherine Coveney is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Loughborough University, UK. She has been researching and writing about the sociology of sleep for over 15 years. Her work sits at the intersections of medical sociology and Science and Technology Studies. She is particularly interested in how medical technologies come to be used in everyday life, and how these uses impact on our understanding of ourselves, health and the body. Michael Greaney is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English and Creative Writing at Lancaster University where his research focuses on literary fiction from 1800 to the present. He is the author of Sleep and the Novel: Fictions of Somnolence from Jane Austen to the Present (Palgrave, 2018). Eric L. Hsu is a Lecturer in Sociology at the University of South Australia, where he also presently serves as a co-leader of a work package on ‘risk, emergency management and global pandemics’ at the UniSA Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence. He is the editor of a 4-volume major works series set on Sleep: Critical Concepts in Sociology (Routledge, 2017), and his research recently published in Technology in Society has investigated the social complexities of aged care robotic technology

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development. More information about his work, including the Sociology of Everything podcast he produces, can be found on his website, www.ericlhsu.com. Robert Meadows is a Professor in the Department of Sociology at Surrey University, where he has published widely on sociological and interdisciplinary aspects of sleep. He is currently co-editing a volume on the Global History of Sleep and Dreaming and co-investigator on a project looking at sleep tracking and treatment for adolescent mental health problems. Simon J. Williams is an Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick. Simon has published widely on sleep-related matters, as well as other topics pertaining to health, medicine and the body. His previous books include Sleep and Society (2005) and The Politics of Sleep (2011).

List of Figures

Fig. 3.1 Fig. 7.1

Screenshot images of a ‘good’ night’s sleep (data) An illustration of the acceleration in publications indexed by pubmed containing the words ‘Sleep’ and ‘Future’ 1–71, 2022

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List of Boxes

Box 7.1 Box 7.2 Box 7.3

Early examples of technosleep futures in scientific and medical texts Examples of how biomedical visions and imaginaries bring with them scientific validity and a sense of epistemic value Futurologists imagine the future of sleep 2030–2050

158 159 163

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Technosleep—Frontiers, Fictions, Futures

In what ways are science, technology and sleep entangled with one another in the twenty-first Century? How will we sleep in the future? Can particular technoscientific frontiers be pointed to? Are these futures equally accessible to all? Does sleep as we know it have a future? These are some of the questions we seek to ask and address in this work. In doing so we add to the already sizeable and growing body of literature on the social, cultural, historical and political dimensions of sleep,1 including existing engagements with the technological dimensions of sleep within and beyond the lab and the clinic.2 It is certainly true, as we further discuss in the following chapters, that relations between sleep and technology have a long and tangled history— from the harnessing of fire to the first synthetically produced sedative hypnotics and from the development of candlelight to the latest newfangled digital devices to track and transform our slumber. Our prime focus in this book, however, is on current developments in these relations between sleep and technology and the frontiers, fictions and futures at stake in this unfolding storyline. New technological frontiers, that is to say, including those of a digital, pharma and neuro kind, which are opening up new ways to know, do, act upon and value sleep. Frontiers too though, in a fashion redolent of Melbin’s (1978) ‘Night as Frontier’, to do with expanding territories and the colonization of our slumber in and through these technological developments, albeit in a complex, uneven, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 C. Coveney et al., Technosleep, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30599-3_1

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fragmented fashion (Shaw, 2015). And frontiers, finally, of a figurative kind, including the technoscientific knowledge at stake here in these very developments and debates. As for the fictions and futures in question here, these too we show are an equally important part of this unfolding sleep and technology storyline. To be able to understand sleep we need not simply to measure, monitor and record it, but to tell stories about it, and often these fictions will take things to provocative extremes—by, for example, representing worlds where entire populations are sedated or ones where entire populations are involuntary wakeful. Such extremes invite us to recalibrate our sense of what counts as a natural or healthy balance between sleep and wakefulness, and to reconsider how such a balance might be produced and managed both at individual and at population level. That these sleep ‘fictions’ are not only to be found in the pages of science fiction (SF) novels or in the futuristic worlds of SF films is also important to stress here. Contemporary technologies of sleep indeed—the whole panoply of gadgets, pills, enhancements and apps—have a partly imaginative existence in the fantasies of improved or optimized sleep that are used to market them and that consumers buy into when they part with their money. Taken together, these stories, imaginaries, images, promises and expectations craft particular technosleep futures that infiltrate popular consciousness as they circulate and recirculate across various cultural spaces (Selin, 2008). Technosleep ‘futures’, created as stories and traded as promises and expectations, can be regarded as both performative and generative (Borup et al., 2006; Van Lente, 1993). Once articulated, these visions, expectations, and imaginaries of technosleep futures can shape attitudes in the present, frame debates, structure agendas and mobilize resources (Jasanoff & Kim, 2015; Steger, 2014; Tutton, 2017). Thus, futures we argue are a critical aspect of studying technosleep as these stories, imaginaries, promises and expectations, and their associated values, norms and meanings become embedded within our current sociotechnical systems in various ways. Overall, our aim in this book, drawing on a variety of substantive examples from science, technology, medicine, literature and popular culture, is to highlight how a new technoscientifically mediated and modified phase and form of technosleep is now in the making—in the global north at least; and to discuss the consequences for our relationships to sleep, the values we accord sleep and the very nature and normativities of sleep itself.

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In doing so, we pay close attention to the salience and significance of these technosleep trends and transformations to date in everyday/night light, their implications for sleep inequalities and the related issues of sleep, social justice and public health they suggest.

Starting Points: On Sleep and Technology How we approach sleep as an object of study in this book has been a critical question for us as an interdisciplinary group of scholars. We have had many long conversations and email exchanges about this very issue, which have been at times fruitful, at others frustrating, but always useful in developing our thinking. These discussions have led us to ask various questions about sleep, some of which are noted below. In particular, the seemingly simple question ‘what is sleep’? is one we kept coming back to again and again, and one which we shall return to at various points throughout the book. At the heart of this uncertainty is the fact that sleep in some ways is ineffable, always embodied, but at the same time immaterial and intangible. Although we feel sleep, we can’t see it, touch it, taste it, hear it. As sleep is something that happens to us, within our bodies when we are unconscious, how do we come to know our own sleep? We can reach for scientifically informed answers which may point us towards understanding sleep as a brain based biological event, but is sleep just brain based? What about all the other things going on in the body that are necessary for sleep to occur such as hormone secretion, circadian rhythms and so on? As we discuss further in Chapter 2, from a sleep science perspective sleep can be thought of as ‘a complex amalgam of physiologic and behavioural processes’ (Carskadon & Dement, 2005)—of stages, cycles, episodes, states and such like. Likewise, from a social science perspective, sleep may be regarded as a complex amalgam of intertwined biological, psychological, social and cultural processes and practices. These processes and practices in turn are embodied, spatial, temporal and rhythmic. They are also of course historically variable too, existing in multiple forms and governed by different norms and values across various groups, societies, cultures, and histories. Sleep, as such, is irreducible to any one domain or discourse (Williams, 2002). Although human sleep is embodied, the materiality of sleep itself is difficult to grasp unless we start to include other actants and objects that

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come together to ‘make sleep’. Here we might borrow from Nettleton et al.’s (2017) concept of ‘sleepfulness’, that sleep should not be understood simply as being other than awake; rather it involves a myriad of associations between diverse actants - human and non-human—that come to ‘fill up’, enable and assemble sleep (see also Ogeil et al., 2021). Without technology—from beds and bedding to our pillows and pyjamas—sleep can elude any self-evident image. All of the things around sleep come to be, in a way, a part of it; they are all traces of sleep. Thus, can we separate sleep out from all of the things around us that impact on, enable and affect our sleep? And even if we could indeed agree on a way to achieve this, would it be meaningful to do so? Taking a sociomaterial perspective, Nettleton et al. (2017) have recently indeed argued that ‘sleep’ itself can be understood as an assemblage formed within complex and contextual networks of social, material and affective forces. As sleep increasingly becomes an object of study and a matter of social concern its ontology becomes more unstable, there is both consensus and contestation over what sleep is. In the translation of ‘sleep’ through scientific measuring devices we see epistemological struggles over subjective/objective ways of knowing sleep and difficulties in separating out scientific fact from methodological artefact. The sociological literature also draws our attention to multiple ways of both making and knowing sleep. Thus, we can see how multiple versions of ‘sleep’ coexist, comprising many different assemblages of a human and non-human, organic and non-organic kind (Hsu, 2017). Our theorising of the ‘techno’ part of technosleep in this book, as the foregoing discussion suggests, has been influenced by the various strands of thinking at the nexus of Science and Technology Studies (STS), medical sociology and the sociology of the body. Our approach to technology is intentionally broad and eclectic reflecting the philosophy of scholars such as Andrew Feenberg (2012) who regard technologies as neither deterministic, static nor neutral. Rather, they can be constructed and reconstructed in various ways to serve human goals or interests, with a range of positive and negative uses, impacts and implications. However, technologies do not just appear out of thin air. As the large body of STS scholarship on technology shows us, they have designers, creators, manufacturers. They are made and marketed with specific uses and users in mind. Technologies are not just empty technical artefacts but technosocial objects; they are co-produced along with and inseparable from social, cultural, political and economic conditions and systems (Winner,

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1980). To explain further, while technologies do have an instrumental quality of sorts, they also have values, politics, expectations and promises embedded within them. Ideas and ideologies about the social lives, relationships, self-images, and characteristics of their users are embedded into their very design features. In relation to ‘sleep’ technologies, these ideas and ideologies are built on, reflect and refract contemporary knowledge claims about sleep, health and the body (Coveney, 2011; Williams et al., 2015). In the coming together of sleep and technology, we recognise that technologies of course have both makers and users. Although technologies are designed and marketed to fulfil a particular role, or solve a particular problem, users can and do adapt, modify, tinker with and repurpose technologies to meet their own individual and/or collective needs. All of these things interact with one another to influence the spaces technologies come to occupy in our everyday/night lives, the roles they play and the impacts they have on us—our identities, subjectivities and normativities, our rhythms, routines and practices. The meanings we attach to technology therefore, and how, when and whom they are used to what ends, are shaped by and simultaneously reshape the ways in which we come to know and understand our bodies and its processes in specific ways, including our sleep. Drawing on scholarship at the intersections of STS, medical sociology and the sociology of the body therefore, we conceptualise the technologies we discuss and their entanglements with sleep as sociotechnical objects that have been ‘co-produced’ (Jasanoff, 2004) in particular social, cultural and historical contexts. These technologies, in other words, exist within complex, changing socio-relational and sociomaterial networks or assemblages of meaning and matter, including both human and non-human things.

Conceptualising Technosleep As the central concept we use to draw together the cases we discuss and present throughout this book, technosleep at its simplest denotes the ‘coming together’ or ‘entanglements’ of sleep and technology. While sleep and technology as noted above have long since, if not always already been intimate bedfellows, these relations, we suggest, are now becoming ever more entangled in new and novel ways. In part, this is a product of new digital developments in the twenty-first century which are ushering in altogether new problems and possibilities for our sleep both now and

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in future. It also, however, as we shall see, concerns developments in other technologies too which are serving to blur, befuddle or obliterate the boundaries between the therapy and enhancement as never before, thereby opening up new horizons for the personalisation, optimisation and customisation of sleep heading into the future. Thus, it becomes difficult, if not impossible to separate sleep from technology if we want to produce a nuanced and multifaceted understanding of the former’s social aspects in contemporary times. Technosleep, then, denotes a new phase in these historical relations, as these technologies get further ‘under the skin’ and ‘into the skull’ so to speak, doing things to and with our slumber that differ in degree or kind from what has gone before, including new prospective norms and forms of slumber indeed. That is not to say of course that these entanglements of sleep and technology are entirely new, uniform, or all-encompassing. Nor is it to suggest that we are all now technosleepers. Rather, technosleep, we suggest, is best conceptualized as a matter of degree, including movements back and forth in both directions. These relations as such may be more or less developed, depending on the particular case in question. Technosleep furthermore, we suggest, is best regarded as a ‘sensitising concept ’3 that alerts or sensitises us to various shifts in these sleep–technology relations through culture, time and place. Some of these shifts can be quantitative, which can be captured in the increase or decrease in the amount or diversity in which sleep technology is adopted and used. But these relationships between sleep and technology can also involve qualitative changes too. Here, for example, we can look to the technoscientific frontiers and future imaginaries of sleep that promise radical shifts in how we understand what sleep is, what sleep is for and even the extent to which sleep remains a vital part of people’s lives, as works by the likes of Melbin (1987) and Steinberg (2008) have previously touched upon. Techno-futures too on these counts involve complex entanglements of meaning and matter, including the social imaginaries they embody and express. Far from simply being in the future, moreover, they are always already futures in the making, as well as futures past and futures present. Thus, the concept of technosleep is one through which we can take account of the blurred temporalities of sleep’s multiple pasts, presents and futures. A concept through which we can account for how these sleep–technology relations we are witnessing today have a long history, while at the same time acknowledging that it is impossible to ever entirely disentangle visions and imaginaries of the future of sleep from the past or the present. And a concept too, finally,

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that can account for a blurring of what sleep ‘is’ or what we take it to be, given these ever-deeper and ever more complex entanglements with the meanings, methods, motives and management of our slumber. This coming together of sleep and technology, conceptually speaking, can happen in multiple and heterogeneous ways and, as already touched on above, encompass how we come to know sleep, how we do sleep as well as how we act on and value sleep: issues which ultimately return us to ontological questions as to what ‘sleep’ is in the first place. Conceptually, technosleep is broad and flexible enough to capture different types and forms of these sleep–technology relations, from the physical and material to the imagined and metaphorical as well as the mimetic. Although seemingly broad in its reach, a strength of this flexibility is that it can be applied as a theoretical lens to analyse how sleep and technology come together in different ways, across different domains and temporalities. Moreover, returning to the point about technosleep being a matter of degree on a case-by-case basis, it can also account for how these sleep–technology assemblages not only come together, but may also break apart, unravel or come undone in various ways when this technologization of sleep is resisted, rejected, refused, repurposed or reworked in some way or another. Taking each of the aforementioned issues in turn. Knowing sleep relates to our individual and collective knowledges and understandings of sleep. This includes the creation and extension of scientific knowledge on sleep that has been, and continues to be, amassed through sleep science and sleep medicine studies conducted in high-tech sleep labs and clinics. Expert constructions of sleep through scientific knowledge and scientific medicine are important to consider, given it is these forms of knowledge that provide the basis for our collective understandings of sleep, shaping our perceptions of normality, health and illness, as well as providing us with guidelines, advice and recommendations for how to do and act on sleep best. Knowing sleep also of course includes how we come to know our own individual sleep through technology. For example, the twentyfirst century has seen an influx of self-monitoring technologies through both generic and tailored digital devices that provide us with a window into the otherwise hidden aspects of our biological bodies, including our sleep lives. Our phones, apps and other gadgets purport to tell us how long we slept for, how well we slept and how we can do better. Thus, technologies that monitor and measure our sleep in particular ways can influence the ways in which we come to know our own sleep and understand our dormant bodies and selves (Williams et al., 2015).

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Further, our knowledge and cultural understandings of sleep, and our fears and fantasies of possible sleep futures are reflected in and articulated through art and literature. SF narratives are a part of our cultural landscape, shaped by and acting to reshape sleep in the public imaginary. In SF narratives where, say, the hero slumbers for decades or centuries and wakes up in a radically transformed world, sleep is how we get to the future. And in these imagined futures, it is often the case that nothing in human bodily experience and existence has been more radically transformed than slumber. On the one hand, there are texts such as The Matrix where the vast majority of the human race has been plunged into enforced somnolence; on the other, there are texts where entire populations have somehow lost the ability to fall asleep. In its exploration of these extreme states of somnolence and wakefulness, SF invites us to reconsider what counts as a normal or natural sleep–wake cycle in the modern world— and to reflect on the extent to which categories such as the ‘normal’ and the ‘natural’ are themselves transformed in a technologized world. Doing sleep relates to the everyday actions and artefacts that surround our sleep practices, rituals and routines. Here we consider the forms that sleep takes. There is no doubt as we have already noted that sleep and technology have always been intertwined or entangled, and that all manner of technologies have impacted on when, where, with whom, for how long and how well we sleep. Sleep in times gone by was therefore far from ‘natural’, ‘pure’ or ‘pristine’ and could arguably be considered a form of technological sleep still. Our focus here, however, to repeat, is predominantly on the technologies available or in development today and the sleep futures in the making that they signal. The question of what is new and distinctive about technosleep now in the early part of the twentyfirst Century, as compared with the past, is an empirical question that we shall reflect upon and address throughout the book. How we act on sleep, points to the ways in which we seek to augment, modify, normalise, customise and optimise sleep through various technologies. This ranges from mechanical to pharmaceutical, and from digital to neurological interventions that are available now as well those which are in development. Our analysis, therefore, on these counts, takes a critical look at these developments which now hold out the promise of not simply repairing or restoring our troubled or broken slumber but optimizing and customizing it, if not rendering it increasingly optional in future.

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As for the values we accord or assign sleep, these too of course are variable sociocultural and historical matters, which continue to divide opinion, including those lovers and despisers of sleep. That sleep is becoming increasingly instrumentalized in contemporary times however, and that technology is itself increasingly bound up with this instrumentalization of our slumber in the neoliberal era, alerts us to another important dimension of this unfolding technosleep storyline; one which itself may be embraced, endorsed, challenged, or resisted in various ways as part and parcel of the politics of sleep. A final point here, threading through much of the foregoing discussion so far, concerns the fact that technosleep is not simply a socially, culturally, historically, spatially and temporally variable matter, important as that is. It may also of course be a more than just an individual matter. To the extent indeed that sleep is often co-sleeping of some kind, human or otherwise, then the with whom of technosleep is also important to consider.

Theorising Technosleep How then do we propose to theorise technosleep? Already it should be clear that sleep for us, as an analytical object of enquiry, takes multiple forms. Sleep, in other words, comprises many different assemblages of a human and non-human, organic and non-organic kind (Mol, 2002; Nettleton et al., 2017). So too with technosleep. To view technosleep in this way then, is to see it as being made up of multiple enactments, different, yet inseparable from one another, coming together to form a fluid hybrid ‘object’ that although constituted by multiple overlapping realities, discourses, knowledges, actors and artefacts is still nevertheless recognisable and intelligible as ‘(techno)sleep’ across different conceptual, professional/disciplinary, individual/personal and sociocultural contexts. Taking this approach prompts ontological questions about what sleep is —should we think of sleep as an object in and of itself? Is sleep multiple? Through this lens then we can start to ask questions like: what are the boundaries we draw around sleep and why? Is medicated sleep, for example, ontologically the same as non-medicated sleep? What about sleep after drinking alcohol? Is taking a nap or ‘dozing’ the same as being asleep? Is being in ‘deep sleep’ the same thing as being in ‘light sleep’, or ‘REM sleep’? We are also, in so doing, able to step beyond the sleep science paradigm and the classifications/divisions (and methodological artefacts such as sleep stages) it provides, to include people’s own

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embodied, experiential negotiations with sleep in asking these questions of what sleep is, and how we come to know it. In a sense, technosleep becomes an abstract and mobile concept, fuzzy around the edges yet coherent enough to be recognisable across disciplinary, social, cultural and historical boundaries. As for related matters of health and medicine, we also draw on recent analyses of so-called biomedicalization (Clarke et al., 2010) as part and parcel of this unfolding technosleep storyline. Again, the focus here in so doing is on the entanglements between technosleep and biomedicalization, including what Clarke et al. (2010) take to be the increasingly technoscientific nature of medicine, the intensified focus on health, the elaboration of at risk susceptibilities and the associated shift from the ‘control’ to the ‘customisation’ of bodies. It is not simply a question here however of these entanglements of technosleep and biomedicalization, important as they are, but of the broader biopolitical questions and issues this raises concerning the governance of sleep in contemporary times, within and beyond the lab and the clinic (Williams, 2011). Another important series of questions here, of course, concerns the role or roles, for they are many, of capitalism within this unfolding technosleep storyline: the story behind this storyline, so to speak, and the latest chapter in this long-running series of relations between capitalism and our slumber (Wolf-Meyer, 2011). A full and detailed analysis of contemporary capitalism is clearly beyond the scope of this book. Suffice it to say that capitalism for us, in keeping with other recent scholarship, is not simply global in reach but ever more technoscientific and technosocial in nature. Hence the growing number of references now made to terms such technocapitalism or technoscientific capitalism (Birch & Muniesa, 2020; Suarez-Villa, 2009), and related terms such as digital capitalism (Fuchs, 2022), informational capitalism (Castells, 1996) and the like. Technosleep, in this sense, is itself intimately and inextricably bound up with technocapitalism. The latter moreover, we suggest, in and through these new technologies, is further recasting or remaking sleep in its own image as a site and source of productivity and profitability in neoliberal times, including the vital normativities of our slumber and the ‘ends’ to which it is put (Crary, 2013). This of course is not to suggest a simple or straightforward series of relations here between capitalism, technology and our sleep. Far from it. Sleep indeed, as we shall see, may trouble these relations too in complex ways, including scope for agnosticism, ambivalence, reluctance or resistance if not outright refusal or rejection of these

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new sleep technologies on the part of patients and publics alike. Technosleep then, as this suggests, provides us with another vital window and another valuable vantage point on the changing fate and fortunes of human slumber, or ‘more-than-just human’ slumber to be precise, in contemporary capitalism which itself now takes an ever increasingly technoscientific and technosocial form. As for the implications of these trends and transformation for current and future inequalities and injustices regarding our slumber, these too are addressed at various points throughout the book. All in all, then, we approach these matters from a variety of angles and viewpoints in a way that enables us to piece together the puzzle and picture that is technosleep. Our analytical focus, therefore, while squarely focused on new frontiers in this sleep and technology storyline, nevertheless attempts to situate the ‘new’ in the context of this longer running storyline of sleep and technology relations. Doing so enables us to shuttle back and forth between these always already entangled sociomaterial relations between the human and non-human, associated technoscientific process of biomedicalisation and the role of contemporary capitalism or technocapitalism if you will in these very trends and transformations, including the inequalities and injustices they engender, and the (bio)political matters they embody and express, both now and in futures yet to come.

Researching Technosleep The sources we draw on in the book are eclectic and varied. They include academic papers,4 advertising materials, news and magazine articles, blogs, policy reports, websites, popular science and media articles,5 and self-help books. A small section of Chapter 2 makes use of the latest wave of the UK Household Longitudinal Study. Approximately 40,000 households were recruited in Wave 1 (2009–2010) (McFall & Garrington, 2011), and respondents have been interviewed annually since then.6 In Chapter 3 we use digital autoethnography as a method of selfinquiry, bringing together qualitative data with personal metrics (Hine, 2020; Lockton et al., 2020). This allows us to reflect on our own experiences and emotions of sleep tracking, and interrogate these in relation to broader social, cultural and political themes. Two members of our team wore smart watches and had the technology on their wrist to track sleep. However, only one of us (CC) regularly wore the tracker while they were

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sleeping and agreed to share their autoethnographic data to be analysed as a part of this project. As CC found out, self-tracking is a messy practice. Ethnographic studies have found that people engage with self-tracking technologies in multiple ways, using personal data to make sense of their bodies, lives and experiences but also, like us, for passive recording and for entertainment. In autoethnographies of self-tracking, personal diaries and notes are typically analysed alongside an analysis of the digital interfaces of the tracking device (e.g., its screens, the app, the online forums) seeing these as all interrelated and integral elements of contemporary self-tracking practices. To reflect this, as a part of her autoethnographic process, CC kept detailed diaries about her experiences of sleep, logged images, numbers and scores created by her tracking device and analysed posts in the online user forums linked to her sleep tracking device. Internet forums and discussion groups can be rich and abundant sources of data where specific topics and issues are discussed by those mutually interested, affiliated or connected to sleep (Rodham & Gavin, 2006). Analysis of these data enabled us to access ‘typical discourses’ or ‘natural data’ (Holtz et al., 2012) taking place within this specific community. The online forums connected to self-tracking devices can be seen as spaces for telling personal yet anonymous sleep stories about the ‘doing’ of sleep, hinged around sleepdata and sleep tracking practices. The forum we studied was open and publicly accessible, meaning posts could be found and read by every Internet user. It had a dedicated page for sleep that was easily located in the forum’s health and wellness section which at the time of data collection (July 2021) contained near to 1500 separate threads, with 150 of these active in the previous six months. Although this might seem substantial, sleep tracking was the least discussed feature of the device with managing weight and discussing activity data (e.g., step counts) each attracting at least three times more attention. Posting in open public forums can be considered as ‘public behaviour’, deliberately intended for public consumption and thus observable for research purposes without explicitly seeking informed consent from the group host or members (BSA, 2017; Eysenbach & Till, 2001; Rodham & Gavin, 2006). However, as researchers we still paid attention to ethical issues of confidentiality and privacy by anonymising the data (e.g., removing nicknames that might make posters identifiable), minimising the use of quotes and avoiding literal quotes that might make individuals traceable or identifiable through Internet search engines. We also decided not to name the online community.

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Throughout the book, particularly in Chapters 6 and 7, we also make recourse to sleep-related fictions—stories, novels, films, TV programmes and other imaginative texts—that we regard as offering valuable speculative explorations at, and beyond, the limits of what is known about human slumber. Sleep-related fictions often function as attempts to extrapolate from what we know about sleep in order to map out possible futures in which the embodied experience of slumber has been transformed by technology. It might of course be objected that the ‘knowledge’ provided by such narratives is decidedly unscientific—dealing as they do with imagined scenarios rather than objective facts, they cannot compare to the kind of hard evidence provided by fieldwork and empirical investigation. However, this is partly the point. Science fiction, despite its name, can be pointedly anti-scientific, not least in sleep-related SF, where sleep is perceived as something whose value and complexity cannot be accounted for in purely scientific terms.

Outlining Technosleep Chapter 2 starts our expedition into the world of technosleep with a review of the extant sociocultural literature on sleep. It offers the reader some background to both the science and sociology of sleep akin to a narrative, rather than systematic, review. Our aim here is to show that how, when and where we sleep are, and have always been, embedded and embodied, sociocultural matters. The chapter summarises this body of work using five interrelated claims: (i) that sleep has had many histories; (ii) that sleep has many presents; (iii) that while sleep is a ‘matter of concern’, the nature of this concern has been complex and contested; (iv) that sleep is (un)knowable, increasingly subject to doubt; and (v) that sleep is always a site and source of entanglement. In doing so, the chapter raises further foci which become vital matters as we move through the remainder of the book. Chapter 3 takes digital sleep tracking technologies as its substantive focus. Within this chapter we explore both the problems and prospects associated with the increased entanglement between the sleep and the digital in the present day. We focus our attention on sleep-specific digital technologies. This ‘digital ecosystem’ (Rich & Miah, 2017), for example, now includes new digital technologies to monitor, metricize and ultimately improve or enhance our sleep ourselves and big data/large-scale analytics of sleep at population levels. Following various other scholars

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who have researched experiences of self-tracking, our analysis includes an autoethnographic element. Our analysis suggests that it is not simply a matter of our changing knowledge and understanding of sleep, nor even simply new ways of doing sleep that are emerging here, important as these are, but that ‘sleep’ itself is being transformed as an ‘object’, or dataobject to be precise, as it becomes manifested and ‘made’ in multiple ways, including via new forms of representations and data flows. Algorithms, too, we argue, are serving to reconfigure and refashion ideas of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ sleep, resulting in multiple norms and new ethical agendas. In our analysis of these technologies, we attempt to delineate different aspects of the relationship between sleep and digital self-tracking technologies, including our knowledge and understanding of sleep, our relationship to, or the doing of sleep in our everyday/night lives, the values we accord sleep and the very nature and normativities of sleep itself. Chapter 4 focuses our attention on the ways in which sleep is, or at least has the potential to be transformed in new ways through its increasing entanglements with technology in the twenty-first Century and beyond. The chapter maps out several frontiers in this regard, including the pharmacological and neurological. While scientific and medical advances in these areas continue to have therapeutic goals, we can also see how technosleep becomes a commodity in the commercial and consumer sphere, something which can be capitalised on and through as doctors, therapists and advertisers encroach into our sleeping minds, medicalising, meddling, controlling our sleeping bodies. Regarding transformations in the places and spaces we sleep, we draw on two examples of technological automation—driverless vehicles and sleep robots—to discuss how advanced robotic technologies might impact on the forms sleep takes. While these technologies may be considered embryonic in one sense, investment in research, development and implementation is rapidly increasing across the globe. We consider how, when sleep becomes further intertwined with contemporary capitalism, such technologies have the potential to transform when and where sleep is commonly present; and the ways in which new technologies may come to populate the nightworlds and sleeping practices of particular groups of people. In keeping with our theoretical framework, we look not only forward, but also backwards, asking what, if anything, is new about these trends and transformations? These transformations, we suggest, are tied to the medicalization, pharmaceuticalisation, commercialization and commodification of sleep; processes which indeed have a much longer history.

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Our analysis shows how the coming together of sleep and technology as technosleep is not an all-encompassing phenomenon nor a one–way process. Just as these sociomaterial sleep assemblages may come together in technosleep, so too they may break up or come apart. The fifth chapter of the book adds a further dimension to our theorization of technosleep as a more-than-human concept. We consider how some technologies are able to engage in the act of sleep. We do this by analysing the ‘sleep mode’ function of some computing devices. The concept of ‘technological sleep’ sensitizes us to how technologies can be anthropomorphized. But more than this, technological sleep brings into focus the varied ways in which computing technologies are able to act. At one level, technological sleep can be instrumentally controlled by humans, but some technologies can also sleep in socially disruptive and unanticipated ways. This accordingly leads us to examine how sleeping technologies are ontologically plural. Besides highlighting the overlaps that exist between human sleep and technological sleep, such as how the social etiquette of sleep can pertain to both, this chapter stresses the importance of recognizing how technological sleep and human sleep are still in some ways significantly asymmetrical. But this is not to say that the distinction between humans and machines is an immutable or self-evident one. To understand how technosleep stands at the interface between humans and technologies, we also consider in this chapter the metaphorical aspects of sleep. The ways in which human sleep can be metaphorically understood in technological terms, and vice versa, alerts us to how technological sleep and human sleep can be both entangled and differentiated from one another. Our aim in this chapter is thus not simply to further elaborate the non-human facets of technosleep but to articulate yet another way technosleep troubles dualisms. Chapter 6 explores the ways in which science fiction engages with possible futures that are being invented and imagined for human sleep. We argue that technosleep exists both as an empirical reality and as a set of fictions and fantasies in works by H. G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, Nancy Kress, Jeanette Winterson and many others, writers who have ‘invented’ a whole range of weird and wonderful sleep-related technologies, including political systems that exploit and regulate sleep, and machines that can prolong, hack, harness, stockpile, transfuse, compress, suppress and even weaponize human slumber. These works are grimly fascinated by technosleep even as they aim to re-state a division—indeed a fundamental opposition—between technology and sleep. We analyse these as both

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forecasts of the future and as symptoms of the fears, anxieties and desires that currently circulate around the sleeping body. In contrast to the narratives surrounding sleep technologies available and in development today, we discuss how SF narratives repeatedly pit ‘technosleep’ against an imagined, organic, pure, form of sleep. Technosleep then becomes viewed as an inauthentic form of sleep, a disturbingly unsatisfactory parody in which the ‘essence’ of human sleep is missing. Reading these texts as extrapolations from present-day debates around the so-called ‘crisis’ in contemporary sleep, we argue that SF, despite its ‘futuristic’ visions of technosleep, is surprisingly loyal to, and an unlikely champion of traditional models of human slumber as an organic and embodied state. In Chapter 7 we ask what does the future hold for technosleep? Empirically, we present a preliminary scoping analysis of the articulation of visions of technosleep futures that are circulating across three interrelated domains—the medicoscientific domain, the technoscientific domain and in popular culture. Drawing on sociological work theorizing ‘the future’ (Selin, 2008; Tutton, 2017) and the STS concept of sociotechnical imaginaries (Jasnaoff & Kim, 2015), we discuss how technology is embedded and intrinsic to how the future of sleep, and its technological frontiers are being imagined. We suggest that multiple technosleep imaginaries exist and present four short narratives of (i) biomedicalised (ii) customised (iii) optionalised and (iv) posthuman, that are each embedded within different temporal landscapes and highlight different aspects of technosleep futures. Whatever version or versions of the future are being discussed; it is clear to see that sleep is constructed as being problematic in the twenty-first century. Furthermore, it becomes important for us to ask how inequalities are being imagined in sleep futures for the very reason that these futures can themselves generate, define and restrict a range of possibilities. We show how inequalities operate in complex ways within these futures— being both absent/present and multiple in form, simultaneously being slain, maintained, widened and increased in a variety of ways. To conclude, we draw together our analysis to present our overall argument, namely, that the sleep–specific and more general technologies we discuss do indeed point to a new era or future of technosleep in the making. This involves transformations not simply in our relationships to sleep, the ways we ‘do’ sleep, or the values we accord sleep, but newly emerging norms and forms of technosleep itself, thereby resulting in multiple forms of technologically mediated and modified sleep in the twenty-first century and beyond. On the one hand, we argue, new forms

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of technosleep hold out the promise or potential of improving, optimizing or customising ourselves in multiple ways. However, we also show how they are not without their problems and perils, from the potential for further sleep disruption to the furthering rather than the flattening of sleep inequalities and injustices. Science fiction provides a further important window on to these trends and transformations, including their promises and perils and the fears and fantasies that circulate about sleep and its technologized futures. We suggest on this basis that a number of possible or prospective ‘sleep futures’ in the making coexist in complex and contested ways in the broader context of contemporary capitalism, neoliberalism and the prevailing time order, and will in all likelihood continue to do so.

Notes 1. See for example Williams (2011), Ekirch (2001, 2016), Reiss (2017), WolfMeyer (2012), Crary (2013), Greaney (2018), Handley (2016), Meadows (2005), Venn et al. (2008). 2. See for example Kroker (2007), Moreira (2006), Williams et al. (2015), Gabe et al. (2016), Williams et al. (2013), Hsu (2017). 3. A sensitizing concept, that is to say, as defined, discussed and debated in the sociological and methodological literature (Blumer, 1954, 1979; Faulkner, n.d.; Flemmen, 2017), which as the name suggests sensitizes or alerts to something important going on in the world without definitional or empirical foreclosure of any kind. Sensitizing concepts as such, in contrast to more ‘definitive concepts’ (Bulmer, 1954), have a certain vagueness (Flemmen, 2017) and a more fluid quality to them (Bulmer, 1979), which is not simply intentional but productive too, helping keep things open given the complexities of the world we dwell in and study. 4. In Chapter 7 we analyse a corpus of peer reviewed and scientific texts published between 1975 and 2022. These were identified through a PubMed search (June 2022) using the key words ‘Sleep + Future + Technology’ which gave 1263 sources. We selected a sub -set of these articles (n = 75) spanning the entire timeframe. 5. Chapter 7 draws on analysis of a corpus of popular media articles, reports and blogs on sleep and the future identified through a Google search. 25 were selected based on their relevance and analysed thematically, pulling out future orientated statements, such as scripts of particular roles to be played by different actors, about sleep and technology relationships, and articulations of promises and fears about things that may change in these visions for the future.

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6. Understanding society is an initiative funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and various Government Departments, with scientific leadership by the Institute for Social and Economic Research, University of Essex, and survey by NatCen Social Research Centre and Kantar Public. The research data are distributed by the UK Data Service.

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CHAPTER 2

Contextualizing Sleep

This book is primarily concerned with the ‘coming together’ of sleep and technology. Before we can get to that, we need to make clear that how, when, and where we sleep are, and have always been, embedded and embodied, sociocultural matters. Sleep is more than a straightforward biological activity (Aubert & White, 1959a, 1959b). It is a temporally bounded phenomenon that we ‘live through’; a phenomenon ‘irreducible to any one domain or discourse, arising or emerging through the interplay of biological and psychological processes, environmental and structural circumstances (i.e. facilitators and constraints), and sociocultural elaboration, conceived in temporal/spatially bounded and embodied terms’ (Williams, 2002: 178, emphasis in original). In order to show this—and how sleep is more than ‘asocial inaction’ (cf. Taylor, 1993)—this chapter attempts to summarize an extant body of work under five interrelated claims. First, that sleep has many histories. Focusing largely on Western societies, this section highlights how sleep represents a particular cultural manifestation in a particular moment in time. Second, that sleep has many presents. This includes differences between cultures, as well as disparities and discordance within societies. Third, we argue that while sleep has become a ‘matter of concern’, the nature of this concern has been complex and contested. The final two themes recognize sleep as (un)knowable and a site and source of entanglement. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 C. Coveney et al., Technosleep, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30599-3_2

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Summarizing around core themes helps us deal with the challenge of chronology. While this chapter primarily aims to illustrate that how, when, and where we sleep are, and have always been, embedded and embodied, sociocultural matters, it also serves as a baseline for what follows throughout the book. This creates a temporal challenge. As noted in the introduction, there is no single date where the concept of technosleep starts to become relevant or where this chapter needs to end and the others begin. This chapter, therefore, aims to build on earlier reviews of the sociology of sleep (for example, Arber et al., 2012; Williams, 2002, 2008; Williams et al., 2010) and bring to the fore issues to do with epistemologies and norms, practices and forms, values, ontologies and futures—all of which become vital matters as we move through the remainder of the book. The themes we outline here also reflect claims that all disciplines interested in sleep make—but sometimes for different reasons and in different ways. This makes them—paradoxically—shared sites of important disagreement.

Sleep Has Many Histories Building on Rose and Abi-Rached’s (2013) work on the brain sciences, Williams et al. (2021: 1503) suggest that chronobiology has many histories in the plural—“including official histories, personal histories, histories of discovery and so forth”. It is perhaps no surprise to find that the same can be said of sleep. First, there is the history of sleep science. As Timmermans and Hass (2008) suggest, every successful scientific discipline will eventually develop a narrative of how it all started. For ‘sleep science’ this historical narrative usually begins by saying something like, although ‘interest in sleep and dreams has existed since the dawn of history’ (Dement, 2005: 1), ‘more has been learned about sleep in the past 60 years than in the preceding 6000’ (Hobson, 1989: 1). The catalyst for this spurt was Hans Berger who, in 1928, recorded electrical brain activity using, what he called, ‘electroencephalograms’ (EEG). For the first time, we are told, sleep could be continuously measured without disturbing the sleeper (see Dement, 2005, for useful discussion). Twenty-five years later, Aserinsky and Kleitman (1953) drew upon this technology to publish a paper on eye motility and sleep. This paper came to be considered ‘seminal’. This was not least of all because it marked the discovery of ‘Rapid Eye Movement’ (REM) sleep and prompted many to move away from the view of sleep as a ‘passive’ state, involving a

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complete shutdown of all brain activity (Dement, 2003). It also led to the identification and definition of sleep stages and cycles. These sleep stages were imaginatively labelled Stage 1, Stage 2, Stage 3, Stage 4 and REM. Stages 1–4 became collectively known as NREM (or Non-REM) sleep and Stages 3 and 4 became collectively known as Slow Wave Sleep (SWS). It did not take long before generalizations were being made (albeit generalizations about ‘sleep in the normal young adult who is living a conventional sleep–wake schedule and who is without sleep complaints’ (Carskadon & Dement, 2005: 19). To summarize those generalizations listed by Carskadon and Dement (2005: 19): individuals will enter sleep via NREM sleep and then cycle through the sleep stages; with each cycle lasting approximately 90 minutes. While each includes all sleep stages, the specific composition of individual cycles will differ. For example, stage 2 will ultimately end up constituting around 45–55% of sleep and REM sleep will predominate in the last third of the night. In 2007 the American Academy of Sleep Medicine published new guidelines on sleep scoring parameters. Sleep stages became referred to as N1, N2, N3 and stage R. N3 reflects old stages 3 and 4 (i.e. slow wave sleep) and stage R alludes to REM (see Moser et al., 2009, for example). As Stanley (2018: 3) illustrates, it was still the case that sleep progresses cyclically from N1 through to REM; with each cycle lasting approximately 90–110 minutes in adults. To this we can add the history of ‘sleep medicine’. Although the history of sleep research is presented as universal/global, the history of sleep medicine appears distinctly American (Williams, 2005). According to Dement (2005), ‘premonitions’ of sleep medicine can be found in the 1960s. During this decade sleep onset REM periods were noted, sleep apnoea was ‘discovered’ (see Williams, 2005: 147 for discussion), benzodiazepines were introduced, and several symposia were organized which looked at ‘abnormal’ sleep (Dement, 2005). Yet, at one and the same time, it remained the case that ‘as late as 1970, the practice of medicine ended when the patient fell asleep’ (Dement with Vaughan, 2000: 45). It was not until 1972, when the first sleep centre performing polysomnography opened at Stanford University, that sleep medicine was born (Todman, 2008). As Schulz and Salzarulo (2016) note: ‘sleep medicine as a medical speciality with its own diagnostic procedures and therapeutic strategies could be established only when key findings in

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neurophysiology and basic sleep research allowed a breakthrough in the understanding of the sleeping brain’ (Schulz & Salzarulo, 2016: 1041). We can also add a history of the norms and forms of sleep. According to Roger Ekirch, Western Europeans experienced two major intervals of sleep per night until the close of the early modern era. Typically, preindustrial families would retire to bed around 10 p.m. to enjoy a ‘first sleep’ which would last until around midnight. An hour or so of wakefulness would then follow—in which individuals would meditate, make love and converse—before they returned for a ‘second’ period of nocturnal sleep (Ekirch, 2015). In medieval societies it was also common for many people to sleep in one room (Elias, 1978) and sleeping bodies were only gradually accorded their own space in the early modern period (Crook, 2008). Nudity was also common and those who kept their shirt on to sleep were suspected of suffering from a physical deformity (Fontaine, 1978). Finally, at least for present purposes, we can add a history of beliefs and values. For example, the forces of capitalism, commercialization and commodification saw sleep become considered as both the ‘ultimate performance enhancer’ and the ‘ultimate waste of time’ (see for example Williams & Boden, 2004). Each sleeping disorder also has its own history. With sleep paralysis, for example, interpretations differ across eras and cultures and include the Greek ‘ephialtes’, the Egyptian Jinn and the modern ‘alien abductions’ (de Sa & Mota-Rolim, 2016). Any separation is of course heuristic, and these histories overlap and come into contact with each other. The nineteenth century, for example, is seen as the peak time of publications on sleepwalking. Clergy, physicians and lawyers fought with one another ‘for interpretive rights over the embodied knowledge which somnambulists produced while in their paroxysms’—while somnambulists themselves resisted attempts to use their bodies as ‘portals to the unconscious mind’ (Friedman, 2014: iii). The number of publications on sleep disorders grew exponentially from 25 in the period 1500–1549 to 12,281 in 1950–1999—with the top noted diagnosis changing from ‘parasomnias’, such as somnambulism, to obstructive sleep apnoea (OSA; Schulz & Salzarulo, 2016). This shift in the number of outputs and the move towards OSA is intrinsically linked to sleep only really becoming of interest to physicians at the end of the twentieth century (cf. Wolf-Meyer, 2011a). Three further critical points can be made here: First, while some histories note change—and support for the idea that ‘virtually nothing about

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our standard model of sleep existed as we know it two centuries ago’ (Reiss, 2017a, 2017b)—others do point towards stability. Studies of preindustrial cultures have found, for example, little evidence of bimodal sleep patterns in those living in equatorial societies without access to electrical lighting (Yetish et al., 2015; see also Ekirch’s, 2016 response). Handley’s (2020) account of sleep loss in early modern England also highlights how the medical culture of ca 1500–1700 encouraged householders to protect their sleep by moderating such things as bedtimes and emotions. This, as we shall see further below, appears to resonate with contemporary concerns vis a vis sleep. Second, even where histories agree on a narrative of change, the mechanisms for change can differ. Whereas for sleep science it is often a narrative of progress and discovery, the focus for Elias (1978) is on how behaviour became more predictable and ‘civilized’ as we became more and more dependent on each other. Somewhat contra to this, Crook (2008: 5) notes that ‘the evolution of modern sleeping space was only in part informed by ideas of privacy and civility: it was also animated by ideas concerning the functioning of ‘normal’ bodies and minds, the governmental agency of space and the moral integrity of nuclear families’. Artificial light plays an important part in Ekirch’s narrative (Ekirch, 2001) and reminds us that technologies—from light bulbs and electricity to EEG machines and actigraphy—play different roles in these complex historical narratives; something which we return to below. Third, questions also remain as to whether histories are geographically and culturally bounded. According to Ekirch, biphasic sleep occurred beyond the bounds of Europe and North America and could be seen in the Middle East, Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia, Australia and Latin America (Ekirch, 2016). Notwithstanding this, Steger (2012) suggests that polyphasic sleep can often be found in pre-industrial societies. To this, we can also add diversity and difference within societies. Ekirch (2015), for example, notes that not everyone slept according to the same schedule. Variations occurred most often outside of the ranks of the middle classes.

Sleep Has Many (Unequal) Presents Within modern Western societies the sleeper is ‘placed in a socially categorized or institutionally defined framework which evokes the deference and support of the wakeful’ (Schwartz, 1970: 489). For Williams and

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Bendelow (1998) this framework is essentially a series of rights and duties which include—at the very least—‘To sleep at night and therefore to conform to the general pattern of sleep time, unless legitimate social circumstances, such as work arrangements depict otherwise’; Second, ‘To sleep in a bed, or similar device, in a private place, away from public view, in proper attire (i.e. pyjamas, nightdress etc.)’ (Williams & Bendelow, 1998: 182–183). This is not to suggest that differences in how, when and where we sleep—and the meanings and values we afford sleep—have been resigned to ‘history’. Sleep is not always a nocturnal or private affair for communities like the Warlpiri or Toraja people. The former, for example, often sleep outside, at varying points in the 24-hour cycle, and do not consider it rude to wake up a sleeper (Airhihenbuwa et al., 2016; Musharbash, 2013). Further to this, and as Alger et al. (2019: 1) note, mid-afternoon breaks are scheduled in Spain (siesta) and Italy (riposo) and some Asian countries encourage napping on the job. It is also not simply differences between cultures. Increasing attention has been paid to ‘sleep disparities’ and the idea that there are groups within societies who are understanding, valuing and experiencing sleep differentially. Grandner (2017), for example, highlights how race and ethnicity impact on an individual’s sleep. Socioeconomic status, marriage and family environment also play a part; with those not currently in paid employment and those with lower education having higher odds of sleep problems even when other factors are controlled for (Arber et al., 2009). Greater attention is also being paid to the ‘gender sleep gap’. For example, data collected during the COVID-19 pandemic highlights how women subjectively experienced more sleep loss than men. Determinants of sleep duration and quality also differed for men and women. While men’s sleep was more affected by changes in financial situation, women’s sleep was more likely to be impacted by anxiety and spending more time on unpaid domestic work, home schooling, nurturing and caring (Ding et al., 2022). Other research has suggested that there might be a gender gap in sleep time which favours women, but this is relatively small and sits alongside a gender gap in leisure time which favours men (Burgard & Ailshire, 2013). To these variations we can add differences associated with factors such as homelessness, institutionalization and war. With respect to the latter, fear and inhospitable sleeping conditions make sleep loss a prevalent phenomenon throughout the history of global conflicts (Derickson,

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2013). A 2010 survey of 41,225 military service personnel found that deployment to Afghanistan or Iraq significantly impacted on sleep (Seelig et al., 2010) and sleep disturbance continues to be seen as core aspect of the signature wounds of Operation Freedom Iraq, Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation New Dawn—namely, post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety and traumatic brain injury (Troxel et al., 2015). The disturbed sleep of Vietnam Vets also played a key role in the history of PTSD and was used to explore and define the nature of trauma (Nudelman, 2019). A more general concern with ‘performance’ (South, 2020) also gave rise to a number of military initiatives: including the US Army’s Performance Triad public health campaign and the US Navy’s Comprehensive Fatigue and Endurance Management Policy. The former saw sleep considered one of the three pillars of Soldier health, alongside exercise and nutrition. Rather than ‘attempting to make sleep obsolete’ (cf. Kinsella, 2020: 127), then, the United States military has long been attempting to develop individualized sleep/alertness management systems to optimize effectiveness of military personnel (Capaldi et al., 2019). In 1997 Belenky—the army’s ‘chief sleep deprivation expert’ (Baltimore Sun, 2003)—described how researchers in the US Army Medical Research and Material Command were developing a ‘sleep management system’. This system aimed to measure sleep during operations and consisted of a wrist worn sleep/activity monitor and a model for predicting performance based on sleep history data captured by the device (Belenky, 1997). The state-of-the-science shifted to the ‘2B-Alert’ system (Capaldi et al., 2019). Like other systems, ‘2B-Alert’ performance predictions are based on estimating sleep pressure and circadian rhythms of alertness. However, it also has the ability to ‘learn’ an individual’s level of resilience to sleep loss and can model how rates of alertness are a complex product of current sleep loss and the amount of sleep obtained during preceding days. At that time, iterations of the system were looking to build interventions and recommendations into the existing actigraph and smartphone-based system. Differences in how, when and where we sleep, then, are more than a matter of biology or individual choices and variations. Sleep is embedded within social structures, interactions, and everyday life. It is something which is ‘done’ and ‘negotiated’ with others. That is not to say that biology is irrelevant. Relationships between the sociological and (neuro)biological dimensions of sleep are complex—not least of all

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because some people are told that their sleep should be different because of physiological diversity—and it is to these matters that we now turn.

Sleep Has Become a Matter of Concern Shortly after COVID-19 took its grip on the world, sleep researchers were coining the term ‘covid-somnia’ (Gupta & Pandi-Perumal, 2020) to encompass the ‘constellation of symptoms of sleep dysfunction such as insomnia, disrupted sleep continuity, changes in sleep–wake cycle, feelings of non-restorative sleep and decreased sleep quality arising either due to stresses related to fear of the virus or the psychosocial impact on daily living’ (Bhat & Chokroverty, 2022: 253). Prior to this, the concern was with the unhealthy obsessions with sleep tracker data (chronorexia, Van den Bulck, 2015) and orthosomnia—which captures the ‘perfectionist quest to achieve perfect sleep’ in a manner similar to the unhealthy preoccupation with health eating (orthorexia; Baron et al., 2017: 351). Recent discussions of coronosomnia, orthosomnia and chronorexia make clear how sleep has become an at-risk state for all of us. Poor sleep has become associated with a range of chronic conditions and health outcomes (Cappuccio et al., 2018), including cardiovascular morbidity and overall mortality (Hale et al., 2013). We are also told that poor sleep has become ubiquitous, and it is now commonplace to hear how a ‘catastrophic’ lack of sleep in modern society is killing us’ (Johnston, 2017) or how shifts to a 24/7 society have led to a ‘crisis’ in sleep (see Williams, 2005 for discussion). Even if this message is more ‘discursive construction’ than ‘reality’ it would seem to be a powerful one. As Boden et al. wrote in 2008, ‘twenty-four-seven society’, ‘long hours culture’ and the ‘work-life balance’ are key media themes. It is perhaps no surprise, then, to note that as sleep medicine grew, so did the desire to translate information into public health messages. Sleep specialists were encouraged to contribute their expertise to the development of public health policies on sleep and to help combat related issues such as obesity, hypertension and diabetes (see for example Walsh et al., 2005: 654). Health education and health promotion campaigns thus started to appear with the aim of improving public health through increasing understanding of sleep. For example, the (US) National Sleep Foundation launched its first annual ‘National Sleep Awareness Week’ in 1998. These

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attempts to make the nation aware of the need for adequate sleep were also linked to the increasing prominence of ‘sleep hygiene’ advice. ‘Sleep hygiene’, the collective word for lifestyle and environmental practices known to influence sleep, has existed discursively since the late 1930s (see Cheek et al., 2004); although it was not until the 1970s, and the work of Hauri (1977), that it began to take its present form. Despite some variations in contemporary ‘sleep hygiene’ messages, most exist as a ‘bulleted’ list of sleep-promoting ‘rules’ (see Espie, 2022 for useful discussion) and they have frequently found their way into public health campaigns and interventions to promote healthy sleep behaviours. For Wolf-Meyer (2008) and others, what we are witnessing here is the production of sleep as a ‘matter of concern’ rather than a ‘matter of fact’. In order to achieve this, sleep needed to be made ‘mobile’—rendered abstract so that it could become a porous concept which could interconnect and insinuate into diverse spheres of life. This, in turn, raises a series of further issues. First, who is producing sleep as a matter of concern—or, to put it another way, who is concerned with sleep? It has been suggested that alongside the fetishization of the idea of ‘normal’, attempts by the National Sleep Foundation (NSF) to popularize sleep as a social concern also made sleep unstable and opened it up for negotiation. Once it had achieved the desired attention, the NSR reasserted sleep’s ‘nature’ but this was a new nature which they would define (Wolf-Meyer, 2008). Controlling the rhythms of sleep also produces an order to everyday life (Wolf-Meyer, 2011b) and therefore capitalism—whether that be of the fast, flexible or surveillance kind—has a stake in sleep (Williams, 2011; Wolf-Meyer, 2011b). We also need to note, inter alia, a burgeoning sleep industry (Williams & Boden, 2004) which has used the allure of sleep to market products ranging from beds, pillows and nappies to film, literature and ear pods. It has also been suggested that pharmaceutical companies have targeted sleep as an area of commercial growth and have popularized sleep disorders and their treatments (Wolf-Meyer, 2008). Second, the production of sleep as a ‘matter of concern’ also raises questions about the possible medicalisation of sleep. Medicalisation is, by definition, about the extension of medical jurisdiction or the expansion of a medical boundary (Conrad & Potter, 2000). It might involve such things as new biomedical explanations and pharmacological treatments which neglect social dimensions and place the emphasis on individuals— as well as the rise of ‘psy’ therapies, such as cognitive behavioural therapy,

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and the increase in self-help surveillance (cf. Scott, 2006). With respect to sleep, certain aspects appear more medicalised than others—with Williams and colleagues (2013: 40–41) noting that insomnia has proved more difficult to medicalise than disorders with a more tangible physiological basis, such as OSA; even though the medicalisation of OSA has proved far from simple or straightforward (Moreira, 2006), if not ‘contested’ on the part of patients using CPAP technologies (Zarhin, 2015). From increases in self-diagnosis (Kroll-Smith, 2003) to increases in google searches for insomnia during COVID-19 (Zitting et al., 2021), individuals remain proactive in their consumption of health information, with possible impacts on medical authority (Moloney et al., 2019). It is also possible that sleep has been caught up in a more general medicalisation of time and temporality. Williams et al. (2021) point towards an increasing number of links being made to biological rhythms and health and the growing number of interventions and forms of governance emerging as a result. These include campaigns highlighting the negative impact early school start times have on student cognition and wellbeing; as well as emerging new rhythmic interventions such as chrono diets and chronotherapies. Conceptualizing these developments, the authors argue, requires us to think within and beyond medicalisation. The implications for sleep are self-evident. For many years sleep scientists have worked on the premise that sleep combines two interrelated forces or processes: a homeostatic process which sees pressure increase as individuals remain awake and decrease as they sleep, and a circadian rhythm of the ‘internal clock’ (Borbely, 1982). Our knowledge of sleep, therefore, is closely entwined with chronobiology and the broader study of the intersections of time and biology (Monk & Welsh, 2003). While it is fair to say that sleep is a matter of concern, then—with numerous stakeholders and interested parties—it is also clear that the nature of this concern remains complex and contested. Within health paradigms the concern can be with sleeping out of the time and place(s); sleeping too much, as well as sleeping too little; focusing too much on sleep as well as caring too little about sleep. Treatments for sleep disorders have also become a matter of concern with both the prescription and consumption of benzodiazepine hypnotics becoming highly moralized issues (Gabe et al., 2016). Contra to this, cognitive behavioural therapy for Insomnia (CBT-I) seems to occupy the status of being the obvious and only solution to sleep problems—with published European Guidelines for the diagnosis and treatment of insomnia (Riemann et al.,

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2017), stating that CBT-I should be the first line treatment for chronic insomnia in adults of any age. Here, the concern is with how to make it more widely available. Others have raised concerns about the ways in which sleep has become a matter of alarm and attention; with Wolf-Meyer (2011b), for example, suggesting that capitalism may be pathologizing forms of sleep that fall outside of the ideas of ‘normal’ and Williams (2011) asking whether debates on the costs and consequences of sleep themselves are promoting anxieties and sleep problems. Complexities surrounding ‘concern’ with sleep can also be seen in micro interactions and everyday life. In 1996 Bliwise reported how the National Commission on Sleep Disorders Research found a general lack of concern for and interest in sleep among the US population. Similarly, Kryger (1995), described how many people want to sleep less because they view sleep as a waste of time. This negative sleep agenda coexists in everyday life alongside a more positive attitude to sleep; where people champion sleep and see it as a vital way to ensure function and everyday performance (see Williams, 2011). This tension—and the ways in which concern plays out differently among stakeholders—is made clear with the example of naps. At one and the same time, naps are situated as lazy, for wimps, antithetical to the Protestant work ethic, an important way to ensure productivity and a vital way for some to ‘customize’ their sleep patterns (Meadows et al., 2008; Williams et al., 2013).

Sleep Became (Un)knowable Phenomenologists, such as Leder (1990) and Merleau-Ponty (1962), have commented usefully on the relationship between sleep and the intersubjective world. For Leder, in our day-to-day lives our body is ‘absent’ (Leder, 1990), spending much of the time in the ‘corporeal background’ even ‘as it provides the basis for existence’ (Gimlin, 2006: 700). According to Leder (1990: 58), when sleep over comes us ‘the body is no longer ecstatic, that from which I perceive and act, but a being recessed from my command and awareness. As I no longer perceive from my body, neither can I perceive to it’. Upon waking we can infer the quality and quantity of our sleep (for example from the shape of bedclothes or light outside) or we can learn of it indirectly from others. This challenge of knowing can be seen in large-scale survey data. Designed to be a representative survey of the UK population, the UK

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Household Longitudinal study recruited approximately 40,000 households to Wave 1 (2009–2010) and respondents have been interviewed annually since (Salmela et al., 2022). The wave 1 survey had a selfcompletion component on sleep. While missing responses for questions on sleep medication use (15.6%) and sleep quality (14.7%) were in line with other non-sleep questions, questions about duration and falling asleep were considerably higher (18.3% and 20.9% respectively). This does point towards particular uncertainties in inferring duration and latency as opposed to medication usage and quality. It is here that we also find another example of how contemporary sleep represents a particular cultural manifestation of sleep in a particular moment in time. For centuries, ‘knowing sleep’ was a matter of ‘I’ and ‘thou’ and was refracted through the prism of individual experience (Kroker, 2007: 5). The technologies and the sleep lab changed this, however, and the concern became with the ‘sleep of others’. The use of instruments introduced a ‘third-person’ perspective and soon subjective experience was negated as instruments became seen as capable of representing sleep. This is not to suggest that sleep science/medicine completely eradicated the practice of knowing sleep as ‘I’ and ‘thou’. As Riemann et al. (2017: 677) point out, ‘the diagnosis of ‘non-organic insomnia’, according to ICD-10, is based solely on the subjective experience of afflicted individuals’. The diagnostic criteria for chronic insomnia according to ICSD-3 also revolve quite heavily around patient reports of difficulty initiating sleep and other forms of sleep difficulty. It is more the case that this information becomes subject to translation through measuring devices and instruments as sleep science continues to develop tools to gather and translate subjective sleep into an object of study (see for example, Akerstedt et al., 1994; Ohayon et al., 2017). This shift from the sleep of ‘ourselves’ to the sleep of ‘others’—then— is also (partly) a struggle over subjective/objective ways of knowing. In 1975 the New York Times published an article about Bill Baird—president of the then newly formed American Narcolepsy Association. Mr Baird was attempting to meet with doctors to essentially educate them on the disorder: ‘Doctors declare us just plain lazy or schizophrenic. It is common to meet narcoleptics who have been to four or five doctors looking for help. But there has been no place to get information on the disorder’ (Blakeslee, 1975). The polyphasic sleep community’s attempts to promote the benefits of moving away from biphasic sleep schedules

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provides a further example of this struggle over subjective/objective ways of knowing. Doubt also appears key. This can be readily seen in discussions of method. Actigraphy—a watch-like device which captures movement data and uses this to infer sleep–wake (Levitt, 1966)—has moved from being defined as a research tool with little clinical value, to being seen as capable of diagnosing circadian rhythm disorder (Martin & Hakim, 2011; Sadeh et al., 1995). The electroencephalogram (EEG) appears to be moving in the opposite direction. As noted above, the invention of the EEG is seen as the main catalyst for the development of sleep science. Outputs from EEG required translation and the guidelines laid down by Rechtschaffen and Kales (R&K, 1968) quickly developed to become the gold standard for EEG analysis. However, as can be seen in the discussion of sleep stages above, the R&K method has itself been subject to criticism, revision and change. As sleep is a continuum from light to deep sleep—and the classification of sleep into stages is therefore a simplification—R&K has been said to confuse biological fact with methodological artefact (Agarwal & Gotman, 2001). At the turn of the twenty-first century, Himanen and Hasen (2000: 149) argued that these rules had never been appropriately validated and were being used in ways for which it was never designed. R&K was invariably described as difficult, impossible to follow and an insufficient description of sleep processes. Sleep epidemiology has also recently been called into question with Miller et al. (2015) finding that simple questions estimating habitual sleep duration can be imprecise. The amount of difference also correlated with socioeconomic drivers of health; raising the possibility that some of what we think are inequalities in sleep might actually be patterns in reporting bias. For Wolf-Meyer (2011a) it is a stable, yet open, definition of sleep which has allowed for sleep to become subject to so much doubt: Dement’s definition depends upon a negative understanding of sleep: sleep is not coma, anaesthesia, or hypnosis, but ‘natural’. Since Nathaniel Kleitman’s work in the first half of the twentieth century, sleep has been defined in negative language as not being awake, but from which wakefulness can be provoked. This ambiguous definition means that any altered state other than these unnatural states might be sleep, and that sleep’s manifestations are knowable only after the fact—when the sleeper can be roused (Wolf-Meyer, 2011a: 950. emphasis in original). This is echoed in research carried out by CC. When asked ‘what is sleep’, clinicians offered definitions such as ‘Sleep is a heterogeneous state

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of conscious that occurs with some degree of regularity in pretty much every species that we know of’; ‘It’s a little death’ and ‘I don’t know! What is sleep? That’s a difficult question…’. When the question shifts to ‘what is the function of sleep’ answers become increasingly opaque: ‘That depends on who you ask’, and ‘none of the functions are truly known’. As Wolf-Meyer (2011a: 950) continues to ask: ‘How does one test for sleep when sleep is so open to possibility’? This is not to suggest that chaos ensues. As Coveney et al. (2019: 280) suggest, concepts such as sleeplessness in general and insomnia in particular are boundary objects , which are ‘both ‘plastic enough’ to ‘travel’ across different boundaries, sites and settings and ‘robust enough’ to maintain some sort of coherence in so doing, albeit ‘without consensuses’. Drawing on data from general practitioners (GPs) and sleep experts, Coveney et al. (2019) suggest a conceptual ambiguity and fuzziness. Insomnia, for example, oscillates between ‘normality’ and ‘pathology’ and between symptom and disorder. While diagnostic systems and guidelines exist (Riemann et al., 2017) and are adhered to, insomnia still displays an element of ‘interpretive flexibility’ within and across different sites and settings (Coveney et al., 2019: 280). In essence, contemporary sleep, at least in Western societies, is characterized by (i) a particular way of knowing sleep which acknowledges uncertainty; (ii) debates about ownership and who is ultimately capable of knowing sleep and resolving uncertainty; and (iii) some uncertainties being considered more legitimate than others.

Sleep Is a Site and Source of Entanglement Researchers across a range of disciplines tend to agree that sleep is inextricably linked to society but differ in how they situate the dynamics of the relationship. For example, the ‘social’ may be positioned as an ‘external factor’ needing to be controlled for in a clinical trial or a variable of interest—such as employment status—in an epidemiological study (see Arber et al., 2012). So what does it mean to say that sleep is a site of entanglement? It is useful to think with and against socialecological models of sleep here. The first version of a socio-ecological model for sleep (Grandner et al., 2010) drew mostly on the micro, meso- and macro-systems. Micro level factors include individual characteristics and health behaviours. The mesosystem—which exists outside of the individual but includes them—recognizes factors such as home,

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family, school, neighbourhood, social networks, religion, race/ethnicity and socioeconomic status. The macrosystem includes forces which impact the social context, such as globalization, public policy, racism and technology. The models therefore conceptualize the role of the individual in their environment. For example, a societal level factor such as the development and adoption of mobile technology will lead to 24-hour access to workplace emails (social level) and increase the chances of us sleeping with a smartphone by the bed Grandner, 2019: 50) The original model has been modified and now appears in various forms (see Grandner, 2019: 50) but the core idea remains similar throughout: sleep exists at the intersection of upstream and downstream influences. On the one hand, social-ecological models help us recognize that sleep has always been contingent, embodied and embedded. For example, in modern Western societies sleep is commonly shared by spouses or romantic partners (Meadows, 2005; Zarhin, 2020). The socio-ecological model helps us recognize this meso level factor and also how couple sleeping arrangements are historically specific. As Hinds (2010) notes, for a period around the 1880s it looked like the ‘twin beds’ would replace the double bed as the site for couple sleep. Concerns about hygiene—and inhaling each other’s breath—saw the widespread move towards twin beds as a mode of sleeping for married couples. Twin beds also represented an alternative vision and explicit move away from the connotations of the ‘Victorian marriage’; at the same time as also articulating ‘a conjugal ideal of autonomy-in-proximity at odds with the dominant contemporary marital paradigm’ (Hinds, 2010: 301). Nowadays, we might suggest that sharing a double bed is symbolic of partners’ status as a couple and that bed sharing plays a key role in shaping the couple identify, gender roles, power relationships and inequalities (Hislop, 2007). In essence, cosleeping is an ‘interembodied’ form of sociality (Zarhin, 2020)—involving both reflexive and material agency; as sleeping bodies touch and are touched, affect and affected. On the other hand, and, as we have seen in this chapter, contextualizing sleep means considering in depth and detail other factors such as doubt, agency, uncertainty and struggles over ownership. The move to make sleep a ‘matter of concern’ also made informatization (cf. Nettleton & Burrows, 2003) and reflexivity key parts of the sleep ecosystem. Even if they do not act on it, individuals are aware and alert to sleep messaging. As one respondent said in a study of couples’ sleep: ‘I don’t think I could [do] that kind of work on the sleep I am on. Because that is where you

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might fall asleep driving on the motorway [which] is so laborious. You are going like a, driving like a zombie and if I did that, I would need a lot more sleep’. Social scientific research has also further complicated ontological matters and the quest to answer: ‘what is sleep’. Rather than situate sleep as a singular object, those in recovery from dependence on alcohol and other drugs speak, for instance, of: ‘anxious sleep’ ‘broken sleep’, ‘comatose sleep’, ‘conscious sleep’, ‘decent sleep’, ‘deep sleep’, ‘disturbed sleep’, ‘dreaming sleep’, ‘exhausted sleep’, ‘heavy sleep’, ‘natural sleep’, ‘pass out sleep’, ‘proper sleep’, ‘not proper sleep’, ‘scared sleep’, ‘unconscious sleep’, ‘unnatural sleep’ and ‘unwakeable sleep’ (Nettleton et al., 2017). The discussion above also highlights the need to recognize temporality and the ways in which sleep is bound up within other, multiple, rhythms. As Williams et al. (2021) suggest, sleep is a prime biosocial indicator of the rhythms of a given time and place. For Wolf-Meyer (2011b), while capitalism has demanded an inflexible model of sleep, sleep during the COVID-19 pandemic may speak to more flexible norms and forms of sleep. As well as denoting individual experience of time, temporality also captures how past, present and future become tied together in a particular narrative (Gokmenoglu, 2022). Any investigation into sleep today, then, involves attending to how it is intertwined with both the experience and narrative of time. Adding further complexity, models of circadian and homeostatic processes may themselves be (partly) situated as socially constructed (Wolf-Meyer, 2011b) and, as Craig Meadows (2010) writes, it may be impossible to ever differentiate natural from social rhythms. Sleep quality judgements may also be explained separately by societal, social and individual factors and a product of all three together (Meadows et al., 2022). To borrow loosely from Fitzgerald and Callard’s (2014) discussion of neuroscience, to say that sleep is site and source of entanglement is to recognize how entwined the ‘social’ and ‘natural’ can become here.

Conclusions---Towards Technosleep Our key aim is this chapter has been to make clear that how, when, and where we sleep are, and have always been, embedded and embodied, sociocultural matters. Reflecting Giddens’ (1986) ideas of the three-fold sociological imagination, there is both a historical and anthropological sensitivity to the above. Whether we turn to Elias, Crook, Kroker, or

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Musharbash, sleep and sleeping have clearly differed in the past and continue to differ across the globe. This in turn leads to a critical sensitivity. If things have been different—and continue to differ—there is capacity and need to explore why this is the case, question assumptions and ask how things may differ in the future. Where, then, does all of this leave us in terms of technology and the discussions which follow throughout this book? For one, it illustrates how sleep has had a long relationship with technologies; and how technologies play an important role in how sleep is defined, experienced and organized. Within socio-ecological models, technology is often situated as ‘disruptive’—something we clearly see in the ‘top-down’ example of the adoption of mobile technology influencing workplace emails at all hours which subsequently influences individual behaviour. This resonates with Reiss’ (2017a: 9) note that the ‘industrial manipulation of time was intensified by the spread of electricity and powerful artificial lighting, from the widespread use of gaslight early in the nineteenth century to electric lighting at the turn of the twentieth century—and now the ubiquitous flood of blue light emanating from electronic screens’. For Summers-Bremner (2008) industrialization gave us cities which were almost ‘laboratories of insomnia’—due to routine experiences; as well as developments like gas and electric lighting, and the popularizing of nocturnal entertainment which these enable. This also echoes’ writings on evolutionary medicine and sleep which have warned that many factors are changing sleep patterns, including the expanding use of artificial light, the use of screen-based social media and excessive environmental stimuli (Nunn et al., 2016). For Crary (2013) the relationship between sleep and technology is even more complex. At the same time as suggesting that we exist in a constant state of (digitally mediated) readiness, Crary considers sleep as incompatible with capitalism. Offering sleep a form of revolutionary potential, he suggests that ‘it is possible that—in many different places, in many disparate states, including reverie or daydream—the imagining of a future without capitalism begins as dreams of sleep’ (2013: 128). Yet, as we will go on to further illustrate, there is more to do to fully capture the current trends, transformation and (techno)sleep futures in the making. In response to Crary (2013) we might point towards the fact that both ‘sleep-negative’ and ‘sleep-positive’ values exist within contemporary society (Williams, 2011). Further to this, while ‘technological disruption’ can point towards the ways in which technologies disturb

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sleep it can also suggest the sweeping away old forms and habits and an altering of the way in which consumers, business and industries engage with sleep. Authors like Kroker (2007) have gone some way to capturing this, but—even here—recent developments in digital technologies have added new dynamics which have yet to be fully considered (see Williams et al., 2015). Technologies are changing and alongside increased access to social media at night, we are now witnessing a proliferation of portable sleep assessment technology and big data sources which enable us to access sleep health information (Grandner & Fernandez, 2021). We need to consider these developments with an eye towards the already entangled sleep/(bio)social nexus. In keeping with the idea that technosleep is a sensitizing concept, the five themes underpinning this chapter gives rise to a series of foci which help provide a lens for considering this further: Epistemologies and norms: What we have seen is that our ways of knowing sleep are multiple and have changed over time. Sleep has been known through multiple discourses, technologies, theories, stories and experiences. Thus, on its own, each way of looking at sleep may be incomplete and partial. Practices/forms: These multiple versions of knowing sleep become entangled with our varied and variable sleep practices. The who, how and where of our sleep have normative and ethical implications as inequalities and inequities are embedded in social relationships and structures. Values: Sleep, as we have shown, becomes a problem or matter of concern in various ways. In medicine we see concerns raised around nonnormal sleep, linked to pathologisation and medicalisation of aspects of sleep behaviours. In terms of public health we see fears expressed around sleep deprivation as a public health crisis. Scientific, medical discourses, also infiltrate public imaginaries of sleep influencing the values we accord to sleep on broader cultural levels. Ontology[ies]: Across the five themes above, sleep is situated as biosocial—a biological yet embedded, embodied, sociocultural matter. As Anton (2006) notes, the ontological significance of sleep has largely been ignored. This, it is suggested, is because common sense situates us as the same person as when we are awake, ‘though for that time we are asleep’ (Anton, 2006: 182). As well as being seen as a radical aporia, Western thought tends to reduce sleep to the experience of dreaming. Heidegger, for example, is said to bypass dreamless sleep entirely when considering the publicly awake Dasein and individually

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dreaming Dasein. Yet ontological questions are not simply about sleep and being. Throughout this chapter, questions have been raised about what sleep is. As sleep increasingly becomes an object of study and a matter of social concern, its ontology becomes more unstable. Yet, without technologies, including the tools of the sleep laboratory, sleep can elude any self-evident image. Thus, the materiality of sleep is difficult to grasp unless we include other actants and objects that come together to ‘make sleep’. Returning to the central theme of the book, and ideas noted in the Introduction, the chapters that follow will each consider the coming together of sleep and technology in the twenty-first century. Through the sensitizing concept of technosleep we are able to step outside of the sleep science paradigm and the classifications, divisions and methodological artefacts (such as sleep stages) this equips us to also include people’s own embodied, experiential negotiations with sleep. The concept helps us consider whether sleep/technology entanglements are changing how we come to know sleep, the values we accord to sleep and how we ‘do’ sleep. Technosleep also keeps us alert to whether these entanglements are changing what ‘sleep’ is.

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CHAPTER 3

Tracking Sleep

It is Friday night and I’m lying in my bed reading a social media thread about ‘best places to live in the UK’ on my smartphone. It’s one of my bedtime rituals, after I have turned out the bedside light, I read something nontaxing, mindless, on my phone until my eyes feel heavy and I notice my mind wandering. I set the alarm for 7.30am in the morning, have a sip of water from the glass on my bedside table and drop my smartphone onto the floor next to my bed. I close my else and settle into a comfy position on my side, pulling the covers up over my shoulders. I’m ready to go to sleep. The bedroom is dark, and the house is quiet. I can hear the soft hum of traffic noise outside and my partners rhythmic breathing beside me. I know he is already asleep. I flick my left wrist upwards to activate my smartwatch to check the time, 11.13pm glows up on the screen. My heart rate is 57bpm which seems about right as I’m feeling sleepy and relaxed. I snuggle into my bedcovers and let my mind wander off until I fall asleep. As I sleep the inbuilt sensors in my smartwatch silently monitor my movement, measuring my heart rate and tracking my respiratory rate, as they have done almost every night for the past year. [CC, 20.08.21]

In this chapter we turn our attention to the ever-increasing entanglements between sleep and digital self-tracking technologies. Our analytic focus is on the growing number of consumer technologies which use their inbuilt sensors to track, monitor, analyse and metricize sleep in everyday/night life. These range from wearables such as smartwatches, activity bands © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 C. Coveney et al., Technosleep, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30599-3_3

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and fitness trackers to mobile phone apps, bedside devices and even smart textiles, beds and mattresses. While some devices are marketed specifically for monitoring sleep, increasingly, sleep tracking is built in as a passive feature of many health tracking and fitness/activity bands which are coalescing into single devices. Thus, sleep tracking devices are frequently not isolated technologies but embedded in wider ‘digital ecosystems’ of health promotion (Rich & Miah, 2017; Shegog et al., 2020) and ‘infrastructures of care’ (Oudshoorn, 2020) where there is an ever-increasing cross-over of different types of sleep/healthdata. To date, however, there has been relatively little focus on the practices and experiences of sleep tracking in the burgeoning self-tracking literature compared with the attention given to other metrics such as activity tracking and calorie counting. In relation to technosleep, our interests and intentions here are not to evaluate whether the sleep tracking technology available today works or not, or whether it provides accurate measurements of sleep, but rather to begin to think about how sleep tracking technologies have the potential to change our knowledge and understanding of sleep, our relationships with sleep in everyday/night life, how we ‘do’ sleep, and the personal and cultural values we give to it. We discuss how through its entanglements with digital self-tracking devices, sleep is being transformed into a series of dataobjects. We suggest that new technosleep relations and the resultant datafication1 of sleep produce new ontological objects, such as sleep data. We see sleep data not only as a digital technology of the body but also as text, and sleep tracking devices as both artefacts and communication devices. In their analysis of Fitbit self-tracking data Fotopoulou and O’Riordan’s (2017) methodological approach involved one of the researchers using a self-tracking device and providing an autoethnographic account of this, along with an analysis of the digital interfaces—the tracker, its screens, the app, the online forums. Likewise, in this chapter we draw on one author’s autoethnographic account of sleep tracking,2 analysing this alongside images and text from the tracker and app and posts in the affiliated online user forum, seeing these different forms of data as all interlinked and integral parts of contemporary self-tracking practices. Drawing on this autoethnographic data, we raise a number of questions: How are technological sleep scores and embodied experiences of sleep brought together in people’s understandings of sleep? What do people do with their sleep data? Does tracking sleep and the creation of sleep data lead

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to new identities, subjectivities or normativities? How does sleep tracking impact on our relationships with sleep and the values we assign to it? Sleep data, we will show, can come to stand in for sleep in various ways, as a data double or ‘data-proxy’3 (Smith, 2016) in the performance of ‘healthy citizenship’4 (Lupton, 2017) and digital self-care5 (Nafus & Neff, 2016; Ruckenstein & Schüll, 2017). We go on to consider and problematize how quantifying sleep as a health metric may lead to new normativites stemming from a collective revaluing of sleep in the context of health and how the sharing of sleep data may lead to new identities and subjectivities. In doing so, we reflect on how normative judgements about what ‘good sleep’ should look like are embedded into the technological design of sleep trackers and point to areas of ambivalence, resistance and rejection of this form of technosleep. Finally, we discuss the emergence of big sleep data and possible broader societal impacts of sleep tracking beyond the individual.

The Quantified Sleeper: Sleep as a Technologically Mediated Reality The sound of a car horn outside wakes me up. I don’t open my eyes, shift positions and fall back to sleep. I wake up to the sound of my 5-year old daughter crying. My partner reacts before I do and goes into her room, it’s his turn. She wakes almost every night with chronic pain, sometimes she needs medicine or a massage, other times reassurance and cuddle is enough. I can hear him comforting her. I don’t look at the time on my smartwatch, it only glows up when I flick my wrist in certain motion. I get up and go to the loo, have a sip of water and settle back into bed, quickly falling back to sleep. I wake up out of dream, its content quickly evaporates as I regain consciousness. I don’t know what I was dreaming about or why I am awake. I shift positions and drift back into sleep. I am woken up by the alarm on my phone at 7.30am. I reach down and switch if off and snuggle back into my bed, half awake, half asleep. I stay there for a while, not moving, until my daughter comes into my room and climbs into bed beside me, lying down on my chest. I pick my phone up, pressing on the app to sync my sleep data and check my sleep scores. The app

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tells me that I’ve had 7hrs 51 minutes of sleep and gives me a sleep score of 80 which is rated as ‘good’ sleep. I feel well rested and like I’ve had a good night’s sleep. I don’t think about my sleepdata again for the rest of the day. [CC, 12.08.21]

Sleep tracking devices collect and capture various combinations of biometric and sometimes environmental data via an assortment of different sensors which detect movement, heart rate, heart rate variability and respiratory rate alongside other factors such as noise and room temperature. Measuring sleep via movement data is not a new idea and can be traced back to the 1960s when sleep scientists began to correlate how people moved with whether they were awake or asleep. By the 1990s, scientists were using ActiWatches, wrist-based movement devices, in their own studies to track sleep and wake patterns throughout the day. However, tracking sleep via movement data alone is often not an accurate way to measure sleep. Studies of early sleep tracking devices show they frequently miscategorized ‘motionless wake’—lying or sitting still— as sleep, leading to user criticisms that wearables overestimate the amount of time they have been sleeping.6 Newer commercial sleep tracking devices typically measure various bodily signals and biometrics along with the option for users to enter behavioural and contextual data related to sleep–wake activities. Take for example the Oura Ring, a wearable health monitoring device connected to a mobile phone app that—at the time of writing—claims to make ‘accurate health information personal and accessible to everyone’. The ring is being advertised as a sleep tracking device, reportedly donned by celebrities, sports stars and even royalty, it is designed to be worn throughout the day and night, tracking the user’s activity and movement via an accelerometer, and using various other sensors such as infrared light photoplethysmography in attempts to measure heart rate, respiratory rate, body temperature, sleep stages, nighttime movement, sleep timing and sleep quality. The device provides the user with a personalized sleep score each day—a slumber number—which its manufacturer’s advertising materials suggest, at the time of writing, helps the user to understand their overall sleep quality and offers ‘personalized bedtime guidance’.7 Another example is Somnofy, a sleep-specific technology that is, at the time of writing, being billed as the ‘contactless sleep assistant’, from Norwegian health-tech start-up company VitalThings. The device has been designed to sit by the bedside, using radio waves along with 10

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different sensors to detect movement alongside respiratory rate and environmental changes, and uses AI to ‘analyse sleep’. It includes a ‘smart alarm’ to wake the user up at an optimal point in their sleep cycle and has an ‘early warning system against illness’ and a sleep coach telling the user how they can improve their sleep based on the data it collects. The company’s website details how they have been working with Olympic athletes to see how training and stress influence sleep, studying how sleep optimization can improve athletic performance. Current adverts for the product are based around two slogans: that Somnofy ‘makes you a mini scientist of your own sleep’ and ‘sleep like a champion and you’ll take the gold’ (Somnofy, 2021). Thus, exemplifying two central goals of sleep tracking technology—knowing sleep and improving daytime performance. The various forms of data such devices collect are brought together; processed and interpreted by the algorithms built into them. For example, when the user stops moving, their heart rate drops to near their baseline level with little variability and their respiratory rate stabilizes, the device infers that the user is sleeping. Together, these data act as a proxy for sleep and are used to extrapolate a range of sleep metrics8 as they measure and quantify sleep. Thus, the vast majority of these technologies at least will only ever be able to provide their users with an estimate or inference of sleep (Reid, 2021). These metrics were an integral, if not central, element of CC’s everyday/night autoethnographic encounters with sleep tracking, as can be seen above, becoming woven into the fabric of her accounts of sleep. Indeed, datafication, where sleep data stands in for sleep, was also readily observed on the online forums linked to her device when sleep tracking was being discussed between users. Sleep metrics were peppered throughout the sleep stories told, with precise numbers drawn on and used to both evidence personal sleep experiences and express solidarity with others. For example, one forum user writes9 : ‘I usually spend most of the night in Light Sleep and REM sleep. Last night I only spent 8 minutes in Deep Sleep, where the night before last I spent 1 hour 3 minutes in Deep Sleep’. Another user replies: ‘I don’t get much Deep Sleep for my age either, get loads of REM sleep but still wake up feeling shattered!’. We can see how, when sleep is made visible to us through technology, users of self-tracking devices readily use sleep data to frame the stories they tell about their sleep, both to themselves and others. We suggest that the

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sleep data these devices produce and reproduce are technologically mediated images of sleep. In our digital worlds, sleep is a part of our corporeal embodied reality, it is an embodied aspect of our everyday/night lives that we can sense and we experience. Yet we can only see our own sleep through a technological mediator. Sleep itself, remains somewhat ineffable, being made known and knowable to us in specific ways through these technologies as sleep data. Thus, sleep data can be understood as a visually perceptible, yet technologically generated reality. These digital representations of our sleeping bodies can be regarded as both fictional and actual objects; objects, as we shall discuss later, that can become stripped of their material context and decontextualized from the bodies they are supposed to represent (Krüger, 2021).

Making Sleep Visible: Sleep as Dataobject Sleep tracking devices do not just track, monitor and quantify sleep, they make our sleep visible to us in new ways as they take our vital signs and transform these into sleep data: numbers, statistics, graphs and ‘data flows’ which come to represent our sleep. Like self-tracking more generally, we can see how sleep tracking promotes what has been referred to as a ‘techno-gaze’ (Ruckenstein, 2014: 70) or ‘data-gaze’ (Beer, 2018) into specific aspects of our bodies and vitalities as tracking devices make these parts of our physiology visible, perceptible and legible to us as personal data. Seeing our sleep as translated through these devices, could then, be considered as rendering an aspect of ourselves knowable in a way that is not possible without technology (Gilmore, 2016). Part of the allure of sleep tracking devices is then, that they promise to tell us something about ourselves that we are not otherwise conscious of. All of the sleep tracking devices currently on the market, whatever their guise, have in common the claim that they will be able to tell their users how long they slept for, with some devices claiming to analyse sleep, adopting and applying concepts from sleep science to break down sleep into discrete ‘stages’, quantifying the amount of deep sleep, light sleep and REM they are getting each night, which are benchmarked against other users of the same age and sex. Typically, these devices also offer some sort of personalized algorithmically derived sleep score as an indication of sleep quality. Take for example the Fitbit Charge 4 which provides numerical values for total time asleep, time spent in each sleep stage (awake, REM, light, deep) and calculates an overall score out of 100 for

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sleep quality, with 90–100 labelled as ‘excellent’, 80–89 as ‘good’, 60–79 as ‘fair’ and anything less than 60 as ‘poor’ (Fitbit, 2021). Writing about self-tracking more generally, Ruckenstein (2014) argues that self-knowledge of our bodies becomes inseparable from such data visualizations, which come make up our personal field of analytics. These data come to encode and represent our bodies, are attributed meaning and can come to structure our experiences (Smith, 2016). These data may be reified as offering objective truths about our bodies and experiences (Robards et al., 2020), yet these data proxies can only ever offer us a partial view of our lives (Ruckenstein, 2014; Smith, 2016). Can we see sleep tracking as generating a new aspect of selfhood—our sleep data? In relation to our knowledge about sleep, we can see how new understandings of sleep may begin to emerge, as we come to think about our sleep in terms of not just numbers, but in terms of specific stages and cycles (see Fig. 3.1), as can be seen in the sleep diary extract below: My fitness band has tracked me as falling asleep at 23.17 and waking at 7.53am - 23 minutes after my alarm went off and I know that I actually woke up. It says I was awake for 45 minutes during the night which I think is pretty good going. I check the sleep benchmarks and am surprised to see this is higher than average for my age. It tells me that I was in Deep Sleep for 1 hour which seems about right but that I’ve only had 35 minutes of REM sleep which is well below the average for my age group. But, then again it tells me that overall my sleep was good so I think that these are probably not things to be concerned about. [CC, 18.08.21]

For users of sleep tracking devices then, ‘good sleep’ may no longer be only considered as a chunk of unbroken slumber taken at night from which the sleep wakes feeling refreshed (Coveney, 2014), but now good sleep can be assessed in terms of the time we spend in each sleep stage as categorized by the device, its quality evaluated by sleep scores that are algorithmically assigned. This was also observed on the online forum where users of sleep tracking devices would often discuss how they are trying to improve a particular aspect of their sleep. For instance, wanting to get a higher percentage of deep sleep—an aspect of technosleep that can only become known to them through their interaction with a sleep tracking device.

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Fig. 3.1 Screenshot images of a ‘good’ night’s sleep (data)

Some people may trust the metrics the device gives them and see these metrics as a window into otherwise hidden aspects of their sleep, a snapshot of their vitality, their biological reality, and use them to interpret why they feel alert or tired. This could be observed on the online forum where users used their slumber numbers to interpret their embodied experiences of sleep, correlating low-quality sleep as measured by the device with feeling tired, fuzzy or sleepy the next day. Sleep quality, mediated by the device and made known to users through its metrics, was linked by some people to mental health and their personal regimens of care. Typically, sleep data was talked about as a part of health data. Some users described

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their attempts to improve their sleep scores as part of overall personal projects to improve health and fitness. As mentioned earlier, sleep tracking has become an integral feature of many other health trackers and fitness trackers and as such, sleep is becoming increasingly embroiled in broader cultural discourses around the maintenance and self-governance of healthy bodies. Thus, as Smith (2016) suggests, we may see this in terms of a new bodily ontology, where ‘bodies exist in a symbiont relationship with the digital data they produce’ (p. 108), which can impact on identity and subjectivity, and come to structure how social life is experienced. My app tells me that I went to sleep at 21.43 and woke up at 8.16am; that I was awake for 1hr 55 minutes, spent 58 minutes in REM sleep, 1 hr 23 in deep sleep and 6 hrs 17 minutes in light sleep. It tells me that I slept for a total of 8 hours 38 minutes, that my sleep was ‘fair’ and gives me a score of 72. I feel annoyed that the device has got it so wrong. My body tells me that my sleep last night was POOR quality, I was awake for HOURS, I feel TERRIBLE. I think it must have registered the time I was lying mostly still but awake as light sleep instead of time awake. I am tempted to go into the app and manually alter my sleepdata to better reflect the time I know I actually went to sleep, around 23.30 not 21.43 and woke up, around 7.45 not 8.16. There is no way I got anywhere near 8 hours of sleep last night. I don’t bother though because last night is over, there is nothing I can do about it now. [CC, 12.08.21]

However, as illustrated in the autoethnographic data extract above, this may be more likely when sleep data matches with and confirms the user’s subjective embodied knowledge and sensory experiences of sleep. Indeed, CC’s autoethnographic account is congruent with previous research on sleep tracking which troubles the idea that sleep data is relied upon as a trusted form of objective knowledge about sleep. Although these ‘data doubles’ can come to stand in for sleep in various ways, they are at the same time open to reflexive interpretation, being interpreted, contested and sometimes rejected and resisted by users (Lyall, 2021). Although some sleep trackers may find value in their sleep data, seeing this as a new form of ‘transformative’ self-knowledge that is interesting and/or useful to them, previous studies have found that users frequently question the accuracy of the scores they are given and are critical of the metrics produced, especially if the sleep data generated does not correlate well with their embodied, emotive and sensory experiences of sleep. People

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often express frustration with these devices due to errors, incompleteness and mis-categorizations of their behaviours. Sleep data then is not sleep, and perhaps not even a good or accurate representation of sleep, but nonetheless it can come to stand in for sleep in various ways, a point we shall return to later. An intriguing feature of the discussions about sleep in the devices online forum is that they often centred around how people might achieve better sleep scores and improve their sleep data. Indeed, many of those posting on the online forum described how they had instigated particular behavioural changes in reaction to their sleep data, setting goals fixated around numbers—with high readings seen as representing good sleep. For these users, high sleep scores were regarded as something to strive towards, as an achievement with an inherent value like scoring highly on an exam. For some sleep trackers at least then, we can see how their sleep data takes on a life of its own, becoming something to work on, cultivate and improve. As one user writes: Anyone got any tips to improve my sleep score? I’m sure its low sometimes because of my sleep duration but even when I sleep for over 8 hours it’s still lower than I think it should be? Another replies: I often get sleep scores over 90. If you can improve your total time asleep, your time in REM and Deep sleep plus keep your heart rate below its resting rate you can get your score to 100. Paradoxically then perhaps, for some user’s at least, good sleep becomes a means to achieve higher sleep scores and better sleep data rather than a high sleep score being valued as an indicator of good sleep.

Acting On and With Sleep Data It is 10.45. My phone beeps. I pick it up to see a notification from my sleep tracking app – it tells me that it’s nearly time for bed. I put my phone back down on my bedside table and continue watching TV. Other than that, the smartwatch I wear does not give me any nudges or pushes on how to improve my sleep, or if it does do this I haven’t noticed. There are affordances built into my device, it ‘buzzes’ when I have been stationary for 50 minutes, prompting me to get up and move. I often ignore that too. I have to open the app and actively search to find some advice on how to improve my sleep. There are some basic recommendations, to sleep at least 7 hours per night, to use the device to check my sleep patterns and find out what works for me, to use other features of the app to relax, cut down on caffeine

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and reduce sugar intake, to exercise regularly, improve my fitness score. There is nothing specific about improving sleep itself, or if there is I can’t find it. [CC, 03.09.21]

As sleep tracking becomes a feature of more health tracking devices, digital sleep data is becoming a standard part of the ‘fitness data suite’, being provided and interpreted in the context of other health metrics and thus becoming further entangled with conceptions of what it means to be healthy or live healthily. In terms of sleep monitoring via smartwatches and fitness bands, sleep also becomes a part of the wider body projects or regimes promoted by the device with better sleep linked to health and fitness in conjunction with nutrition and activity monitoring. For example, Fitbit’s tips to help improve sleep revolve around exercise regimes and using other features of the device—suggesting users exercise regularly earlier in the day, maintain a consistent sleep schedule getting at least 7 hours sleep per night, exercise for the recommended 150 minutes per week and log their food in the app to track caffeine and sugar intake (Fitbit Blog, 2019). As discussed above, the technological analysis of sleep and the assignment of sleep scores lead these devices to define ‘good sleep’ in a particular way. This is linked to the optimization of sleep as users are nudged, guided and pushed in various ways, depending on the device in question towards achieving better sleep (scores), with some devices offering practical tips to their users relating to for example, sleep hygiene, sleep timing, sleep efficiency. Fage-Butler (2018) argues that in commercial marketing materials, sleep apps are constructed as ‘technical appendages’ (p. 159) that purport to address problematic sleep by empowering the user with self-knowledge and imparting behavioural advice to help them to sleep better. Thus, the user is encouraged to not only take responsibility for their own sleep, but also delegate some of this responsibility to the technology as it tracks, metricizes, measures and suggests ways to improve sleep, as Dow Schüll (2016) suggests. Many of these devices have socalled ‘smart alarms’ inbuilt which promise to wake the user up at a time that (their devices decide) is an optimal point in their sleep cycle. Users of sleep tracking devices are guided by their devices to programme in ‘goals’ for time asleep and set bedtime reminders to keep to a sleep schedule of their choosing. The Fitbit Charge 4 for example recommends that adults get 7–9 hours sleep per night and suggests wake-up and bedtime reminders to its users that align with this. Thus, as we shall discuss further

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in Chapter 4, these devices are not only tracking sleep but promising to optimize and enhance the ‘practices and rhythms associated with sleeping bodies’ (O’Neill & Nansen, 2019). Deborah Lupton (2016) talks of the ‘pushiness of digital data’— where pushes and nudges from devices prompt or even compel users to take action via continued interaction with the data platform. Likewise, Fotopoulou and O’Riordan (2017) describe the collection of personal analytics via tracking devices as a ‘micropractice with a pedagogical dimension’. They argue that these meanings and forms of knowledge shape, or in more Foucauldian terms, come to normalize and discipline our bodies, producing certain subjectivities and consumer behaviours. Even without specific affordances, these devices are telling their millions of users that sleep matters and informing particular modes of action by encouraging, promoting and nudging them to take an interest in improving their sleep in specific ways as a route to improving their overall health, well-being and/or fitness. We could perhaps hypothesize that the more that sleep and health become entangled through this form of technosleep, the more that people will come to think about and value sleep as an important aspect of their overall health in their performance of ‘healthy citizenship’ (Lupton, 2016). For instance, it could be suggested that having access to sleep data prompts users to take notice of their sleep and nudges them to make changes to their behaviour or lifestyle or seek help in order to do so. In particular, if their sleep scores are low or rated as ‘poor’, users are prompted to ask themselves if there is something in their environment preventing them from getting enough sleep or enough deep sleep—is it too bright? Too noisy?—or to consider if they have any underlying medical conditions impacting their sleep quality—is chronic pain keeping me awake? The value then, it could be suggested, is not in the sleep data itself, but in what users (are told to) do with it. We can see how the interconnectedness of sleep and technology through these devices is informing, or at least attempting to inform, particular modes of action related to improving or optimizing sleep in conjunction with an imperative to improve overall health. An integral element of technosleep, then is the data-driven management of sleep to achieve not only better sleep and more personalized knowledge about sleep, but better health, moods and performance. However, sleep and sleep data are qualitatively different when compared with other forms of personal analytics that digital self-tracking devices collect. When tracking activity levels, such steps taken, hills

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climbed calories consumed or burnt, these data are available in real time to the user and actionable in real time. If a user sees that they have not met their daily step goal they can get up and walk around, go for a run or even jog on the spot until this is reached. Users can check their heart rate during exercise and increase the effort they put in to increase the intensity of their workout. They can use the measure of calorie deficit to decide whether to have that extra bread roll or glass of wine with dinner without overeating. But with sleep, the sleep data always arrives after the event, and is not actionable in real time in the same way. Thus, it is difficult to act on sleep data to improve sleep, as sleep isn’t easy to modify, adapt, alter or control as these other things we can track. Studies also show that people often engage with sleep tracking passively, choosing to use, interweave and abandon self-tracking devices in various ways, especially if these devices are providing them with information they do not like, want or think is useful to them. Others may see these devices more as ‘toys’ than ‘tutors’ (Lyall & Robards, 2018), providing playful interaction and entertainment rather than exerting a form of disciplinary power, directing users to change their behaviours in specific ways. Sleep data, then, can lead to self-reflection, prompting questions about particular aspects of sleep and lead to some people seeking advice about whether their sleep data is normal or how they can improve it. Further than this though, as discussed above sleep data has a normative dimension. The devices, apps and online forums are, in a sense, stipulating to their users how much sleep to get and how best to get it, situating sleep within reproductions of dominant cultural discourses about healthy living and healthy bodies. However, due to the commercial nature of these devices, the algorithms they rely on use to produce sleep metrics, and how these algorithms are modified over time, are typically invisible to the user, and to scientists wanting to evaluate their efficacy.

Algorithmic Injustices? Normativity and Exclusion I think about my sleepdata like a rippled reflection on a lake, a picture slightly out of focus. The numbers and figures give me an impression of my sleep, a likeness that is fuzzy around the edges, capturing an essence of my sleep but not a complete picture of it. An image that has to be interpreted, that can be edited and manipulated. [CC, 31.08.21]

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The idea of algorithmic injustice is widely discussed in fields such as critical data studies (Barassi, 2021), where scholars recognize not only the fallacy of algorithms when it comes to reading human bodies and predicting behaviour but also the biases built into technology, and the algorithms they rely on, from the outset. Not only then is digital data messy and inaccurate, providing us with only partial representations of ourselves and what we do. In addition, we know that the technologies themselves are flawed; they are shaped by cultural values and beliefs and can work to reproduce racist, sexist, classed, colonial, Western-centric knowledge systems, values and ideals (Beer, 2017; Noble, 2018). Of sociological interest here is the normative implications this datafication of sleep has. As discussed above, sleep tracking devices assign numerical values to particular sleep patterns and practices and by consequence, values can also be attributed to the behaviours that give rise to them. These data then are not neutral, but in a sense ideological and political, in that they naturalize and normalize particular ways of being in the world. For instance, it has been well documented that sleep tracking devices find tracking daytime sleep, shorter naps and periods of ‘motionless wake’ problematic to measure and assess (Danzig et al., 2020; de Zambotti et al., 2020); sleep behaviours which are common in both young children, older adults, in the many people with different sleep disorders and in people working in various occupational roles. Meanwhile, when behaviours such as waking up during the night, restlessness, irregular sleep patterns and ‘short sleep’ are tracked by sleep monitoring technologies, they come to configure poor technosleep. The goals and benchmarks set by these devices suggest that the individual should be getting more sleep, be less restless at night or be getting better quality sleep than they are. Normative judgements about what form good sleep should take are embedded into their technological design. Thus, these devices potentially exclude those with non-normative sleep patterns and can impact on how people come to understand their sleep and see themselves as ‘good’ or ‘poor’ sleepers. Ellis’s (2017) autoethnographic exploration of a good night’s sleep is interesting to consider here. Although not using sleep tracking technology, when she documents her sleep patterns, practices and embodied experiences she describes how the experience of paying closer attention to her sleep leads to her redefining what a good night sleep is for her. Her account gives us a good illustration of the messy realities of sleep. She shares her bed with her partner and her dogs, often waking in the night

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for various reasons—there is a noise outside, she just wakes up, or needs ‘to pee’, her dogs wake her with their movements, the weather outside means she needs to close the bedroom window, she has something on her mind or knows she has to get up earlier than usual which plays on her mind throughout the night. After examining her sleep, she takes more notice of why she wakes during the night, and how this feels for her. She begins to redefine this time, not as a disruption to good sleep, but somehow a part of it. She reconceptualizes these periods of wakefulness as a part of her natural rhythm, seeing them not as failing to get good sleep but quiet times of solitude for contemplation and creativity, and for connection and companionship: ‘Before exploring this topic, I assumed that a good night’s sleep meant sleeping straight through the night for approximately eight hours […] Previously I had become anxious about getting enough sleep when I awakened during the night at home and had trouble falling asleep, or when I failed to sleep through the night in other contexts. Now I began to consider waking as part of a natural rhythm of segmented sleep that could provide quiet quality time and solitude in which to contemplate issues important to me. A pause in sleeping became time to let my creative juices flow in a half awake/half-asleep state, time to be present with my dreams, to be consciously aware of my partner and my love for him, and to give special attention to our dogs’ (Ellis, 2017, online). Ellis’ (2017) account stands in contrast to the algorithmic constructions of good sleep programmed into sleep trackers, where periods of restlessness and wakefulness during sleep feed into lower sleep scores, in a sense, perpetuating notions that sleep is ‘broken’, disrupted or disturbed when the sleeper wakes during a period of slumber. We can see how the algorithms embedded in these devices define good and bad sleep in particular ways that exclude many of the sleep patterns and practices we consider normal for us across different spaces, places and contexts. For instance, Nettleton et al. (2012) study on the sleeping practices of homeless drug users documented an inversion of normative sleeping patterns among this group. Sleeping during the daytime rather than the night was viewed as more compatible with these individuals’ lifeworlds, enabling both spatial and temporal demarcation from the rest of society and as consequence, negating the requirement for these individuals to maintain troubled social relationships. On the other hand, they found that hegemonic ideals of day/night sleep cycles were embedded within

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institutionalized paths to recovery from drug dependence. The rehabilitation centres they studied necessitated a realignment of individual sleep/wake patterns with institutional rhythms thus reproducing normative ideas about good and bad sleep (Meadows et al., 2017). Similarly, in an earlier study of shift workers and students’ sleep, Coveney (2014) documents the anomic sleep patterns and practices both groups adopt in order to fit sleep around the other demands of their daily lives. The shift workers she interviewed found their non-normative sleeping patterns were disruptive to family life and put a strain on social relationships. Like in Meadows et al. (2017)’s work, these non-normative sleep patterns were considered to be problematic; sleep was thought of as broken and in need of fixing. The students she interviewed, on the other hand, viewed ‘normal’ sleep with more flexibility and described modifying or customizing their sleep patterns to fit around their studies and social engagements. These sociological studies raise important questions about whether we should think of a consolidated block of nighttime sleep as the only normal way of sleeping or shift towards greater flexibility in our perceptions and expectations about what normal sleep is (Coveney, 2014). However, it is clear to see that the rules embedded into the algorithms of sleep trackers still reflect dominant hegemonic imaginings of ‘good sleep’ and of the ideal sleeper; leaving many groups of people excluded.10 Returning to our ethnographic encounters with sleep, an important observation is that ‘my sleep is not just own’. By that, we mean that for many of us, sleep is not, and cannot be conceptualized in terms of an individual body project that is solely under our own control. Research in the sociology of sleep reiterates that although sleep is a vital and embodied part of our biology, it is also a psychological, social, cultural and importantly, a relational practice. We sleep within complex networks of technologies, devices and relationships. Our sleep schedules have to fit around the demands of our family lives and work schedules, including the necessary choreographies of care these roles bring with them. Our sleep rituals, routines, timings and quality are all impacted and influenced by our sleep environments and the others who enter and leave our sleep environments. As the autoethnographic extract below attests, technosleep is technobiosocial: It’s 9.26pm. I have been lying in my bed, in the dark, with my 1 year-old daughter for at least an hour while she has been feeding on and off. She has finally drifted off to sleep so I get out of bed and carry her into her own room.

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It’s 11.15pm when I settle down to sleep. I find it difficult to switch off and it feels like ages before I fall to sleep. I’m woken up suddenly by my daughter crying. I open my eyes to see the shadow of my partner carrying her into our room. He puts her into bed bedside me, she rolls under my arm with the sleep tracker on and cuddles in. We lie there and try to keep as still as possible, hoping she will drift off back to sleep. She rolls around, sits up, throws herself back down. She pulls my hair, presses her fingers into my mouth, my eyes, up my nose, rolls over to my partner, cuddles in with him while rhythmically kicking me in the stomach. Eventually I check the time on my smartwatch, it’s 3.33am. I try gently rocking her legs to settle her, stroking her head, cuddling her. Nothing works. None of us are fully alert, but we are definitely not asleep either. It’s 4.53am and my daughter has finally gone back off to sleep. My husband carries her back into her bedroom and we get back into our comfy sleep positions. I feel like I fall instantly back to sleep. The alarm on my phone wakes me at 7.30am and I reach down and press snooze. My eyes are sore and I feel exhausted. I drift back into a light sleep until the alarm goes off again. My partner gets up but there is no part of me that wants to get out of bed yet. I lie still, awake but with my eyes closed, waiting for the next alarm. Eventually I reach down and pick up my phone, turning off the alarm and opening the tracking app to sync my nighttime data. I am expecting to see a graph showing broken sleep, with low sleep scores. I feel awful. [CC, 05.08.21]

As the extract above so aptly illustrates, sleep is a social practice that is negotiated with others; it is constrained and enabled by myriad factors. As discussed in Chapter 1, the forms sleep takes are influenced by personal and collective social, cultural rituals, routines and relationships, structures and practices. Thus, the sleep ‘goals’ set by these devices are impossibly difficult to achieve for a whole range of people. There are many people who cannot control or change their sleep environments or routines to fit with sleep hygiene advice. Think of those who share their bed with others, have partners who snore (Hislop & Arber, 2003), babies, children (Venn et al., 2008) or other family members who need care during the night (Bianchera & Arber, 2007), have pets who sleep with them (Zarhin et al., 2022). Research has found that the night is often a gendered space

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where nighttime roles of care typically fall to women (Hislop & Arber, 2003). There are millions of people across the globe with sleep disorders; in addition to those with many other medical and health conditions which impact on their sleep in various ways, for example being woken up by chronic pain (Broom et al., 2015) or menopausal symptoms during the night (Hislop & Arber, 2003) or taking medications for chronic illnesses such as cancer which disrupt sleep (Ancoli-Israel, 2015). There are many people who cannot reduce the levels of light, noise or heat in their sleep environment, and many of us who cannot keep the bedroom just for sleep, having to live, eat, work and sleep in the same space. Then, there are the hundreds of thousands of people who are sleeping in various locations and have little or no control over their sleep environments—hotels, hospitals, prisons, care homes, hostels and the streets. Those who have been displaced from their homes due to wars and natural disasters. These wider social, cultural and political factors influence how, where and how well we can sleep on a broader level. In her autoethnographic account, Ellis (2017) recounts her experiences of sleeping in different places—her home, her holiday home, on an aeroplane, in a hotel and in hospital. Her account demonstrates how the places we sleep, and who is present or absent, necessitate different sleep patterns and practices and lead to different sleep experiences. This makes it all the more difficult to act on and with our sleep data, as many of the factors that influence our sleep, timing, duration and quality are beyond our individual control. Like with other forms of self-tracking, people can often feel powerless to change their behaviours (Saukko & Weedon, 2022) and tracking sleep may only highlight their discontent. Stepping outside of this individualized vantage-point also directs our attention to some broader issues at stake. As with all consumer technology, the logics of capitalism are embedded into the technological design. The ultimate aim for manufacturers is to get people to consume their products and to keep interacting with their technology platforms. Products, then are designed to reproduce and reinforce patterns of technology use by cultivating a reliance on the technology. While sleep by its very nature may be less amenable to gamification than other aspects of our vital selves, keeping people interested and engaged enough to continue interacting with the technology platform is integral to its success. When user engagement is the business priority, how well the technology actually works, its accuracy, usability, its equitable distribution and effects, become only shadowy concerns.

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As discussed earlier, other studies have shown that people tend to only pay attention to particular data if they find the information useful to them, or actionable upon, otherwise these devices can end up discarded or abandoned. However, when single devices consist of multiple trackers it is likely that instead of abandonment, sleep data continues being passively collected yet ignored by users if they do not personally find value in it. While users retain a certain level of agency around sleep tracking, and while we can opt in and out of looking at our sleep data individually, it is more difficult to opt out on a collective level. Thinking beyond the technologies that have been specifically designed to track sleep for a moment, to the many other technologies that shape our lives in the modern world we can see how there is something about sleep that has been captured by technology in the twenty-first century an almost ubiquitous and inescapable way. Sleep patterns can be inferred in many different ways through our interactions with technology in digital societies and through our patterns of consumption—from the period we stop picking up our smartphones and scrolling (Leypunskiy et al., 2018)—known as tappigraphy (Borger et al., 2019), and turn off our smart TVs and disengage from the digital sphere to when we turn out the lights11 in our homes. Even then, some of the digital devices such as smart speakers that are commonplace in our homes and bedrooms ‘never stop listening’12 and tracking everything we do. Thus, multiple and heterogenous big data sets are becoming available through which sleep patterns and behaviours can be inferred in various ways. What are commercial companies doing with the vast amount of ‘sleep data’ they collect? What value does big sleep data have? What are the broader social and ethical implications of this?

Big Sleep Data: A Life of Its Own? Williams et al. (2015), drawing on Kroker’s (2007) earlier assertation that sleep science is founded on a concern with ‘the sleep of others’, argue that new tools and technologies for tracking and monitoring sleep shift the technoscientific gaze back to our own sleep, or ‘the sleep of ourselves’ as we become our own sleep labs. As the marketing materials for the sleep tracker Somnofy, mentioned earlier, suggests, through sleep tracking we can become ‘mini scientists’ of our own sleep. However, once collected, our sleep data is no longer just ours. Even if you decide not to share it with others, online or otherwise, the data generated through your device, the technological reflections and refractions and numerical interpretations

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of your sleep, can take on a life of their own beyond you and your body. These data can become aggregated and amalgamated with the sleep data of other device users in the creation of big (sleep) data sets which are collected and curated by commercial entities. In her book ‘Healthcare and Big data’ Mary Ebeling (2016) traces the sociotechnical networks through which personal data flow. Her analysis is centred around a haunting autoethnographic account of her attempts to trace what she describes as her ‘marketing baby’; a ‘phantom’ made real, created through the materialization of the digital traces and trails she left behind in her attempts to become pregnant through IVF. In tracking and tracing the companies that are tracking, trading and capitalizing on her personal data she shows how the data produced from our bodies can come to have their own existence, a life beyond ours. Through our complicity in the digital health ecosystem, Lupton (2016) suggests that we have become ‘digital data subjects’. When we wear our fitness trackers, or sleep with a bedside device, our movements and activities are tracked generating information about our bodies and vitalities. At the same time, these data are being reconfigured and repurposed in different ways and used by other actors in ways we may not be fully aware of. Ruckenstein and Schüll (2017) discuss how these large data sets can be mined for patterns and correlations at the population level. These data can be used to provide knowledge and to predict behaviours in all domains of social life, from policy-making and electoral forecasting to entertainment and education. The inferences and assumptions generated by big data algorithms, then, can have far-reaching implications (Lupton, 2016) and raise important issues around ownership and power. So, what is big sleep data being used for? First, various companies are capitalizing on big sleep data in their attempts to sell us a better night’s sleep. These big sleep data sets are analysed, processed and feed into the development of algorithms used by these companies to produce things like benchmarks for sleep duration and quality by age or sex that mirror dominant scientific discourses. However, the decision-making processes of AI and machine learning are not transparent. Far from being objective and neutral, as we have seen, data collection, curation and presentation have a normative dimension, which in turn can further entrench existing inequalities among already marginalized groups. Thus, ‘the sleep of ourselves’ (Williams et al., 2015) becomes re-entangled with ‘the sleep of others’ (Kroker, 2007) as new technosleep norms are created, circulated and perpetuated by these devices and corporations.

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Through big sleep data our sleep is further transformed into commodity; we see the further encroachment of capitalism into our sleep through the creation and marketing of more products for us to consume connected to the surveillance, monitoring and disciplining of our bodies. Alongside this, despite continued disputes in the scientific community around the efficacy of consumer sleep tracking devices, and critiques of the instrumental application of these sorts of data in medicine and public health (Lupton, 2014) sleep data (along with other health data) is gaining traction in wider society, as likely predictors of health. For example, sleep tracking data is one of several metrics collected by some insurance companies who have an option for their clients to opt into health assessments and upload their biodata, which in turn impacts on their insurance premiums through the tailoring of individualized insurance policies.13 The potential for this to be exploited by employers has also been noted, with examples cited of companies in the US deducting healthcare payments from employees who declined to wear a fitness tracker or who did not reach the desired benchmarks set by the corporation.14 Others report of schools and workplaces (Elmholdt et al., 2021) that encourage their employees to wear fitness trackers to enhance their health, fitness and productivity in the workplace (Lupton, 2016). Thus, sleep data can become embroiled in further surveillance capitalism and ‘algorithmic modes of management’ (Elmholdt et al., 2021). Beyond the consumer sphere, digital sleep tech is also finding uses within the sleep research community, where large-scale sleep monitoring at population levels coupled with machine learning and AI is providing new insights into how and when we sleep. For example, a recent Fitbit blog analysing how Americans sleep reported that: ‘The average Fitbit user is in bed for 7 hours and 33 minutes but only gets 6 hours and 38 minutes of sleep. The remaining 55 minutes is spent restless or awake’.15 The company also released a fascinating analysis of sleep patterns and practices during the COVID-19 pandemic. Correlating population level sleep data with various lockdown measures across the globe, they report that: ‘For the most part, people are going to bed later but getting more sleep, as well as more quality rest. For those whose quality of sleep has improved, they have been spending more time in deep and REM sleep’.16 These tools are also providing new frontiers in better understanding sleep in specific populations, such as those with sleep apnoea and the clinical, societal and environmental aspects of the disorder through the aggregation of multiple big data sets (Pépin et al., 2020). Population

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level monitoring is also providing valuable scientific and medical insights by linking sleep patterns to disease (Deering et al., 2020; Perez-Pozuelo et al., 2020). Access to big sleep data sets is facilitating a more personalized and individualized approach to the management of sleep disorders (Bragazzi et al., 2019) and being used to improve sleep for people with various chronic diseases including cancer and diabetes. Furthermore, wearables can be used in health surveillance studies in populations such as night shift workers, not only predicting risk of sleep deprivation and ill health but to inform workplace health policy, for example in the regulation of working schedules. However, studies have consistently shown that the sensors many of these tracking devices use do not work as well across all groups. For example, they are much less accurate in diagnosing sleep disorders when used on darker skin tones (Colvonen et al., 2020). This has health implications for non-white users and could contribute to future health disparities as these data are increasingly used in the medical sphere.

Conclusions To conclude, this chapter has discussed sleep tracking as an important element of contemporary technosleep and has charted the different ways in which sleep/technology entanglements are already transforming the epistemologies of our sleeping bodies, in significant ways. Sleep data we suggest is a distinct ontological object, a data proxy (Smith, 2016), a digital representation of sleep that can come to stand in for sleep in various ways that can become decontextualized from materiality and corporality of the body (Ebeling, 2016). Self-tracking technology promises to be a democratizing force—giving us the knowledge and tools to improve sleep and in turn improve our health. Thus, tracking sleep, and having sleep tracked has the potential to wield a disciplinary force. Users are nudged, guided and pushed towards achieving better sleep as part of improving overall health, in ways that encourage continued use of the several features of these devices as well as their connected platforms and forums. An integral feature of technosleep then, we suggest, is how data-driven sleep management strategies are entwined with dominant hegemonic imaginaries of healthy bodies and ideas about how we perform healthy citizenship as responsible biocitizens (Fotopoulou & O’Riordan, 2017; Lupton, 2013). However, as we have shown, sleep does not fit as easily into this unfolding storyline as other

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bodily matters. For many groups, the promises embedded in the technology—to help improve sleep, and health, are not easily realized. While some people have embraced sleep tracking technologies and may welcome these transformations, others have and may continue, perhaps unwittingly, to engage with sleep tracking in a more passive sense. Beyond the individual level, our personal metrics come together in big sleep data sets which can be put to various uses. Big sleep data sets are analysed, processed and feed into the development of algorithms used by companies to produce benchmarks for sleep duration and sleep quality, broken down by age or sex. As these sleep data circulate beyond the individual, rippling or flowing through society, they may take on a life of their own. We suggest that ‘the sleep of ourselves’ (Williams et al., 2015) is transformed back into ‘the sleep of others’ (Kroker, 2007), albeit in new ways through the algorithmically derived sleep norms that sleep tracking devices offer. We can see then, how assumptions regarding the importance of particular sleep patterns and practices are embedded within the technological design, both reflecting and reinforcing hegemonic ideals. Thus, the behaviours that give rise to them, such as sleeping for a certain number of hours per night in an undisturbed and consolidated fashion, are valorized and can come to impact on our identities and subjectivities; how people come to see themselves as ‘good’ or ‘poor’ sleepers. While sleep tracking technologies are founded on dominant ideals and hegemonic imaginings of what normal, good and ideal sleep patterns and practices are, many groups of people will find their values, experiences and behaviours are excluded from dominant narratives and perhaps even coming to be seen as invalid forms of ‘good’ sleep. This has real implications as we see the increasing use of personal data across society, in medical decision-making, as predictors of health and well-being in the workplace and in insurance decisions where we might see new sites of inequity emerge along the existing axis of inequality.

Notes 1. Ruckenstein and Schüll (2017) define datafication as the ‘conversion of qualitative aspects of life into quantified data’. 2. As a part of the autoethnographic process CC kept detailed diaries about experiences of sleep, logged images, numbers and scores created by the tracking device and analysed posts in the online user forums linked to it. More detail is included in the Methodology section in Chapter 1.

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3. In his work theorizing technological surveillance of the body, Gavin Smith (2016) advances the concept of a data proxy. Drawing on Latour (1996), he describes a data proxy as ‘an abstracted figure created from the amalgamation of data traces which serves as a representational signifier of selfhood in networked transactions between social actors and audiences’. A data proxy then, arises from datafication of the materiality of the body by various networked sensor technologies that track, trace and monitor our bodies as we move through everyday life. The flows of data these technologies produce, he suggests, are transformed into representational proxies of the body which operate within complex sociotechnical networks as a mediator between the ‘real’ and the ‘virtual’ domains. 4. In her work on the digitally engaged patient, Lupton (2013) discusses how self-tracking promotes a series of obligations for patients to make lifestyle choices and changes in the pursuit of a healthier life. 5. Self-tracking is a messy practice. For some, personal data may prompt various regimes of self-care in ways that both align with and deviate from normative, medicalized and hegemonic categorizations. Others may tinker with their devices and disrupt dataflows, ignore or forget about their data, using devices sporadically, switching between devices, resisting some forms of tracking (see the review paper ‘Datafication of Health’ by Ruckenstein and Schüll [2017] for further elaboration of these points). As Nafus and Neff (2016: 25) aptly put it ‘there is much room for people to manoeuvre in the imperfect translation’ of their subjective embodied experiences into personal analytics and data. 6. See de Zambotti et al. (2020) for a review of use, validation and utility of consumer wearable sleep technology. 7. The Oura Ring’s advertising campaign connects better sleep to greater productivity and emotional regulation, proclaiming ‘the better you sleep, the better you’… ‘know why you feel how you feel ’… https://ouraring.com/ life-with-oura. Accessed 7 Jul 2022. 8. Perez-Pozuelo et al. (2020) discuss how even PSG—the often touted clinical ‘Gold Standard’ for measuring sleep in the lab—is actually measuring brain activity alongside other physiological signals such as airflow, blood oxygen levels, heart rate, body position, eye movement, electrical activity in the muscles, data which are interpreted by a sleep clinician and correlated with different sleep–wake states. 9. Data extracts have been paraphrased to protect forum users’ anonymity. 10. See Coveney (2014) for a fuller discussion of shift workers perceptions of sleep norms; where normal sleep is conceptualized as a solid block of nocturnal sleep and the anomic patterns of sleep and wakefulness they were forced to adopt due to their working patterns were considered to result in ‘broken’ sleep.

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11. In Terry et al. (2013) analysis of light use in the home, sleep is assumed to occur when it is dark. Electricity use was found to peak between 8 and 9 a.m. in the morning and between 6 and 10 p.m. in the evenings. 12. https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/blog/amazons-alexa-never-stopslistening-to-you/. Accessed 28 Aug 2022. 13. See Lyall (2021) for an elaboration of how various companies are collecting and using consumer sleep tracking data; rewarding clients for ‘healthy’ actions through things such as virtual currency, discounts and airmiles as self-tracking becomes further entangled with consumerism and consumption. 14. See Perez-Pozuelo et al. (2020) for a fuller discussion. 15. https://blog.fitbit.com/sleep-study/ and https://www.weforum.org/ agenda/2018/02/fitbit-analyzed-data-on-6-billion-nights-of-sleep-withfascinating-results/. Accessed 17 Aug 2022. 16. https://blog.fitbit.com/covid-19-sleep-patterns/. Published 2 Apr 2020. Accessed 17 Aug 2022.

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CHAPTER 4

Transforming Sleep?

I look at the clock, it’s 7.30pm and officially the start of ‘bedtime’ at our house. I coax my children upstairs and run the younger two a bath. I pour a generous dollop of ‘bedtime bubble bath’ under the running water and the room fills with lavender and chamomile scents that the bottle promises will be ‘calming and soothing’. After their bath I rub a combination of ‘baby bedtime oil’ and ‘bedtime moisturiser’ into their skin and help them get into their matching kitten pyjamas. They have a drink of warm milk and some buttery toast while we read bedtime stories together. After they have brushed their teeth, they climb into their beds resting their heads on their pillows, with several soft toys cuddled in around each of them. I check the temperature in the room on the sensor and adjust the heat on the radiator. I tuck them into their bedcovers and turn out their night lights. The black -out blinds on the windows ensure their rooms are dark. The eldest likes to wear an eye mask too. I press play on the little cloud shaped speakers that sit by their bedsides, baby has white noise, and her older sister has lullabies. We listen together for a while and then lie in the darkness and silence until each one eventually drifts off to sleep. [CC, 21.02.22]

We sleep in, on and with all manner of ‘things ’. These material objects, tools and devices are embedded in and integral to our nightly rituals and routines of going to bed and getting to sleep. Indeed, as the extract above suggests, a whole range of different technologies—from nightlights, beds, duvets, blinds, clothes, foodstuff, herbal remedies, to cosmetics and, to beauty products—seems ordinary, mundane, dull even. We use all kinds © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 C. Coveney et al., Technosleep, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30599-3_4

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of technologies to accomplish, manage and negotiate our ‘temporal withdrawal’ from the waking world and our ‘doing’ of sleep (Taylor, 1993), in collaboration and cooperation with others in our lives. Technologies that promise us a good night’s sleep in one way or another are commonplace in our lives and, to some extent at least, always have been. Today, there is a figurative smorgasbord and a veritable cornucopia of medical, pharmaceutical and consumer products for us to feast on that promise to help us sleep better, whether that be to fall asleep quicker, to sleep for longer, to sleep more soundly or wake up feeling more refreshed. On the other side of the coin, products and strategies for maximizing alertness and energy in our waking lives are also widely available. As we discussed in Chapter 2, our sleep, our sleep-related practices and the material processes that surround them are culturally and historically situated matters (Handley, 2016). We can think about sleep as a learnt body-technique (Mauss, 1973/1934), hence the ‘doing’ of sleeping as a sociocultural and historically variable practice. Thus, technologies play a significant role in the ways in which sleep is socioculturally defined, experienced and organized in our contemporary lives. So where then does this leave us with regard to technosleep? Our aim in this chapter is to consider and discuss the ways in which sleep is being, or at least has the potential to be, transformed through its increasing entanglements with new technologies in the twenty-first century. In doing so, we discuss examples that point to a new technoscientifically mediated and indeed the modified phase of technosleep in the making, that is tied to the increasing biomedicalization, commercialization and commodification of sleep in the twenty-first century, and the quest for customization, optimization and enhancement of our bodies and our minds (Clarke et al., 2010; Williams et al., 2013). We ask, what, if anything, is new about these transformations? And are there ‘limits’ here to any such trends? In what follows, we draw on a number of examples, from light and circadian technologies to masks, medicines, machines and elder care robots, to illustrate our analysis and arguments. We consider how these entanglements of sleep and technology have the potential to change the ways in which we come to see the role of sleep in our lives, the ways in which we ‘do sleep’ in relation to new norms and forms of ‘customized’ slumber, and the values we accord it. Further, we point to newly emerging norms and forms of customized slumber, for some groups at least.

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Light and Sleep One could argue that ever since the advent of electric light, technology has ‘gotten under the skin’, transforming our sleep in biosocially significant ways. As discussed in Chapter 2, Roger Ekirch’s (2001) historical ventures into early literary sources point towards sleep being organized in two distinct phases in pre-modern times. First sleep at dusk was followed by a period of wakefulness where people would partake in not only ‘quiet wakefulness’ but also various activities such as smoking, sex and even going to the pub, before taking a second period of second sleep in the early hours of the morning. Ekrich’s theories have been debated and disputed by some but nevertheless show the extent to which our embodied sleep patterns and practices have always been entangled with our social and cultural environments. Although we (supposedly) once lived in better harmony with natural rhythms such as the rising and setting of the sun (Kreitzman & Foster, 2011), industrialization and the appearance of electric lights in the home in the 1880s significantly changed the photic environment (Ludtke, 2020) and our ability to perform around the clock. As Kreitzman and Foster (2011: 9) suggest: ‘we are diurnal creatures, but we live in a 24-hour world’. There was no sustained scientific research into the physiological impacts of artificial light on sleep until the twentieth century (Ludtke, 2020). However, it is now well known and accepted that exposure to artificial light at night can negatively impact on sleep in various ways (de la Ingesia et al., 2016). Today, exposure to light at night is an ordinary feature of our everyday lives, with streetlights, electric lights inside and outside our homes and the many electrical light-emitting devices we have around us, including TVs, digital clocks, smart watches, mobile phones, and even things like smoke, carbon monoxide and house alarms.1 What then, of technosleep? To what extent are these light-emitting technologies a part of the technosleep storyline? In these early decades of the twenty-first century there are renewed concerns around light pollution on health and how light impacts sleep (Cho et al., 2013; Hasson & Gilmore, 2017; Mortazavi et al., 2018) with blue light emerging as a cause of concern in so far as it potentially damages sleep quality and delays sleep onset by interfering with the release of the hormone melatonin. For instance, a recent study by Cho et al. (2013) found that sleeping with a light on at night directly impacts sleep

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quality causing shallow sleep and frequent arousals. Thus, while we are glued to our devices, watching TV or playing video games in bed and staring at our tablets and mobile phone screens, pursuing online leisure activities into the night—as has become the norm for many (Exelmans & Van den Bulck, 2016; Grandner et al., 2013)—our sleep is being quietly and unintentionally transformed—our sleep quality is in decline and our sleep cycles are shifted further off kilter. Furthermore, the increase in digital technology in the bedroom can be disruptive in other ways, demonstrating its own situational agency. As Hsu (2017) notes, our devices themselves can ‘wake up’ unexpectedly during the night (see also Chapter 5). A call, a text, a software update, a notification or nudge from an app could light up the screen or make a sound, waking the device and potentially its owner at any time, transforming our experiences of sleep. In these contemporary, hyperconnected times, sleep is no longer the respite from the waking world it once was as the litany of digital devices that clutter our homes mean we can be constantly ‘on call’ no matter the time of the day or night. For instance, a recent study in the US found college students would frequently sleep with their mobile phone not only in their bedrooms but actually in their beds with them. They reported their devices would frequently interrupt their sleep and many participants reported ‘sleep texting’ during the night but had no memory of doing so in the morning (Dowdell & Clayton, 2019). Some may think this reasonably prompts a call for digital and communication devices to leave the bedroom as a part of sleep hygiene measures to ensure a good night’s sleep in the twenty-first century. However, to the contrary we have seen the sleep technology industry respond by implementing design modifications to some devices (e.g. mobile phones) tailoring them specifically for evening use and night -time reading by creating timer-activated amber filters (Mortazavi et al., 2018) and other ways of reducing blue light exposure (Janku˚ et al., 2020). An example perhaps, in other words, as Reiss (2017) has appositely put it in a different context, of deploying the very technologies which ‘broke’ sleep to ‘fix’ it. As for the circadian storyline behind this foregoing one, suffice it to say that light of course is the prime zeitgeber (time giver or time cue) with a powerful effect on our body clocks, sleep and alertness. Many of our sleep problems today, furthermore, are translated into circadian matters to do with the clash or conflict between our body clocks and

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our social schedules, including recourse to notions such as ‘social jet lag’ (Roenneberg, 2017) to capture and convey this circadian disruption or misalignment. A variety of proposed ‘solutions’ may also now be pointed to on these circadian counts, some more high-tech than others. This for example, in the case of the so-called ‘circadian sleep rhythm disorders’, includes chronotherapeutic interventions like light boxes, behavioural measures and pharmaceuticals to realign our sleep– wake cycles with prevailing normative models of consolidated nocturnal slumber, themselves contested matters (Meadows, 2020; Wolf-Meyer, 2016). It also however, beyond the clinic, includes anything and everything from the use of ‘circadian lighting’ in the workplace to cultural directives to know your chronotype (Breus, 2016) and from apps to help you sync your schedule with your circadian rhythms, to calls for more biocompatible school and work schedules. Questions on this latter count have also been raised as to whether light interventions may be more effective at reducing social jetlag than changing school start times (Skeldon & Dijk, 2019), which is equally important to note here with these light and sleep matters in mind. Here then we glimpse, not simply the long-running storyline of light and sleep, nor even its more recent translation into the circadian problems it creates for our body clocks and our sleep–wake cycles in these ‘desynchronized’ times of ours (Williams et al., 2021), but the variety of circadian interventions which may now be pointed to, some more high-tech than others. New circadian forms of governance, within and beyond the clinic, seek to reset and resynchronise our body clocks and to normalize and optimize our sleep–wake cycles in so doing. Next, we turn to another important facet of this transforming sleep landscape in the guise of masks and machines.

Masks and Machines Recent population surveys carried out across different social and cultural contexts suggest that 1 in 3 adults report one or more night of poor sleep a week with 6–10% fulfilling the criteria for insomnia (NICE, 2021). Furthermore, it has recently been estimated that there are close to a billion people worldwide living with Obstructive Sleep Apnoea (OSA). The take-home message from these statistics is that experiencing sleep problems is an extremely common issue for people across the globe.

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Although many sleep problems go unrecognized and undiagnosed, there is then, still a rather large pool of people who do seek medical help to improve their ‘disordered’ sleep. The so-called ‘medicalization’ of sleep, as in the transformation of aspects of our sleep behaviour into medical matters (Conrad, 2007; Williams et al., 2013), has been linked to the birth of sleep medicine in America in the 1970s. However, sleep has been medicalized and pharmaceuticalized for much longer than that. We shall return to discuss the pharmaceutical transformations of sleep in the next section. Suffice it to say that today, there are newer and more sophisticated medical technologies being developed to treat sleep disorders, designed specifically to transform ‘disordered’, ‘abnormal’ or ‘pathological’ sleep into a more ‘normal’ or at least more normative form. Take for example Continuous Positive Airway Pressure (CPAP) machines that are used to treat sleep apnoea. Obstructive sleep apnoea is the most commonly diagnosed and widely studied sleep-disordered breathing syndrome within sleep medicine. It is characterized by weight gain, heavy snoring, excessive daytime sleepiness and apnoeas—short periods of upper airway collapse during sleep where the individual stops breathing—which may result in the individual gasping for breath and momentarily waking from their sleep. These continuous arousals impact sleep quality leading to sleep becoming more fragmented. Often those with OSA report that they do not feel like they have a problem with sleep per se, on the contrary, they can fall asleep at the drop of a hat. Rather they report issues with wakefulness—they report feeling tired all the time, disinterested and sleepy. It is often those who share their beds and bedrooms who encourage these individuals to seek medical help, noticing the apnoeas and being disturbed by loud snoring at night. OSA has other health implications too, being associated with increased cardiovascular disease, mortality and an increased risk of road traffic accidents (Erridge et al., 2021). Before CPAP, the standard treatment of OSA was tracheostomy. CPAP machines, introduced in the 1980s, are designed to be worn during periods of sleep. They consist of a face mask and tube connected to an oxygen supply kept at the bedside that supplies a consistent flow of air to the user. Thus, CPAP use drastically transforms the user’s sleep at a biological level; by helping keep their airways open and oxygen levels high it allows the sleeper to enter a deeper sleep and reduces the micro-arousals and apnoea’s that characterize this form of sleep-disordered breathing. CPAP is thought to be of great clinical value and studies have shown

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that it improves subjective measurements of daytime sleepiness, blood pressure and quality of life (Moreira, 2006). The clinical effectiveness of CPAP is clear on these counts with a large body of evidence to back it up, including a significant reduction in symptoms and improved daytime functioning. Thus, CPAP can be said to improve sleep quality by restoring a more healthy and normative sleep pattern. Beyond these clinical effects, CPAP also significantly transforms how its users ‘do’ sleep; it impacts their sleep routines, rituals and behaviours as well as how they experience sleep. Recent research has found that CPAP users emphasize how using the machine is transformative for them (Coveney et al., 2016a). Not only does it transform the rhythms, routines, patterns and practices of their sleep, it also, so they say, transforms them as people and what they are able to do when they were awake, as we can see in this data extract below: SAFG2M3: …I went to the doc and doc sent me to the sleep clinic […] once I was brought back for the results they told me they didn’t know how I was even operating because I woke up or stopped breathing 579 times […] I got the machine and within days, total change. I’ve lost two and half stone in weight. I am full of energy, full of get up and go. I feel a totally different person. I feel about 20 years younger! (as quoted in Coveney et al., 2016a)

Despite the technology’s transformative potential, the technosleep storyline here is far from simple and straightforward. The historical emergence of the diagnostic category OSA was not a straightforward process either (Kroker, 2007; Moreira, 2006) and medicalisation of the condition remains complex and contested including delays in the seeking of medical care according to factors such as gender, family and morality (Zarhin, 2018), with many cases still undiagnosed. Sociological research on experiences of sleeping with CPAP indicate many additional tensions and troubles in relation to experiences of sleeping with the machine in addition to resistance and rejection of the machine by some. For example, Coveney et al. (2016a) found that people disliked being tethered to a machine at night. They found it stigmatizing, embarrassing, disruptive of their usual bedtime routines and nocturnal relationships including intimacy with their partners. They reported times that they would resist or reject wearing the machine for example when in public (e.g. on long-haul flights) or if sharing a bed with a new partner. Additionally, they reported

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discomfort, pain and marks on their faces from the mask. Likewise, Zarhin (2018) draws attention to a range of physical and emotional difficulties patients experienced in bringing a ‘hospital-like device’ of this kind into their homes. Doing so indeed, as Zahrin comments, is clearly not an ‘easy experience’ for them, resulting in cases of ‘ambivalent adherence’ and ‘ambivalent non-adherence’ alike. What we can see here then, is just as these sociomaterial sleep assemblages may come together in technosleep, so too they may break up or come apart, leading to something far from sleepful far from ‘normal’ or normative and far from fully medicalized (Zarhin, 2018).

Pharmaceuticals and Sleep Sleeping Pills Alongside mechanical technologies like CPAP, sleeping pills are consumed in great quantities across the globe. Here we have another medical or at least pharmaceutical technology that gets under the skin to transform sleep, quite literally. Sedatives and hypnotics have been around for decades and can be regarded as established tools used to induce and augment sleep across both clinical and domestic life worlds. Many, however, are heavily medicalized technologies that are typically only accessible through medical gatekeepers on a prescription-only basis (in the UK at least). The market for sleeping tablets in the UK has traditionally been dominated by benzodiazepines like temazepam and nitrazepam but these have now been replaced as market leaders by the socalled Z drugs like Zopiclone and Zolpidem (Gabe et al., 2016). In 2021 over 8.1 million prescriptions for hypnotics were dispensed in community settings in England. This included over 5.5 million prescriptions for z drugs (primarily Zopiclone) and over 1 million benzodiazepines were prescribed as sleeping tablets, temazepam being the market leader with over 725,000 prescriptions (NHS BSA, 2022). Despite this, the ‘pharmaceuticalization’ (Williams et al., 2011) of sleep within clinical medicine remains partial and contested due in part to downwards regulatory pressures on doctors to reduce overall hypnotic prescribing and in particular long-term use (Coveney et al., 2019). Uses of these pharmaceutical technologies are heavily moralized too (Gabe et al., 2016) with long-term users facing the potential stigma of being labelled as ‘addicts’. As a result, there is a high level of ambivalence surrounding their use reported by

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both doctors and patients alike (Davy et al., 2015; Moloney, 2017; Venn et al., 2013). Despite this, sleeping pills continue to be prescribed in large quantities, not to mention other medicines and substances such as antidepressants and antihistamines that are prescribed and consumed for their sedative effects also contributing to the pharmacology of sleep (Coveney et al., 2019). The pharmacology of sleep can include a wide range of substances, as illustrated by Coveney et al. (2016b) in a report discussing how night shift workers manage sleep. They asked their participants whether they would seek medical advice for how to manage the sleep problems relating to shift work and whether they would be open to taking a pharmaceutical to help them sleep. These participants described various self-medication practices including using over-the-counter pharmaceutical products, painkillers with sedating side-effects, anti-depressants and anxiolytics (originally prescribed to them for reasons other than sleep), herbal and homeopathic remedies marketed as sleep aids, antihistamines and alcohol to ‘help them to sleep’. Despite having these substances at their disposal, value judgements were attached to medicating sleep. There was a strong sense that people thought of ‘chemical sleep’ as being inferior to natural sleep. Sleeping pills were thought of as treating the symptom rather than the root cause of the problem. There was a general dislike of sleep medication and resistance towards using it, linked to the possibility of becoming addicted, the idea of sleeping pills being ‘unnatural’ and concerns that medicated sleep would not feel like ‘real sleep’. ‘Natural’ or unmedicated sleep therefore was valued over medicated sleep with participants believing that this helped them to feel better the next day. The substances we ingest work on transforming sleep from the inside out, interacting with our internal biological processes, thus raising ontological questions about what medicated sleep ‘is’ vis-a-vis unmedicated sleep. To paraphrase Emily Martin (2006) when she writes ‘the drug goes in the person, and a new person results’, we might suggest that when drugs come to bear on sleep a new sleep emerges—a medicated or pharmaceuticalized technosleep which is understood and experienced differently to ‘natural’ or non-medicated sleep. It is stigmatized, it is policed and it is scrutinized, it is often less satisfying, long-lasting or refreshing, it is viewed as different from and inferior to unmedicated sleep by those who experience it (Coveney et al., 2016b, 2019; Gabe et al., 2016). Parallels too, anticipating issues further discussed in Chapter 6,

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can be drawn here with the science fiction literature which frames ‘technosleep’ as an inauthentic and impure form of sleep. Let us return here, however, to one of the questions posed at the beginning of this chapter as to what, if anything is new about technosleep on these pharmaceutical counts? It is apparent after all that using various substances as soporific tonics to try and improve sleep is not a new or contemporary development in the technosleep storyline. When researching the history of sleeping pills, the Britannica (2022) tells us that the first substance introduced especially as a sedative was a liquid solution of bromide salts in the 1880s, with chloral hydrate, a derivative of ethyl alcohol coming into use in Britain in 1869. The first sleeping pill, barbital, was formulated in 1903. Going back even further, as Sasha Handley and her colleagues note (2016), historical documents show an array of substances that were used to induce sleep dating as far back as the 1600s. This included various flowers and plants such as white poppies, water lilies, violets, tobacco and cypress bark, herbs, foodstuffs such as ale and beer milk, animal fats and, as the following extract attests, even toads and weasels: ‘to procure sleep…anoint the soles of the feet with the grease of a small weasel’ (The Kitchin-Physician, 1680 as cited by Sleep Well in the Early Modern World on Twitter). Sleeping well, Handley (2016) suggests, has always been sought after and valued. The roots of the medicalization of sleep indeed, Handley argues, which scholars suggest intensified in the 1970s with the discovery of REM and the birth of sleep science and sleep medicine (as we discussed in Chapter 2), can be traced back to the early modern period. Her research casts a light on a wide range of different sleep-related practices people engaged in ‘underlining the vital role that sleep played in everyday settings’ (2016: 2). Thus, Handley argues, early modern people ‘clearly understood the benefits of a good night’s sleep for the health of their bodies and minds and went to great lengths to secure it’ (2016: 3). Today, however, alongside the medicalization of sleep we are seeing another noteworthy shift that marks a departure from the past in significant ways too: a shift, that is to say, which has more to do with the optimization and/or customization of sleep (Williams et al., 2013) than the medicalization or normalization of ‘disordered’ sleep. The social uses of sleeping pills beyond therapy, that is, to alter, augment and manage sleep–wake cycles beyond their licensed uses by those without diagnosed illnesses or disorders, points to a new frontier of contemporary technosleep which has not received a great deal of attention in the social

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sciences literature to date. Yet we can see evidence of this type of use all around us. For example, travellers using sleeping pills on long-haul flights to overcome jetlag can be seen as a way of customizing our sleep and wakefulness patterns to fit in with social demands and driven by social goals rather than as a medical need. In a recent study Krøll (2019) found that a small number of Danish students were using sedatives nonmedically and outside of medical guidance to manage their body rhythms and maximize their time for sleep or to ‘chill out’ after days of hard work. Other studies on the use of sedative hypnotics in institutionalized settings such as hospitals, old people’s homes, prisons, and secure mental health units point to pills being used to control the sleep of others in attempts to get their bodies to conform to institutional norms (Pegado et al., 2018). Multiple spaces within contemporary societies have emerged then, or are now emerging, where these same pharmaceuticals tools and technologies could be, or are being, used by people who already have normal or normative sleep patterns; uses which seek to transform, control, individualize or customize sleep and/or wakefulness in multiple ways. Context, in short, matters here to the very meanings and values we accord these technologies in use or practice. Wakefulness Promoting Drugs ‘Wakefulness’ or alertness promoting drugs, with the exception of caffeine, are a more recent development in the technosleep storyline in comparison to sleeping pills. These have caused a lot of debate within and beyond academic circles since the turn of the twenty-first century— mostly to do with the prospect of pharmaceutical cognitive enhancement (Coveney & Bjønness, 2019) or the pharmaceuticalisation of performance in our waking lives (Lopes et al., 2015) rather than the customization of sleep (Williams et al., 2013). One such drug, modafinil, which is currently prescribed to treat narcolepsy, has captured the public imagination over the past decade in that, alongside its touted cognitive enhancing effects, it can supposedly be used by people to help them stay awake, alert and fully functioning for up to several days at a time without accumulating any significant sleep debt. And there are scientific studies showing that this may indeed be the case (Killgore et al., 2008). Military interest in tools like modafinil is comprehensible, and related stories and images of the creation of ‘super soldiers’ who don’t need

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to rest or sleep and can maintain high levels of functionality (Ehlert & Wilson, 2021; Subbotina et al., 2018) have been circulating for over a decade (Bickford, 2020). These technosleep—or perhaps ‘technowake’ promises fit alongside a broader military agenda within which the optimization of sleep is seen as a key strategic challenge and opportunity in terms of solider performance and health. As Capaldi and colleagues note (2019), the US military have a number of recent initiatives, including (i) the development of comprehensive individualized sleep/alertness management systems to optimize performance in military personnel (i.e. seeing sleep as a component of the ‘performance triad’ alongside exercise and nutrition for Soldier health), and (ii) investigation of the prevalence, aetiology and treatment of sleep disorders and co-morbidities in military personal. Hypnotics can be used to optimize crew rest under suboptimal environmental conditions. Temazepam can be used to maintain sleep during the daytime whereas zolpidem and zapelon may be used to help initiate short naps outside of ‘optimal naptimes’, helping with jetlag and melatonin can be used to shift the circadian rhythm in ways that are socially desirable (Wingelaar-Jagt et al., 2021). However, modafinil is also gaining attention due to the potential for use by civilians across different sectors of society. This includes discussion and debate on potential use by surgeons, shift workers, students, parents of young children, as well as recreational users (Coveney, 2011; Greely et al., 2008; Kim, 2012; Mann & Sahakian, 2015; Sugden et al., 2012; Turner et al., 2003). Potential uses, in such cases, amounts to the customization of sleep patterns where users could potentially reduce their need for sleep without succumbing to the deleterious cognitive effects of sleep deprivation. There have been some notable studies on perceptions, attitudes, imaginaries and experiences of using drugs like modafinil (and others e.g. Dextroamphetamine, Adderall, Ritalin) to postpone or overcome the need for sleep over recent years (Coveney, 2011, 2019; Krøll, 2019; Steward & Pickersgill, 2019). Steward and Pickersgill (2019) for instance, found that a small number of students in their study justified using ‘study drugs’ like modafinil to customize their sleep and manage lifestyle pressures. Such uses blur the therapy/enhancement boundary and provide illustrative cases of how, in some instances at least, otherwise ‘healthy’ people are already using pharmaceutical technology to manipulate their sleep/wake patterns and practices in their pursuit of efficiency and productivity.

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In terms of technosleep, the public discourse around pharmaceutically manipulating sleep in the absence of any sort of disorder or illness portrays sleep as a ‘choice’ or an ‘option’ in a way that we have not seen before, further casting sleep as something that is expendable and can be dispensed with, albeit temporarily, through technology. Sleep then, becomes further disconnected from our biology and the rhythms of the natural world around us, like the rising and setting of the sun. Instead, sleep comes to be regarded as something we can choose to do when we want to and can overcome or override (to some degree at least), using technology, when we do not. What we are witnessing then, in terms of pharmaceuticalized technosleep, is a shift away from the medicalised focus on disease and goals of countering, repairing or normalizing disordered sleep towards customizing or potentially even optionalising sleep in the future (a point we shall return to and discuss further in Chapter 7). This, in turn, transforms our relationships with sleep in the contemporary era; reinforcing social norms that sleep is something that can be cut back on delayed or deferred at will, in favour of waking activities, individualizing sleep as part of our own body projects in the twenty-first century. New Drugs in Development Updating this storyline still further, new drug developments or frontiers may be pointed to on these technosleep counts. We already have pharmaceutical chronotherapies (Cardinali et al., 2021), based around melatonin, with more in development which aim to reset our body clocks and realign our sleep–wake cycles back in with prevailing norms and notions of what normal sleep is (Dallmann et al., 2016), or at least what those in the medicoscientific sphere imagine it should be. There is a range of other new drugs on the horizon including ampakine compounds that are being investigated for their potential to counteract the effects of sleep deprivation by enhancing cognitive performance during extended wakefulness (Boyle et al., 2012). Orexin-A and Orexin-B, for example, are neuropeptides that are synthesized in the brain and play an important role in sleep–wake regulation. Animal studies have shown that administration of orexin-A increases wakeful activity and inhibits sleep but the translation of these effects in humans is still uncertain (Nepovimova et al., 2019). Medications that target the orexin receptor and block orexin binding could, it is suggested, help sustain longer periods of sleep as a treatment for

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insomnia (Liu, 2020) whereas orexin supplementation has been investigated as a prospective treatment for narcolepsy which is categorized by orexin deficiency. Each of these pharmaceutical technologies embodies the same promise; that we can have technological mastery over our sleep and that we will be able to more or less radically transform our sleep practices sooner or later through pharmaceutical manipulation of our sleep onset, duration, quality and timing. We can see therefore, through the (prospective) use of these pharmaceuticals, how sleep further becomes something that can be technologically controlled, modified and molded to fit social norms, demands and desires.

Sleep and Dream Engineering As we have alluded to above, both the medicoscientific sphere and the sleep industry puts forward the idea that sleep is malleable, providing a range of tools for us to tinker with, normalize, improve, customize, optimize and even potentially optionalize sleep. As well as utilizing technologies to help us sleep better, we are also seeing a shift towards technologies that are being designed to intervene in our sleep as we sleep. Rather than sleep being merely something that we do each night, a time of rest when we are switched off and out of reach, sleep is increasingly positioned as being something that we can act on and with, in various ways. These new technologies not only promise to improve our sleep but go beyond that in promising to enable us to use the time we are sleeping to do something else—to learn while we sleep, to undergo therapy, to be entertained by controlling our dreams. Although this shift too, has a longer history, these new forms of technosleep transform our thinking about sleep as a period of respite from the waking world into seeing sleep as an active, productive or even industrious phase. One example of this from the sleep science domain is the newly emerging science of ‘sleep engineering’. The science behind sleep engineering is still experimental and embryonic to date. It involves exposing the sleeper to sensory stimuli (such as clicking sounds) at specific times in the sleep cycle in attempts to manipulate neural oscillations in ways that maintain, improve or enhance the amplitude of slow-wave sleep. Dr. Penny Lewis, a professor in psychology at Cardiff University is a leading voice on this in the UK. As Lewis explains in a TEDx talk entitled ‘Sleep Engineering: Improve Your Life by Manipulating Your Sleep’ (2015),

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sleep engineering involves tailoring sleep and manipulating the sleep we do get in order to ‘get the most out of it’—to improve memories, study, for better brain health or to tackle PTSD. There are also scientists across the globe working on how to build technology that interfaces with the sleeping mind and our dreams. The notion of dream ‘incubation’ has a long history dating back to ancient times. Today however this comes in the shape of things such as Dream Engineering where scientists are working to build technologies for ‘targeted dream incubation’ (TDI) a modern-day scientific incarnation of this ancient sacred art, that is to say, and a method for ‘guiding dreams towards specific themes’ (Carr et al., 2020). The key to TDI, on this count, turns out to be the hypnagogic state of sleep known as NREM1, or the entrance stage to our sleep, in simple terms, where sensory cues of the haptic, olfactory or auditory kind are administered to modulate the sleeping body. As with sleep engineering, the scientific goals of dream engineering are to improve sleep quality and enhance memory. However, Carr et al. (2020) suggest that these technologies could also be used in the future to generate specific dream content, alleviating nightmares, augmenting creativity and ‘manipulate dreaming in the wild’. As for the prospects of ‘reading’ our dreams, progress is also being made on these counts too. Scientists indeed have already taken the first steps towards doing so by measuring our brain activity whilst we sleep and using machine learning based neural analyses to ‘decode’ them (Horikawa et al., 2013). The extent to which these technologies will find their way from sleep labs into our homes and bedrooms is not yet known. While currently in the domain of sleep science, as ever, we find that researchorientated goals spill over into other more commercial interests. For instance, some early commercial products are advertised as being able to promote lucid dreaming. A recent piece in Wired magazine with the eye-catching headline ‘Lucid dreamers are using unproven technology to hack their sleep’ (Schofield, 2021), raised a number of concerns here, with some devices seen as far more reliable than others on these counts and further progress predicted in the next 5–10 years. The commercial opportunities that having a window into our sleeping minds, and tools to manipulate our unconscious thoughts provides, both now and in future, are already unsurprisingly or understandably causing concern amongst the scientific community. There are fears that these developments will lead to the (further) corporate colonization of our sleep. Because there are no regulations specifically addressing things like

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in-dream advertising, it has been suggested that companies might one day, in the not-too-distant future, use smart speakers to detect people’s sleep stages and play back sounds that could influence their dreams and behaviours. A recent ‘open letter’ (Stickgold et al., 2021) signed by 35 leading sleep and dream researchers has sounded the alarm on these counts. ‘Our dreams cannot just become a playground for corporate advertisers’ the letter warns, citing a recent advertising campaign that was supposedly designed to ‘infiltrate our dreams’—as an early example what could be coming our way in future. Discussing developments in the science of dream engineering, Carr et al. (2020) raise a number of ethical concerns as commercial products of these types are increasingly being developed. The sleeper is considered to be particularly vulnerable during sleep, and research shows that during experimental studies sleepers are unaware of whether they have been exposed to any sleep stimulation or not. Thus, concerns are raised regarding the potential harms these technologies could cause, including things like emotional mis-regulation or memory disruption as well as fears of their misuse. For example, they discuss how these devices could potentially be used to introduce ideas into an individual’s mind without their consent, a form of subliminal persuasion creating possible political bias or even sexual attraction, or to induce nightmares via unpleasant sensory stimulation rather than get rid of them. While fears of a Brave New World of mind control may be unfounded on these counts as yet, the potential to not simply manipulate but to marketize our dreams is clearly a cause for concern. These technosleep relations then have the potential to further transform the ways in which we see sleep. No longer can sleep be regarded as an inactive and asocial phase, where we can unplug and disconnect in restful slumber, relinquishing many of the responsibilities of our waking lives. Through these new technological entanglements, sleep becomes a time of activity and potential productivity, a time we or others can ‘engineer’ if not ‘exploit’ to various ends; to undergo therapy, to improve our cognitive health, to learn a new language, and even a potential or prospective new space we can be exposed to advertising and marketing for commercial goods and services.

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(Bio) Hacking Sleep? In light of the above, we might also consider some of the other ways our sleep is now becoming ‘hackable’. Defining hacking or ‘biohacking’ is no easy matter, comprising as it does a variety of different pursuits, practices and meanings. For some, it amounts to exploring and experimenting with the biology of living matter other than our own in the interests of curiosity, citizen science, and the so-called DIY biology movement. For others, biohacking means experimenting on their own biology far beyond the lab and the clinic, in the interests not simply of controlling, manipulating or improving but of optimizing, enhancing or upgrading their bodies, brains or minds (Yetisen, 2018). Biohacking on these latter counts, those which primarily concern us here in this short section that is, involves a complex mixture of meanings, methods and motives. Indeed, it can encompass many forms of bioscience and biotechnology, and include the use of biomedical tools and techniques and high-tech equipment outside of the institutional sphere of biomedicine such as medicines, drugs, machines and other expensive experimental gadgets 2022; Mularoni, 2021). On the other hand, it can (Compagna & Sahinol, ¸ also encompass more mundane technologies and techniques, including foodstuffs and nutrition, exercise and health regimes of a more ‘natural’, organic, new age, holistic or wellness kind (Ahteensuu & Blockus, 2016), premised on the belief that such changes will have beneficial physiological consequences. Thus, biohacking can occur across multiple places and spaces (e.g. private laboratories, workplaces, gyms, sports clubs and homes), but typically takes place outside of institutionalized settings such as academia, hospitals and clinics (Ahteensuu & Blockus, 2016). As far as the biohacking of our sleep is concerned, in part it concerns things such as the digital self-tracking of our sleep already discussed in Chapter 3, this time albeit pressed into the service of ‘tracking your hacking’ so to speak, to monitor and measure progress on these counts. In part, it may include or encompass the above-mentioned use of pharmaceuticals beyond the lab or clinic to ‘control’ and ‘customise’ the sleep–wake cycle. In part too though it may also include things like the home or DIY use of various forms of brain stimulation such as transcranial electrical stimulation (TES) as part and parcel of the quest for better sleep or better sleep in less time (see for example Matthews, 2018). In other respects, however, in its more popular guise and looser sense of the word, it once again seems to involve a variety of lower tech, more

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mundane pursuits and practices, some of which predate biohacking by far but are now rebooted or rebranded as biohacking or just ‘sleep hacks’ for short of the ‘how to hack your sleep’ variety. It may even now in, it seems, include the addition of ‘hacking’ tags or reference to the use of such basic things in these sleep environments like blackout blinds, temperature control, no screens in the bedroom and so on, as well as other not such basic or mundane things like the use of white noise machines not to mention sleeping on magnetic mats or pads in the quest to get more ‘restful sleep’ (Matthews, 2018). Whether or not the pursuit of so-called polyphasic sleep counts as another form of (bio) hacking however is an open question. That some biohackers have reportedly tried it nevertheless (Matthews, 2018), successfully or otherwise, gives us grounds at least to mention it here in this regard. The same indeed may arguably be said of the growing cultural directive to know or understand your ‘chronotype’—your genetic propensity for morningness or eveningness that is to say—which has is now starting to be framed through recourse to this hacking trope, mantra or motif. It is not simply a question here however of hacking sleep in this way, nor even of hacking ones chronotype for that matter, whatever that may mean, but of the way in which knowing your chronotype and living your life according to it enables you to find the best or optimal time to do everything from eating to working, studying to exercising (Breus, 2016). Sleeping in harmony, tune or sync with your chronotype, in this way, is itself starting to become a sort of life or productivity hack in popular culture today. Biohacking then, as this suggests, provides us with another important strand to this technosleep storyline: another example or exemplar indeed of the quest to optimize, enhance and customize our sleep ourselves, in these high and low-tech ways far beyond the lab and the clinic. Opinion nevertheless is divided on the merits of any such pursuits and practices. On the one hand, as we have seen, the appeal for biohackers is no doubt bound up with the quest to be ‘better’ by taking biology into our ‘own hands’ so to speak and self-experimenting accordingly. On the other hand, biohacking, sleep related or otherwise, has been criticized on many counts, particularly some of the more risky forms of biohacking, including concerns aired in such attention-grabbing pieces as the following: ‘The dangers of biohacking “experiments” – and how

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it could damage your health’ (Anand, 2018); ‘The human body is too complex for easy fixes: You don’t need to be hacked’ (Arbesman, 2018); and, ‘As a scientist I’m anti-biohacking: Understanding your own energy depletion and restoration is how to truly optimize’ (Mednick, 2022). Our discussion of the biohacking of sleep thus highlights how it is a multifaceted and contested phenomenon. Not only are its practices multiple, but so too are its wider implications. We can see this further in the way that sleep hacking has a link with computationalism, the idea that human bodies and minds can be conceptualized to varying degrees as computer systems. Petersén (2018) moreover notes that biohacking writ large might do more than frame humans as being metaphorically similar to computers. Biohacking might actually redefine what biological bodies are, since metaphors can ‘collapse’ when two domains are made ‘equivalent’ with one another. But this too is not a foregone conclusion, as we explore in Chapter 5, when we examine in greater detail how sleep is metaphorically constructed. The metaphorical redescription of humanness and technology through the prism of biohacking sleep is not necessarily uniform nor is it unidirectional. Biohacking sleep, in other words, may not just subsume humans and computer systems but may reinforce or be productive of differences. As for the political or politicoethical dimensions of these developments and debates, the picture here is also somewhat mixed. To the extent for example that biohacking, or certain forms of it at least, is about the decentralization and democratizations of science and technology beyond the lab and clinic in open-source ways, then it may be regarded as part and parcel of more technoprogressive views and visions of the future. To the extent however it is also about individual freedom and the right to control, experiment with and upgrade our biology in any way we see fit, which in turn tends to favour those with more time, energy and money to do so, then it is may also be associated with more technolibertarian views and values. And to the extent finally, as the above notes of caution suggest, that concern and criticism are expressed over these some of these pursuits and practices, then we also glimpse here views and values which lean more toward the opposite more bioconservative end of the spectrum.

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Techno Transformations of the Places and Spaces We Sleep Finally, we turn to consider how technosleep is transforming the places and spaces we sleep. The advent of ‘smart’ technologies, like smart beds, baby monitors, watches, and speakers, constitutes another set of technosleep transformations. Sleep technologies that are branded as being ‘smart’ focus attention on the ways artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) can be affecting how sleep happens. We can especially see this in the case of ‘smart homes’. The emergence of smart home technologies increasingly allows numerous aspects of homes to be digitally controlled and monitored by complex technological systems (Mennicken et al., 2014). This includes the temperature and lighting of rooms, which as we have discussed earlier are known to facilitate or inhibit how sleep is realized (Caddick et al., 2018). The effects that smart home technologies have on sleep are not simply incidental or random. Some smart home technologies are specifically designed to improve or optimize how sleep is practised. Some smart home technologies like sleep sensor pads for baby beds do more than just monitor and ‘informate’ (Zuboff, 2015) how sleep occurs. Through the sleep data they generate, they are also designed to help users become ‘better’ sleepers. In this way, smart home technologies are similar to the sleep tracking technologies that we discussed at some length in the previous chapter. We identified two ways sleep is meant to be optimized and improved by sleep tracking devices and apps. Firstly, by providing users with personalized data, sleep tracking technologies give users ‘evidence’ of how their sleep compares with others. Sleep trackers and apps additionally draw from other health data sets collected by other health devices and apps to recommend broader lifestyle changes, such as reduced consumption of caffeine before bedtime, which are meant to influence sleep onset, duration, and/or quality. But more than this, sleep tracking technologies ‘nudge’ users and provide incentives to users to alter their sleep behaviours and practices, as evident in the way that improved sleep scores might be linked to lower health insurance premiums. Alongside smart home technologies and sleep tracking apps and devices are sleep-affecting robots, which are in varying degrees of technological development. In contexts like Japan, there is a growing cultural expectation among some people that the development and deployment of social,

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communication, and information support robots can improve how some people sleep and/or are cared for (Mizuno et al., 2021; Obayashi et al., 2020; Pu et al., 2021). Obayashi et al.’s study of how a communication robot in tandem with a smart bed sensor can be deployed in a Japanese elder care residence is illustrative of this possible future-in-themaking. Obayashi et al. (2020) found that the ability to monitor and alter the sleep of older people in a Japanese residential care home through robotic and assistive technologies not only was good in itself, in that it provided data to care workers about how older residents were sleeping. This technology-driven intervention was also found to have improved the working environment of care professionals, as less energy and attention was needed to surveil older residents at night-time.2 Recent attempts to introduce robotic technologies into spaces for sleep have also originated outside of Japan. First developed in 2017 by Dutch roboticists, the ‘Somnox’ sleep pillow robot has received media attention from many prominent news sources in the Anglosphere, such as the New York Times (Chen, 2020) and the technology and design website, Gizmodo (Song, 2019). The latest version of the Somnox sleep pillow robot primarily functions by being hugged by its users. The pillow robot uses smart sensors and an adaptive algorithm to create a breathing pattern that users can mimic, which when followed is said to be more conducive to falling asleep. It remains to be seen the extent to which sleep robots like the Somnox sleep pillow will actually factor into people’s lives. There are not yet any clear indications that robots will come to populate the night worlds of people in a substantial, sustained, or ubiquitous way. For example, some technology reviews of the Somnox sleep robot have framed it as a superfluous piece of technology that is not likely to find a broad consumer base, stemming mainly from the fact that the device can be disruptive of sleep and intimacy between bed partners (Song, 2019). And the ability of sleep robots to become widely used in care settings is also questionable, partly because robots are generally not perceived in some contexts to have the ability to provide ‘warm’ care (Ishiguro, 2017), which requires genuine concern to be shown for the relational and emotional needs of the care recipient. We raise the distinct possibility that the inability of robots to provide ‘warm’ care may also extend into the bedroom since sleep is commonly framed in the contemporary modern world as a highly intimate act that predominantly occurs between close relations (Williams, 2005).

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But the point remains that transformations in technosleep can originate from a multitude of different sources. The development of automated driverless vehicles (AVs) constitutes another form of technology that has implications for how sleep is practiced. Numerous speculative accounts of AVs contribute to the growing narrative that driverless modes of transport are likely to transform where, when, and how sleep occurs (Das et al., 2017; Fairs, 2015). If fully automated driverless vehicles ever materialize, which continues to be an open question for numerous reasons (Nikitas et al., 2019), then it is predicted that more people will have the option of sleeping while they are in transit. By providing a space to sleep, AV’s increase the upper bounds of travel for many groups including those who transport goods, people with various disabilities and medical conditions and the elderly who might struggle with driving long distances. They could also shift long commuters away from public transport towards private transport (Das et al., 2017). Smart technologies are key to this. Not only will AVs rely on complex AI systems to navigate from place to place, in coordination with other vehicles and objects on the road. AVs will also need to rely to some extent on advanced algorithmic systems to address the problem of motion-sickness and other uncomfortable bodily states (Diels & Bos, 2016), which passenger sleep is affected by. Additionally, how smart drowsy detection technologies are deployed in vehicles might one day change. When vehicles become fully automated, it is possible that drowsy detection technologies might no longer be used to prevent automobile accidents from happening. Instead, their purpose might shift to optimizing how long it will take for passengers to get to their intended destination so that passengers can obtain a pre-set amount of high-quality sleep without being interrupted (Arakawa, 2021). Against the growing narrative that the emergence of AV transport will improve how people sleep by affecting where and when it occurs, there are also other possibilities to consider. Besides doubts that fully autonomous vehicles will ever materialize, particularly in the timeframes proposed by some technology developers, it is possible that the sleep that is afforded by AVs may not be as optimal as some accounts presume. In order for comfortable and deep sleep in an AV to be realized, Neil’s (2020) article in the Wall Street Journal notes that passengers may need to be free of seatbelts since restraining harnesses can constrain the bodies of passengers in a way that is less conducive to some sleep states. Neil’s article observes that crash safety is one of the obstacles that stand in the way of seatbelts being removed from cars. Seatbelts are likely to remain in

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AVs because only in highly limited circumstances can the risk of collisions in AVs be reduced to a figure closely approaching zero. For one thing, AVs would have to travel on entirely separate roads from manually driven vehicles and cyclists, which is a costly change to make that may not eventuate in some contexts. Or AVs would have to come to entirely replace conventional modes of automotive transport, which does not appear likely in the near future (Harb et al., 2021). Even if the embodied experience of being in an AV could be configured to be sufficiently conducive to comfortable sleep, questions remain about access. As Bissell et al. (2020) note, although discourses about AVs often depict broad sweeping changes in the future of transit and transport, it is likely that AV systems will still be marked by social inequality. One only needs to look in the skies at commercial long-haul flights with commodified access to sleep to understand how a similar dynamic might play out in AV transit systems. Thus, the picture that emerges about the implications of AV technologies on sleep is an ambivalent and open-ended one. Smart technologies, as a whole, carry the potential to directly or indirectly shape the places and spaces in which we sleep, how we experience sleep and who we share our sleep with, now and in the future. But this shaping is multifaceted and prone to produce unintended outcomes or be met by a multitude of resistances.

Conclusions Sleep is a socially, culturally, and historically variable matter and human efforts to transform sleep via technology have a long history. However, as we can see in the examples discussed above technosleep is changing, or at least has the potential to change, the ways we ‘do’ and ‘act on’ sleep, how we understand and experience sleep and the values we accord it in the twenty-first century and beyond. From new generations of drugs to send us to sleep or keep us awake to sleep and dream engineering, and from masks and machines to keep the airways open while we sleep to a panoply of smart new solutions to customize, optimize and even optionalize our slumber, the contours of these technosleep trends and transformations have been traced, with some more developed than others to date. While scientific and medical advances in these areas continue to have therapeutic goals, we can also see how technosleep increasingly becomes a commodity in the commercial and consumer sphere, something which can be capitalized on and through as

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doctors, therapists and advertisers encroach into our sleeping minds, (bio) medicalizing, meddling and controlling our sleeping bodies. Consequently, our understandings, expectations and experiences of sleep are changing too. No longer is sleep simply a ‘non-negotiable biological state required for the maintenance of human life’ (Grandner & Fernandez, 2021). Rather, through intensifying technoscientific entanglements, we are increasingly able to control, modify or alter aspects of our sleepy/ing/less bodies or how they perform both inside and outside of institutional spheres and spaces. New knowledge and technologies enable us to become more conscious of our sleep and provide us with the tools to make decisions not only to normalize, optimize and enhance but to customize our sleep in various ways too. Thus, we can see how a new technoscientifically mediated and indeed modified frontier of technosleep is in the making which itself is tied to the increasing biomedicalization, commercialization and commodification of sleep in the twenty-first century. However, as noted above, just as these sociomaterial sleep assemblages may come together in technosleep, so too they may break up or come apart, leading to something far from sleepful far from ‘normal’ or normative and far from fully medicalized (Zarhin, 2018). Thus, we can see that technosleep is not an either-or state, but rather it is more of a matter of degree with movement both ways so speak. In so far that we can chart the increasing entanglements of sleep and technology we can also consider moves against this in the form of rejection and resistance towards the further technologization of sleep, moves which are themselves political through and through.

Notes 1. Bille and Sørensen (2007) elaborate the utility of conceptualizing light as a material agent. Their work articulates how social life, order, and experience is affected by and affecting of lightscapes, which have become an everyday part of the contemporary modern world. 2. What we may be witnessing here then, is a technosleep transformation where good sleep comes to be mutually constituted through various technosleep assemblages as a part of the care economy.

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Nikitas, A., Njoya, E. T., & Dani, S. (2019). Examining the myths of connected and autonomous vehicles: Analysing the pathway to a driverless mobility paradigm. International Journal of Automotive Technology and Management, 19(1–2), 10–30. https://doi.org/10.1504/IJATM.2019.098513 Obayashi, K., Kodate, N., & Masuyama, S. (2020). Can connected technologies improve sleep quality and safety of older adults and care-givers? An evaluation study of sleep monitors and communicative robots at a residential care home in Japan. Technology in Society, 62, 101318. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tec hsoc.2020.101318 Pegado, E., Lopes, N., & Zózimo, J. (2018). Pharmaceuticalisation and the social management of sleep in old age. Ageing & Society, 38(8), 1645–1666. Petersén, M. (2018). Human-technology relationships in the digital age: The collapse of metaphor in biohacking. In J. Aagaard, J. Kyrre, B. Friis, J. Sorenson, O. Tafdrup, C. Hasse, J. Aagaard, C. Adams, C. Aydin, & L. Blond (Eds.), Postphenomenological methodologies: New ways in mediating techno-human relationships (pp. 65–82). Lexington Books. Pu, L., Moyle, W., Jones, C., & Todorovic, M. (2021). The effect of a social robot intervention on sleep and motor activity of people living with dementia and chronic pain: A pilot randomized controlled trial. Maturitas, 144(August 2020), 16–22. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.maturitas.2020.09.003 Reiss, B. (2017). Wild nights: How taming sleep created our restless world. Hachette. Roenneberg, T. (2017). Internal Times. Harvard University Press. Schofield, D. (2021, January 5). Lucid dreamers are using unproven technology to hack their sleep. Wired Magazine. https://www.wired.co.uk/article/luciddreaming-tech Skeldon, A. C., & Dijk, D. J. (2019). School start times and daylight saving time confuse California lawmakers. Current Biology, 29(8), R278–R279. Song, V. (2019). This $600 sleep robot is only worth it if you’re tired and alone. Gizmodo. https://gizmodo.com/this-600-sleep-robot-is-only-worthit-if-youre-tired-a-1834921997 Steward, A., & Pickersgill, M. (2019). Developing expertise, customising sleep, enhancing study practices: Exploring the legitimisation of modafinil use within the accounts of UK undergraduate students. Drugs: Education, Prevention and Policy, 26(4), 347–355. Stickgold, R., Zadra, A., & Haar, A. J. H. (2021, June 8). Advertising in dreams is coming: Now what? https://dxe.pubpub.org/pub/dreamadvertising/rel ease/1 Subbotina, S. N., Kuzmin, A. A., Anokhin, A. G., Yudin, M. A., & Bykova, A. F. (2018). Prospects of using ampakines for correction of unfavorable functional states in military specialists (literature review). Voenno-Medicinskij Žurnal, 339(8), 48–52.

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Sugden, C., Housden, C. R., Aggarwal, R., Sahakian, B. J., & Darzi, A. (2012). Effect of pharmacological enhancement on the cognitive and clinical psychomotor performance of sleep-deprived doctors: A randomized controlled trial. Annals of Surgery, 255(2), 222–227. Taylor, B. (1993). Unconsciousness and society: The sociology of sleep. International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, 6, 463–471. Turner, D. C., Robbins, T. W., Clark, L., Aron, A. R., Dowson, J., & Sahakian, B. J. (2003). Cognitive enhancing effects of modafinil in healthy volunteers. Psychopharmacology (berl), 165(3), 260–269. Venn, S., Meadows, R., & Arber, S. (2013). Gender differences in approaches to self-management of poor sleep in later life. Social Science & Medicine, 79, 117–123. Williams, S. J. (2005). Sleep and society: Sociological ventures into the (un)known. Routledge. Williams, S. J., Coveney, C. M., & Gabe, J. (2013). Medicalisation or customisation? Sleep, enterprise and enhancement in the 24/7 society. Social Science & Medicine, 79, 40–47. Williams, S. J., Martin, P., & Gabe, J. (2011). The pharmaceuticalisation of society? A framework for analysis. Sociology of Health & Illness, 33(5), 710– 725. Williams, S. J., Meadows, R., & Coveney, C. M. (2021). Desynchronised times? Chronobiology, (bio) medicalisation and the rhythms of life itself. Sociology of Health & Illness, 43(6), 1501–1517. Wingelaar-Jagt, Y. Q., Wingelaar, T. T., Riedel, W. J., & Ramaekers, J. G. (2021). Fatigue in aviation: Safety risks, preventive strategies and pharmacological interventions. Frontiers in Physiology, 12, 712628. Wolf-Meyer, M. (2016). The slumbering masses: Sleep, medicine and modern American Life. University of Minnesota Press. Yetisen, A. K. (2018). Biohacking. Trends in Biotechnology, 36(8), 744–747. Zarhin, D. (2018). Delaying and seeking care for obstructive sleep apnea: The role of gender, family, and morality. Health, 22(1), 36–53. Zuboff, S. (2015). Big other: Surveillance capitalism and the prospects of an information civilization. Journal of Information Technology, 30(1), 75–89. https://doi.org/10.1057/jit.2015.5

CHAPTER 5

Machinic ‘Sleep’

In the preceding chapters we have taken a decidedly ‘human’ focus. We have explored the coming together of, and the intersections between, human sleep and technology. However, conceptually, as we noted at the outset, sleep can and does happen in multiple and heterogenous ways. Therefore, in this chapter, we turn our attention to focus explicitly on the non-human, and more specifically on the non-biological, asking how the capacity to sleep can extend to non-human actors like electronic computing devices. By pursuing this line of inquiry, we seek to add a new dimension to our theorization of technosleep, to further grasp its more-than-human elements. Technosleep does not simply attune us to the ways in which human sleep is interwoven with technological practice. Technosleep also captures how the constitution and expression of sleep partly occurs at the interface between humans and technologies. We begin this chapter by exploring how some technological devices possess a ‘sleep mode’ function. This leads us to consider the utility of conceptualizing sleep as an activity that some technologies can engage in. We posit that the phenomenon of technological sleep can expand our understanding of how the anthropomorphization of technologies unfolds. We also contend that technological sleep can deepen our understanding of how computing technologies can be theorized as a ‘marginal object’, a concept developed by Turkle (2005: 34–35) to describe how computing devices defy ontological categorization. This partly refers to the idea © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 C. Coveney et al., Technosleep, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30599-3_5

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that sleeping technologies can express different types of agency, some of which are disruptive to human expectations. After putting forward a theorization of technological sleep that problematizes dualisms but preserves distinctions between humans and machines, we then explore the ways in which technological sleep and human sleep are interrelated. This leads us to investigate the metaphorical dimensions of technosleep, which illuminate how human and technological forms of sleep can be entangled with and set in opposition to one another. The final section of this chapter considers how sleep might factor into the moral status of some technologies.

Can Technology Sleep? In the medical sciences, it almost goes without saying that sleep needs to involve flesh and blood. Sleep is something that biological beings do, and this is also primarily how sleep has been understood by many research works in the social sciences. Sociological research on sleep has mainly focused on the ways it is a socially variable part of human and animal life. But in what ways does it make sense for sleep to be conceptualized as an act that technologies can engage in? What does the concept of ‘technological sleep’ tell us about how technologies act and the ways humans and technologies interface with one another? To grasp how the capacity to sleep is able to extend into the domain of technology, it is worthwhile to consider the limits of conceptualizing technologies as lifeless pieces of machinery. As numerous works have noted (Prasad, 1995; Turkle, 2005), technological devices can be in some cases anthropomorphized by the people who use them, and this trait can be explicitly built into a technology’s functionality. We can see this in the early work of Reeves and Nass (1996) on how software programs can be treated like persons but this is also apparent in the ‘sleep mode’ function that is presently found in numerous kinds of computing devices. It is not clear exactly when the capacity to enter ‘sleep mode’ first appeared as a feature of modern electronic computing devices but Hsu (2017: 876) notes that mention of it in trade journals can at least be traced back to the early 1980s. Although sleep mode can encapsulate an array of forms and modalities, it nonetheless appears to possess a few core qualities. One is that sleep mode generally reduces how much electrical power a device uses (Salahdine et al., 2021). Devices in sleep mode

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are designed to expend less energy because there is normally a substantial change and/or reduction in the device’s functionality. Sleep mode is designed to be activated when the device is no longer receiving active inputs from its user, and this activation can be programmed to occur automatically after a period of time or it can be manually initiated. Sleep mode is different from the ‘off’ function of a computing device in that a device’s full functionality is meant to be accessed faster from the former than it can be from the latter. This accordingly is why ‘sleep mode’ and ‘standby’ mode are used synonymously by some electronics manufacturers and by online web resources (Roseberry, 2018). Despite not being the object of much sociological research, sleep mode has come to be an extremely prevalent feature in the contemporary technological landscape (Hsu, 2017: 870). Sleep mode has been for some years an in-built feature of Microsoft Windows, which remains one of the world’s most popular computer operating systems. But it is important to note that computing devices running other operating systems like Google’s Android and Apple iOS—which do not have ‘sleep mode’ specifically and explicitly listed as a function—still are perceived by some as having the capacities to go to ‘sleep’ and ‘wake up’ (Hsu, 2017). What this indicates is that the sleep of technological devices has exceeded the specifically named feature of ‘sleep mode’. There are numerous reasons why technological sleep is sociologically significant, especially when it comes to our theorization of technosleep. For one thing, its perceived existence may tell us something about how computing technologies can be anthropomorphized. Some social commentators have noted a trend in recent decades for technologies to be increasingly inscribed with biological features (Thrift, 2004). Sleep may be, in some respects, part of this wider story, and this appears to apply to the development of AI driven robots. While robots are presently being developed to affect the ways in which people sleep (Obayashi et al., 2020), sleep is also a verb that can be applied to the actions of some robotic technologies. This is evident for example in Fouks et al.’s (2004) article in Neurophysiologie clinique, which seeks to establish the speculative advantages of building AI driven robots with a daily sleep function. Fouks et al. put forward a framing of robotic sleep, which other AI1 and robot developers and researchers have affirmed and developed (Balkenius et al., 2018; Watkins et al., 2020): the idea that the technological biomimicry of sleep has adaptational advantages, in that it potentially allows machines to process experiential information in a more effective and dynamic way.2

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The shift from conceptualizing robots as having no need for sleep to an entity that not only can but should regularly engage in sleep thus is significant because it provides us with yet another entry point into understanding how anthropomorphic (Duffy, 2003; Reeves & Nass, 1996) relationships with technologies can emerge and evolve over time. If sleep, according to Williams and Wolf-Meyer (2013), is an ‘integral’ part of what means to be human, then might there be broader implications for how personhood might be conferred—at least in some form—to technologies that come to be perceived as having sleep needs? Alternatively, what happens when efforts to incorporate sleep functions into technologies do not go as planned or indeed are unsuccessful? Might this contribute to the ongoing differentiation between humans and machines in certain contexts (Castañeda & Suchman, 2014)?

Sleeping Technologies as Actants Another facet of technological sleep that is worth considering is what it can tell us about how technologies and humans relate with one another. This thread is picked up by the work of Hsu (2017), who asserts that the sleep mode function of computing devices is socially consequential, since it constitutes one way synchronicity is sought between humans and their technological surroundings. In order to sleep and act in certain ways in waking life, humans do not just depend on the coordinated actions of other humans, which the work of Schwartz (1970) mainly focuses on. Coordination with non-human actors is required as well (Schubert, 2012: 120), which Nettleton et al.’s (2017) theorization of sleep as an ‘assemblage’ goes some way to capturing. A large body of work across the social sciences has noted how computing devices are ubiquitously found in the sleeping spaces of people in many parts of the contemporary modern world (Gradisar et al., 2013; Hsu, 2014). Research has found that the use of smartphone technologies in sleep spaces has an array of effects and drivers. Smartphone use in sleep spaces has been linked to poor sleep (Exelmans & Van den Bulck, 2016) and family conflict (Salmela et al., 2019), but the effect that technology use can have on people’s sleep lives also stems from the capacity for technological sleep to be expressed in unexpected, and/or unruly ways. Sleep mode in computing devices, as discussed above, normally involves a reduction in power usage (Salahdine et al., 2021) and a change in functionality. Commonly, this involves the shutting off or darkening

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of a screen, and the muting or reduced volume of computer sounds. Hsu (2017: 870) notes that personal computers do not always remain in sleep mode as their users intend them to, and this in turn has the potential to affect aspects of people’s sleep lives. When a computer suddenly wakes back up, which can happen for a myriad of reasons, this can disrupt people’s sleep by initiating a luminous, aural, or haptic change in a person’s environment. A question posed to the ‘Ask Jack’ technology advice column in The Guardian (Schofield, 2015) serves as an illustrative example. Resident technology expert, Jack Schofield, is asked by one of his readers, Ösp, what can be done to a personal computer to stop it from being disruptive of their sleep at night: I put my desktop computer to sleep before I go to bed (which is close to my PC). The problem is that it wakes me up in the middle of the night. Almost every night, often at 3am, the hard disk drive jerks into action and the fan starts spinning for no obvious reason. It is driving me mad! I know I could just turn it off, but I have loads of different software running […] Is there any way I can tell it to stay asleep all night?

Ösp’s frustration at their computer not staying ‘asleep’ all night indicates, at one level, that the social etiquette of sleep (Williams, 2007a) does not merely apply to humans. A technological device might be perceived to sleep in ‘socially attentive’ ways, which aligns with human expectations and socio-temporal rhythms (Williams, 2007a: 319–320). But it is also possible for a technological device to be perceived as an ‘inconsiderate’, ‘anomic’, ‘anarchic’ and/or ‘deviant’ sleeper (Williams, 2007a: 321–324). This in turn leads us to recognize how computing technologies can be, in some respects, conceptualized as ‘actants’ (Latour, 1990). Technological sleep further sensitizes us to the multitude of impacts that computing technologies have on people’s lives. Technologies which possess the perceived ability to sleep do not only do so in anticipated and socially permissible ways. Technological sleep can also take on a socially disruptive quality. Computing technologies may not ‘wake up’ as quickly as users want, and they may not ‘sleep’ as long or as quietly as they are meant to, which Ösp’s example demonstrates.

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Hsu (2017: 871) has suggested that it may be fruitful to conceptualize sleeping technologies as having the ability to exert a form of ‘material agency’ (Kaptelinin & Nardi, 2006). Material agency refers to ‘the capacity for nonhuman entities to act absent sustained human intervention’ (Leonardi, 2012: 35) and there is a sense in which it is related to but still meaningfully distinct from the kinds of agency which are expressed by humans, as some works have argued (Pickering, 1995). A rather large body of scholarship has examined the merits of drawing or collapsing distinctions between humans and technologies in terms of how agency is expressed (Hornborg, 2021; Mitcham, 2014; Rose & Jones, 2005; Sayes, 2014). Our intention at this juncture is not to fully rehearse these important discussions and debates but to pursue a more focused line of inquiry. In the section that follows, we explore how technological sleep and human sleep are different from one another, in order to deepen our understanding how agency is expressed by sleeping technologies.

The Differences Between Human and Technological Sleep One of the key differences between technological sleep and human sleep is that human intentionality can play more of a pronounced role in how the former is realized. While a computing device can be manually put into sleep mode with a click of a button, human sleep conversely appears to lack such a volitional quality. Even though humans can put themselves in circumstances that are more conducive to sleep, there is still a sense in which it escapes people’s direct command and control, as sleep cannot simply be just willed about (Williams, 2007b, p. 145; Zarhin, 2020). This then leads us to recognize how sleeping technologies can express agency in a ‘delegated’ manner. Using Rammert’s (2012) differentiated account of agency, we can label technological sleep as partly having an ‘instrumental’ quality, which troubles the framing of technological sleep as a wholly autonomous act. But there is more to this story, as the preceding discussion indicates. There are numerous ways computing technologies can be programmed to execute sleep mode. Computing technologies can be programmed to enter sleep mode after a certain period of time has passed without any user inputs. But sleep mode can also be initiated and sustained through a more complex interplay of different technical processes. Salahdine et al.’s (2021) survey of how sleep mode is diversely expressed in mobile phone

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network technologies establishes how we need to think of the inputs and effects of sleep mode in more dynamic and varied terms. The sleep mode function of various computing devices has the capacity to evolve, and it can take on new elements. Some iterations of the sleep mode function, presently in development or in use, no longer confine its operation to a single device. Salahdine et al. (2021) describe how some sleep mode programs exhibit a networked quality, in that the expression of technological sleep is determined by an array of devices that may have different functions. This in turn prompts us to conceptualize the agency of sleeping technologies as having multiple facets. There is a sense in which sleeping technologies can operate ‘passively’, according to Rammert’s (2012: 97) account of technological agency. But sleeping technologies can also act in ‘reactive’, ‘proactive’ or somewhat ‘co-operative’ ways, due to the complexities of what triggers technological sleep to occur and the complexities of what technological sleep involves. This then points to another difference between human and technological forms of sleep. Technological sleep displays, in some respects, a greater amount of plasticity in terms of what it can constitute and how it can occur. One can envision a computing device being programmed to oscillate between sleep and waking states multiple times in rapid succession. And some computing devices can remain in sleep mode without interruption over extended periods of time, such as over a week. However, these forms of sleep are not generally found in the domain of humans. This has to do with the fact that for humans and other living beings like cats, sleep is a biological need, with particular constraints, affordances and parameters. The recognition that human and other biological actors have biological needs, unlike machines, is one reason why Kaptelinin and Nardi (2006) believe humans and technologies should not be treated symmetrically. We find utility in some aspects of this approach, in that it underlines two facets of technological sleep, which produce insight about how sleeping technologies are able to act. The first, as we have discussed earlier, is that there are some kinds of technological sleep which exhibit a ‘delegated’ quality. The design and development of sleep mode can be used to further the ends of some humans, such as the aim of using less electrical power. But because technological sleep does not emanate from a biological source, it also has the potential to involve a vast array of changing

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elements and processes. Sleep mode can become so complex that in some cases it exceeds simple and direct human control. This facet of technological sleep is what qualifies it, in our view, as a ‘marginal object’. Turkle (2005: 34) theorizes that objects become marginal when they are ‘on the lines of categories’, which provoke us to consider, challenge and/or affirm, how distinctions between categorizations are drawn. Some sleeping technologies resist ontological categorization by oscillating between being used instrumentally and being perceived to express ‘material’ (Pickering, 1995) and ‘conditional’ forms of agency (Kaptelinin & Nardi, 2006). However, it remains to be seen whether sleeping technologies can ever express agency which involves a self-intentional or reflexive quality, which humans are commonly associated with (Rose & Jones, 2005; Zarhin, 2020). For one thing, there are some indications that the incorporation of advanced AI into the sleep mode feature of computing devices has thus far remained nascent (Salahdine et al., 2021). Sleeping technologies continue to involve a substantial amount of human input, in terms of how they are designed and used, with deep learning and self-generative algorithms not factoring much into the constitution of technological sleep yet. But even if technological sleep somehow came to be governed by advanced AI processes sometime in the future, this would not necessarily lead us to ascribe complete symmetry between humans and sleeping technologies. While the heightened use of AI might alter elements of how humans and machines interact in that the relevance of the former becomes weakened in favour of the latter, it does not excise the role humans play altogether (Johnson & Verdicchio, 2019). This partly has to do with the fact that for automated technologies to appear detached from human input, human attachments frequently need to be transfigured or obscured (Suchman, 2007; Tennant & Stilgoe, 2021).3 We thus arrive at a conceptualization of technological sleep that problematizes dualisms but preserves distinctions, following aspects of the work of Hornborg (2021). Hornborg argues that it is important to challenge human-centric accounts of social life that pay little attention to its material aspects, which involve, among other things, technologies that are affecting of social practice. But Hornborg also contends that various distinctions need to be preserved between humans and non-humans, which acknowledge and elaborate asymmetries. And so too does this apply to the conceptualization of technological sleep we have offered so far.

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To review, we affirm the idea that human activities including sleep merit being conceptualized as ‘assemblages’ that involve non-human elements (Nettleton et al., 2017). These elements, as we have described, include technologies that are perceived to engage in the act of sleep. Technological sleep can occur in unexpected, deviant and disruptive ways, which suggests sleeping technologies are ‘marginal objects’ (Turkle, 2005) in their capacity to engage in ‘material’ (Pickering, 1995) or ‘conditional’ (Kaptelinin & Nardi, 2006) forms of agency. But there is still a need to appreciate how sleeping technologies and humans can contribute asymmetrically to social order. In the section that follows, we consider an issue that arises from the conceptualization of technological sleep that we have put forth. We examine how drawing bold distinctions between technological and human sleep runs the risk of essentializing the difference between humans and machines. This leads us to explore the ways human sleep and technological sleep interface with one another, and the role that metaphor plays in the constitution of technosleep.

The Problem of Essentialism Attempts to advance materialist but asymmetrical understandings of how humans and non-humans interact with one another have encountered on numerous occasions the problem of essentialism (Holton & Boyd, 2021; Suchman, 2007). Some works have argued that the distinction between humans and technologies is neither fixed, self-evident or inconsequential (Hayles, 2005). We need to examine how definitions of humanness and technology can transform over time, and how human and technologies are not purified categories, which do not stand in natural opposition to one another (Suchman, 2007). Hayles (1999, 2005) has theorized that humanness has never been a stand-alone category. Since antiquity, humanness has been constructed through comparisons with non-human living entities and inanimate objects (Berryman, 2007). This dynamic has continued with the emergence and development of computing technologies (Hayles, 2005). It is not simply that computing technologies in recent years have become more human-like (Reeves & Nass, 1996). ‘Computer-based technologies have become a, if not the, reference point for defining “humans” and for measuring their capabilities’ (Gane, 2003: 433, emphasis in original).

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One way to understand this point with relation to sleep is to explore how there is interchange between human and technological forms of sleep. Prompted by Hayles’ (2005) account of ‘computing the human’ and Neisser’s (1966) theorizing of computers as both tools and metaphors, we seek to investigate how human and technological sleep are able to be mutually informing of one another. This involves a discussion of how sleep can be understood in metaphorical terms, as metaphors can be ontologically generative (Cazeaux, 2007).

Interfacing Human and Technological Sleep Through the Prism of Metaphor Conceptualizing sleep as a metaphor departs in some ways from how sleep has tended thus far to be understood in the social sciences. The sociological study of sleep has tended to operate with a more literal conception of sleep, with sleep mainly regarded as a physical activity that only biological beings can engage in. This has meant that the use of sleep to metaphorically characterize the actions of social organizations and other abstracted social units like societies has remained sparse and underdeveloped, even though numerous works have established the vital and productive role that metaphor plays in social theorizing (Brown, 1976; Marks, 2018). Schoeneborn et al.’s (2012) article in the Journal of Management Inquiry appears to be the only explicit attempt thus far to investigate the utility of using sleep as a metaphor in social analysis. Schoeneborn et al. explore what it means to conceptualize sleep as an act that organizations can engage in. According to Schoeneborn et al., what the metaphor of organizational sleep is especially adept at illuminating is how the process of learning occurs in organizations. Unless organizations regularly find opportunities to sleep, they are less able to learn from their experiences. Schoeneborn et al. base this on the neuroscientific finding that sleep affects cognitive performance and memory consolidation. Schoeneborn et al. coin the metaphorical term, ‘organizational insomnia’, to capture when organizations find it difficult to obtain the sleep they need. For the purposes of our chapter, there are two limitations that Schoeneborn et al.’s (2012) metaphorical account of sleep exhibits. Firstly, it largely restricts its understanding of sleep to how it has been conceptualized in the contemporary neurosciences, overlooking other facets of sleep that can be used as a heuristic device for abstracted social units. This accordingly is linked to its second limitation, its decision

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not to explore how the metaphor of sleep is a ‘two-way street’ (Brown, 1976: 189). Schoeneborn et al. (2012) predominantly focus on how the metaphor of sleep can be applied to other domains, but this leaves largely untouched the issue of how sleep can itself be on the receiving end of metaphors. There are numerous indications that metaphor plays a vital role in how sleep is culturally understood. Sleep in many contexts tends to be figuratively cast as a kind of death (Fernández, 2006) and there is the English-language idiom that someone has slept ‘like a log’ to indicate that they have slept well (Eyers et al., 2016). But how might computing technologies mutually affect how human sleep is defined and experienced? To answer this question, we need to look for signs that the discourse of computing has imprinted on some of the ways that sleep is culturally described. We identify two figurative framings of sleep which appear to draw from the discourse of electronic computing devices. The first likens human sleep to the ‘rebooting’ of a computer. Sleep is said to ‘reboot’ the brain as a whole (James, 2011; McMillan, 2018) or it is thought by some to involve the rebooting of only parts of it, as captured by Kozlowska, Scher and Helgeland’s (2020: 106) statement that ‘nerve cells within the brain reboot and reset during sleep’. Drawing a link between human sleep and rebooting is usually meant to highlight the dangers of not getting enough sleep, specifically as it pertains to learning (Kozlowska et al., 2020), bodily regeneration (Gonzalez & Tyminski, 2020: 491) and workplace productivity (James, 2011). The way in which human sleep can be metaphorically likened to the computational act of ‘rebooting’ shares an overlap with the second framing of sleep we identify, which equates it with the process of ‘computer programme clearance’ (Evans, 1968; Newman & Evans, 1965). This conceptualization of sleep is most associated with the work of Evans. Evans (1968) posits in an article in Electronics and Power that using the analogy of a computer to describe sleep sheds new light on what occurs during sleep and its importance to human life. The computational process of ‘programme clearing’, which removes and revises programs in an ‘off-line’ setting to improve a computer’s functionality, is conceptualized as being akin to what happens during sleep, specifically in the act of dreaming:

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Our brain-computer analogy states that the purpose of sleep is to take a man’s brain “off-line”—to prepare for revising and clearing the brain’s programs in the light of recent events and experiences. Dreaming, by this analogy, is the running-through of the programs and their reclassifications. (Evans, 1968: 44)

While it is evident from the two computational framings of sleep we have just presented that the discourse of electronic computers is able to affect how human sleep is described, we still have not yet considered what the effect and significance of these redescriptions are. To do this, we draw from aspects of Agre’s (1997) theoretical account of computational metaphors. Agre theorizes how there is varied and continuous interchange between humans and computing machines, in terms of how each is conceptualized through metaphorical processes. Deployments of metaphors lead to varying degrees of ‘confluence’ between technology and humans. Some metaphors are reflexively recognized as such, which enables them to be minimized or revised, but other uses of metaphors are so accepted that their status as metaphors becomes ‘effaced’ (Agre, 1997: 39–42). This is Agre’s point that the distinction between what discursively constitutes a human and what constitutes a machine or technology exhibits a certain degree of fluidity. The integration of a human metaphor to understand what a particular technology can do or constitutes (and vice versa) can be so complete in some cases, that it no longer is predominantly perceived or experienced as a metaphor. The ability of figurative language to slip in and out of the literal prompts us to recognize how humans and computing technologies can mutually constitute one another but still be both distinct.4 This in turn addresses the issue of essentialism that we raised earlier about the need to preserve ontological distinctions between humans and technologies, while concomitantly recognizing that the dividing lines between humans and technologies are not fixed or uniform.5 What constitutes human sleep or technological sleep may be the product of metaphoric transfers from the other corresponding domain that are no longer commonly recognized as such. And there is also a need to recognize how the assembling of human and technological sleep is an ongoing process, which may one day lead to greater points of opposition or confluence. These insights help us to make better sense of the concern that some have expressed about the emergence of the ‘sleep mode’ function in

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computing technologies. Should human sleep come to be conceptualized as a sort of sleep mode, Crary (2013: 13) worries this will position the sleeper as being always at some level accessible. In this scenario, people no longer understand or appreciate sleep as an act that involves a radical withdrawal from the waking world. And this in turn aligns with and contributes to a key feature of contemporary global capitalism, the valorization of incessant activity. The discussion we have provided in this chapter provides us with a way to evaluate some aspects of Crary’s concerns. That Crary (2013: 13) explicitly identifies ‘sleep mode’ as a ‘linguistic figure’ suggests that human and sleep mode have not been metaphorically subsumed yet. To use Agre’s (1997) terminology, sleep mode does not appear to have gone from the ‘margins’ to the ‘centre’ of how human sleep has been metaphorically constructed. And so too does this seem to apply to some of the other computational framings of human sleep we identified earlier. There is a need to empirically investigate the extent to which human sleep is being likened to ‘computer programme clearance’ (Evans, 1968) and a kind of neural ‘rebooting’ (Kozlowska et al., 2020), since the status of these framings of sleep has not yet been adequately established.6 We also need to sensitize ourselves to the asymmetrical, multifaceted and ongoing way metaphors from the human domain are being applied to computational technologies. As we have described earlier in this chapter, various attempts have been made to conceptualize sleep as an act that computing devices can engage in, as evident in the advent and ubiquity of the ‘sleep mode’ function. This may have something to do with Suchman’s (2007: 34) point that technologies are becoming so complex and multifaceted that it makes increasing sense to apply the term ‘interaction […] to characterize what goes on between people and certain machines’. But it should be noted that the metaphoric transfer of sleep into the domain of computing technologies is never completely uniform nor is it ever complete. It is a continuous process involving numerous elements and actors, which is why we find utility in conceptualizing technological sleep as a phenomenon that is ‘repeatedly assembled’, following the work of Šabanovi´c (2014). Šabanovi´c (2014: 346) notes that ‘repeated assemblies are mutative, rather than identical, reproductions; they do not produce simple copies of existing cultural and technological forms, but represent the recursion of core cultural models as they dynamically change and adapt to fit contemporary circumstances’. This in turn is why we position the analysis of technological sleep we have offered in this

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chapter as only a starting point. Our aim has been to establish technological sleep as an explanandum in social research, but we leave open for further investigation the multiplicity and contestations that technological sleep involves. What we have not yet substantively considered, for example, is how technological sleep encompasses and/or relates to the concept of ‘computational dreaming’. This connection is significant to explore because it demonstrates one of the ways technological sleep is not reducible to the ‘sleep mode’ function of computing devices. The recent advent of Google’s computer vision program, DeepDream, has especially advanced the idea that dreams are an act that computational technologies are able to engage in. DeepDream was originally developed by its creator, Alexander Mordvintsev, to explore what artificial neural networks are capable of (Miller, 2019). More than just demonstrating that artificial neural networks can be used to classify images, Leach (2020: 61) notes that what is distinctive about DeepDream is its capacity to be generative: Instead of recognizing an image and assigning it a category, DeepDream starts with a category and proceeds to generate an image. For example, whereas a standard neural network can recognize an image of a bird and categorize it as a “bird,” DeepDream is able to start with the category “bird,” and generate an image of a bird.

The resulting images produced by DeepDream are commonly described as having a ‘hallucinogenic’ (Marzano & Novembre, 2016: 149) and/or ‘psychedelic’ (Miller, 2019: 64) quality. They demonstrate, according to numerous works, the creative and synthetic potentials of neural network technologies, particularly in the domain of art (Bruder, 2018; Leach, 2020; Marzano & Novembre, 2016; Miller, 2019). Bruder (2018) contends that the recently developed capacity for computational technologies to dream is part of a broader redescription of ‘idleness’ as having creative and productive qualities in both the domains of artificial intelligence and neuroscience. Computational dreaming is worthy of further investigation because it indicates how states of ‘rest’ like sleep7 are being conceptualized in new ways, across and between cognitive science, psychology and artificial intelligence (Bruder, 2018). But more than this, computational dreaming has the potential to further illuminate a key point we raised earlier: the idea that humans and technologies are continually being entangled and differentiated with one

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another through the prism of metaphor. This is evident in Leach’s (2020) discussion of DeepDream. Leach (2020: 71) notes how for AI, ‘the term “dream”—along with the terms “memory” and “hallucination”—should not be taken literally. They need to appear in inverted commas. Until computers have consciousness, they cannot literally dream’. But Leach (2020) additionally notes that AI applications like DeepDream raise questions about what constitutes humanness, especially around the topic of human creativity. Computing technologies that are thought to dream and/or produce dream-like images not only prompt people to consider what, if anything, might be truly unique about creativity in humans. They also open up for redescription what constitutes dreaming and the unconscious features of sleep, which we underline is ripe for further analysis and social commentary.

The Ethical Dimensions of Technological Sleep Thus far we have mainly examined technological sleep in descriptive terms. We have focused on the complexities of whether and how technological sleep exists, but we have paid less attention to its normative aspects. One way to determine the ethical consequences of widening the ascription of sleep beyond human actors is to consider how sleep is framed by some as a fundamental human right (Cakal, 2019; Williams, 2011). Sleep is of vital value because it is ‘instrumental to leading healthy lives’, but as Nordgren (2016: 575) notes, it may also be construed as an end unto itself, as implied in the UN Universal Declaration on Human Rights’ assertion that ‘everyone has the right to rest’. If people are significantly denied the opportunity to get adequate sleep as in the case of sleep deprivation as method of torture (Cakal, 2019), they are not only unjustly denied a human right. Some scholarly works have argued that some kinds of sleep deprivation can also be generative of unethical behaviour (Barber & Budnick, 2016). In some circumstances, a sleepdeprived person may be less morally accountable for their actions, on account of their diminished ability to engage in ethical reasoning. How does this map onto technological sleep and on our concept of technosleep more broadly? For one thing, it is consequential that technological sleep thus far does not appear to be an end unto itself for the technologies that engage in it. Technological sleep seems to be firmly positioned within the realm of the instrumental. Insofar as a computing

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device is impacted by not getting ‘enough’ sleep, it is its other operations that might be negatively affected. But then the question becomes, ‘negatively affected for whom?’. Presently, when a computer is affected by not getting put into sleep mode in a certain way, concern predominantly, if not completely, revolves around the affected human users. If there is something faulty with how a computing device sleeps, then either that device is altered, or it is disposed of, on account that it is ultimately perceived and experienced as a tool/object, instead of as a moral agent. At most, technologies that are programmed to sleep in extremely complex ways might produce unanticipated actions that some people might find socially undesirable. But here too, all this might contribute to is the ‘responsibility gap’ identified by Matthias (2004) of the difficulty of assigning moral responsibility to complex technical systems, which still in the final instance puts the main onus on humans to act in a morally responsible way. However, might there ever be a situation where this moral asymmetry is overturned? Could we ever envision, for instance, the development of an advanced humanoid robot that merits being imbued with the right to sleep, as outlandish as that presently sounds in the early decades of the twenty-first century? To answer this question, we need to consider the moral status of robots, which to be sure has been an extremely contentious issue, involving multiple discussions and perspectives. We do not venture to take a clear side on which perspective is correct, except we recognize that if robots are worthy of having moral status, it could be because of what Danaher (2020) calls their ‘performative equivalency’ with other already established moral agents. This refers to the principle that if a robot behaves roughly and consistently like a being with recognized moral status, then it too should be treated as a moral being. Sleep factors into this equation because sleep is regarded as an important if not ‘integral’ part of being human (Williams & Wolf-Meyer, 2013). Sleep indicates that humans are complex psychical beings, which do not only engage in intentional acts (Zarhin, 2020). And sleep additionally is involved in the various ways in which humans exhibit suffering, which some have argued is a key requirement for ascribing moral status to machines (Sparrow, 2004). Not only can sleeplessness manifest itself as a form of suffering, human suffering intersects with human sleep in a myriad of different ways. A person, for example, might not be able to

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sleep after an emotionally strong experience, such as if they feel regret for something they have done (Schmidt et al., 2011). It remains to be seen if technological sleep and human sleep will ever share enough performative overlap so that what is conceptualized as a fundamental right in humans also applies to some kinds of technologies. We assert that this is not simply a technical issue. Technological sleep might not be substantially recognized as a fundamental right not only because developers of sleeping robots might not be able to technically replicate the complexities of human sleep. It also has to do with our view that human sleep appears to defy simple categorization and description. Cakal’s (2019) analysis of how sleep deprivation as a method of torture is conceptualized in international law is illuminating. Cakal notes that while many international laws and declarations recognize that sleep deprivation in general can constitute a form of torture, there does not appear to be much consensus or specificity about what instances of sleep deprivation rise to the level of illegality. We posit that this may have to do with the complexities and vagaries of what constitutes a sleep injury, as there are many facets to sleeplessness that cannot be reduced to personal and social harm (Williams & Wolf-Meyer, 2013). This in turn speaks to a broader thread of Technosleep: the idea that sleep is a multifaceted phenomenon, which is irreducible to any single ontology, discourse, epistemology or set of values. We have aimed to further develop this way of theorizing sleep by exploring how sleep can exceed and inform the boundaries of the biological.

Conclusions Technosleep, as we have further sought to demonstrate in this chapter, is not solely concerned with the sleep of human beings. Technosleep does more than describe how sleep and technologies are entangled with one another, particularly in terms of how the former is affecting of the latter. Technosleep can also be used to sensitize us to the ways sleep can exceed and inform the boundaries of the biological, as evident in the ‘sleep mode’ function of some computing devices. The concept of technological sleep is fruitful to engage with because it can deepen our understanding of how the anthropomorphization of digital computing technologies occurs. But we also found in this chapter that the concept of technological sleep can illuminate some of the ontological complexities of digital computing devices. Sleeping technologies

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can act in a myriad of ways. Just as they can be instrumentally controlled by humans, sleeping technologies can additionally express agency that is disruptive to human expectations and desires. In trying to theorize this Janus-faced quality of technological sleep, we arrived at the need to preserve distinctions between humans and technologies, as there are important differences and asymmetries between human and technological sleep that are sociologically and ethically significant. But our theorization of technological sleep was also careful to avoid upholding a fixed dualism between humans and machines. This led us to discuss the metaphorical qualities of technosleep, which provided us with a way to understand how computational technologies and humanness can be distinct from one another yet still discursively and ontologically entangled. We stress that these and other theoretical reflections about technological sleep that we have offered in this chapter exhibit in some cases an exploratory quality. Our attempt to extend sleep beyond the domain of the biological has certainly not been all-encompassing and there are no doubt numerous aspects of our account of technological sleep which stand to benefit from being scrutinized, refined and/or extended. This applies for instance to the way in which our discussion of technological sleep did not directly tackle the issue of energy usage. We did not query the presumption made by some technological accounts that the sleep mode function of digital computing devices reduces the amount of electrical energy that is expended. We also did not query ‘what energy is for?’ (Shove & Walker, 2014), which we find is germane to understanding the affordances of technological sleep. What resources need to be consumed to facilitate technological sleep and what energies and capacities does its function open up? Another limitation of our theoretical account of technological sleep is that it has been underpinned at different points by a duality. It has sought to understand how sleep stands at the interface between humans and technology, but this has overlooked the sleep of non-human biological beings. A more comprehensive theorization of the metaphorical properties of sleep will consider how metaphor stands at the nexus between more than just two domains. Technological sleep may be informed by, and informing of, not just human sleep but non-human animal sleep as well. This in turn calls into question what it means to say that sleeping technologies can capture the ways in which technologies are anthropomorphized. The discussion we have provided in this chapter has sought to highlight how the ‘anthropos’ is not a static or wholly uniform concept

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when it comes to the matter of sleep, but to better articulate this theorization, there is a need to investigate how the constitution of technology involves other entanglements. The last facet of technological sleep that we invite further study on is how sleep is mimetically constructed. Mimesis has come to encapsulate different elements, but social science accounts of it tend to draw our attention to the ways imitations, copies and/or likenesses are present in social and technological forms (Taussig, 1993). While we have loosely touched upon mimetic elements at various points in this chapter such as in our discussion of how biological features like sleep are increasingly being inscribed in the function of some computing devices (Thrift, 2004), we have not yet addressed how mimesis relates to sleep directly or in a sustained fashion. This thread is worth exploring because it brings into focus new aspects of technological sleep, including what some of its drivers and social implications are. If we conceptualize technological sleep and its corollary, computational dreaming, as forms of biomimetic technologies, then this helps us to better understand how technological sleep might be involved in the redescription of what constitutes nature and the human body. Numerous studies have theorized that technological biomimicry is not simply a neutral act of duplication (Fisch, 2017; Magnet, 2021; Suchman, 2007). Rather, when imitation occurs, this can have effects on the entity or domain being imitated (Lempert, 2014).8 Understanding technological sleep as an instance of biomimesis thus can be illuminating in a number of ways. If further investigated, it can help us better understand how technological sleep might be involved in the animation of what Fisch (2017: 818) has called, ‘a new arrangement of becoming’. The biomimesis of sleep can also further deepen understanding of what the growing field of biomimetic technology encompasses. And we additionally raise the possibility that the biomimesis of sleep may expand understanding of how sleep is produced by metaphor.9 These lines of inquiry—and the preceding discussion we provided— speak to the multidimensional nature of technological sleep, and the promise of viewing technosleep as a more-than-human concept, which we underlined in the introductory chapter of our work. In addition to asking ‘how sleep occurs?’, we find insight in asking ‘who or what sleeps?’, ‘what forms can sleep take?’, and ‘what about sleep defies dualisms?’.

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Notes 1. For a detailed account of how AI technologies are coming to be associated with the capacity to sleep, it is useful to consult the work of Possati (2021), who analyses AI technologies from the perspective of psychoanalytical theory. Possati posits that the conceptualization of AI sleep is more broadly indicative of an ‘unconscious’ dimension of AI algorithms. 2. It should be noted that the incorporation of sleep into AI systems is an ongoing one, which continues to evolve in new directions. Robinson et al. (2022) for example, propose that developers of artificial neural networks (ANN) benefit from having a more a differentiated understanding of what biological sleep involves. Biological and neurological research on sleep tends to strongly emphasize how it involves numerous processes and phases, which technology developers should look to draw from in their construction of ANN systems. 3. It is also worth noting here Guzman’s (2018) argument that there are limitations with associating AI technologies as being ‘extraordinary’. We should not simply accept the long-standing idea that AI will one day dramatically revolutionize how people live their lives, as AI may be socially experienced as being similar to other types of technology which possess more of an ‘ordinary’ quality. 4. Indeed it is worthwhile to note that even the term computer has been subject to metaphoric transformations. Numerous studies have noted that computers used to more commonly refer to human beings (Grier, 2005). 5. Cazeaux (2007) has established a link between metaphor and ontology. Metaphor is not merely a flourish in how we describe ourselves and the world around us. Cazeaux (2007: 197) contends that there is a sense in which it can be ‘world-making’. Hence, this is why we posit that metaphor has some bearing on the matter of ontology. Cazeaux acknowledges that the latter cannot be reduced to the former, but this does diminish its generative capacities. 6. A related line of inquiry which we leave for future research is what is driving human sleep to be described in computational terms. Computational framings of sleep appear to be part of a broader story. Searle (1984: 42) has noted how theoreticians of brains have used historically specific technologies to understand how brains work, from Leibniz’s comparison of the brain to a mill and Freud’s comparison of hydraulic and electro-magnetic systems to the present-day likening of brains to digital computers. 7. We acknowledge, however, that sleep and rest are far from synonymous. For one thing, rest is not reducible to sleep (Hammond & Lewis, 2016: 60), nor is sleep always restful. 8. Theoretical accounts of mimesis and technological mimicry note how imitation is commonly thought to involve the existence of an unchanging

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original, from which copies are made (Laccetti, 2006; Lempert, 2014; Magnet, 2021). This original-copy binary, however, does not recognize the full complexity of mimesis, as ‘slippages’ can occur (Taussig, 1993) and it is not always clear whom is imitating whom, or what is the object of mimicry (Lempert, 2014). 9. The mimetic dimension of sleep may especially shed light on what prompts metaphoric exchanges to take place. Some research has sought to link mimesis with metaphor (Mageo, 2018) but more conceptual elaboration is needed on this front.

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CHAPTER 6

Technosleep in/as Science Fiction

The focus of this chapter is on the varieties of technosleep that have been envisioned by creators of science fiction (SF) from the late nineteenth century to the present day. Before we embark on this discussion, it is worth taking a step back and asking two clusters of interrelated questions: the first is about the status of literary narrative in broadly sociological analysis; the second is about the historical scope of this chapter analysis. First: what is the place of literary analysis in a discussion of the lived reality of sleep? What can discussion of fictitious characters, alternative worlds and wholly imaginary technologies—technologies that don’t and perhaps can’t exist—add to our understanding of the reality of sleep as it is experienced? Can novels, stories, films and other cultural narratives meaningfully add to what we might glean from fieldwork? We have argued in this volume that technosleep—human slumber that has been in some way produced in, conditioned by or entangled with technology—has become a fact of everyday life for anyone who uses a smartphone app to track their sleep, or uses pharmaceutical aids to induce sleep, or takes alertness drugs to postpone it. But we want to argue that technosleep exists also as a set of fictions and fantasies that circulate in novelistic, televisual and cinematic representations of human slumber where sleep and technology interact, often in outlandish and disturbing ways. Writers from H.G Wells and Aldous Huxley to Nancy Kress and Jeanette Winterson have ‘invented’ a whole range of weird and wonderful sleep-related technologies, including © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 C. Coveney et al., Technosleep, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30599-3_6

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political systems that exploit and regulate sleep, and machines that can prolong, hack, harness, stockpile, transfuse, compress, suppress and even weaponize human slumber. What can we learn if we peer from the world we know into these bizarre and vividly imagined alternative and futuristic universes? First of all, it is worth saying that the frontier between ‘real’ technosleep and ‘imagined’ technosleep is not as clear-cut as it might seem. To say that technosleep exists as both reality and fantasy is not to say that there is always a clean differentiation between the two. On the one hand, twenty-first-century technologies of sleep often speak to, or trade on, consumers’ desires and fantasies around enhanced, streamlined or upgraded sleep. Technosleep appears in the twenty-first-century consumer marketplace as a new horizon of possibility for what sleep could or should be. New pharmaceutical products, innovative apps and state-of-the art technologies are not encountered by consumers in a vacuum; rather, they are always embedded in dreams and expectations about human slumber. ‘Real’ technosleep in the twenty-first century often has a decidedly science-fictional quality to it. On the other hand, SF—even at its most far-fetched, outlandish and ‘unscientific’—speaks in eloquent and powerful ways about the underlying human and ethical questions that are opened up by real-world innovations in technology as they impinge on our sleep lives. The gadgets in these texts, no matter how implausible, are mirrors in which we can catch sight of contemporary culture’s fears, fantasies and desires about sleep and its evolving relation to technology. Our second question relates to the historical scope of this discussion of sleep and SF. The historical scope of the present volume is largely restricted to innovations in sleep technology in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century culture, but the novels and stories under discussion in this chapter date back to the late nineteenth century and emerge as part of the wave of technological innovations that have been nicknamed the ‘second industrial revolution’, a frenetically innovative period that witnessed the emergence of the telegraph, telephone, radio, cinema, automobile and electric light bulb alongside many other features in the landscape of the modern world. Why stray outside our historical frame in this way? The simple answer to this question is that SF writing has been in some ways ‘prophetic’ in what it has to say about sleep and technology in the modern world. We’re using the term ‘prophetic’ in scare quotes because we don’t think we should take it literally. We don’t read SF as a

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set of predictions about the future, a kind of techno-cultural weather forecast that stands or falls on its accuracy and is valuable only to the extent to which its prognostications are proved right. To say that SF has been ‘ahead of its time’ is to say that it has furnished us with ways of imagining, envisioning and evaluating the new and evolving relations between technology and the body in the modern world. Even with those caveats in mind, to say that SF is ‘ahead of its time’ is to tell only half the story. To be sure, we can say that SF writers have run ahead of scientists and inventors in their prolific creation of new technologies of sleep, and it is certainly tempting to speculate that science fact is only now catching up with the prolific inventiveness of science fiction. But SF is also in important ways a backward-looking, nostalgic enterprise, one that is rooted in traditional models of human nature, attached to well-established ethical norms, and frankly suspicious of the arrogant over-reach and reckless addiction to novelty that can characterize technoscientific innovation as it impinges on our sleep. As we consider the sleep-related gadgets and systems that are encountered in modern SF, we will not be appraising them in terms of scientific accuracy, validity or viability. It’s not our aim to read fictional texts as a source of objective information or hard evidence about the relationship between sleep and technology in the modern world. This is because the artistic success or conceptual value of a work of SF does not depend on whether the technology it depicts is plausible or viable. In an influential study, the critic Darko Suvin coins a term for the imagined technologies of SF: he calls them nova. According to Suvin, a novum is an innovation such as time travel or teleportation or faster-than-light transport that exists as a scientific reality in the world of the story. The novum is not an inexplicable magical or supernatural phenomenon but something that has emerged as a product of scientific knowledge and technological innovation at some point in the future or in an alternative timeline or alternative reality. For Suvin, the function of the novum is twofold: first, it marks out the world that created it as radically different from our own. If we encounter, say, teleportation or time travel in a given text then we know straight away that we are not reading a text that’s asking to be judged in terms of its documentary realism. Second, the novum, in its sheer novelty, provides us with a new vantage point, a new perspective, on our own world. So, for example, if we read a text such as Nancy Kress’s Beggars in Spain (1993), where technology ‘frees’ some human beings from the need to sleep, we are compelled to reconsider what it

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means to be creatures who submit to and are shaped by somnolence. SF, in other words, takes us on an exhilarating voyage away from the familiar, the everyday and the taken-for-granted not simply as part of a one-way escapist daydream but rather to set us up for an all-important return journey in the course of which we will view the world around us with fresh eyes. This process, the imaginative rediscovery of regions of experience that have become familiar to the point of invisibility, is one that Suvin calls ‘cognitive estrangement’ (Suvin, 1979: 13). Providing us with a unique imaginative vantage point on one of the most elusive and intangible elements of human experience, SF is a place where contemporary fears, fantasies and desires about human slumber and its futures are converted into stories that articulate our sense of what’s valuable about sleep—its role and significance in human experience. In offering a unique imaginative vantage point on one of the most elusive and intangible elements of human experience, SF enables us to ‘see’ something that has become familiar to the point of invisibility, to ‘think’ a state that is characterized by thoughtlessness and to imagine a past, present and future for a state that might seem to have no history.

Technologizing Sleep SF has not always seemed terribly interested in sleep, and the topic has attracted only a modest amount of literary-critical attention (see: Jones, 2015; Steinberg, 2008; Willis, 2019). In many SF narratives, sleep is what happens before the storyline proper gets under way. Whether in Wells’s The Sleeper Awakes (1910/2005) or Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979), the protagonists emerge from a state of extended slumber and what matters in the story is what happens to them when they are awake. Increasingly, however, there has been in modern SF a turn to sleep as a matter of concern in its own right. A recent collection of short stories inspired by the contemporary science of sleep, Spindles (2016), meditates on the relationship between technology and slumber in the modern world, while a spate of recent novels by Calhoun (2014), Russell and others have engaged with sleep via a narrative of mass insomnia. The sleep-obsessed texts of modern SF proceed by asking a series of what if questions about sleep: What if we could transcend its limitations? What if science can help us unlock the secrets of slumber? What if technological innovations could make sleep useful, efficient and productive? What if technology could help us to harness, stockpile, share and distribute sleep just as we do with other

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resources? Might there be ways in which technology could minimize or even eliminate the risks associated with sleep? What if technology could place a limit on sleep’s ability to place limits on us? It should be emphasized that when SF raises questions such as these, it nearly always does so in a cautionary rather than an enthusiastic spirit. Contemporary transhumanist thinkers such as Istvan (2016) have talked up the possibilities of technological ‘cures’ for the ‘disease’ of sleep, while stimulants such as modafinil and armodafinil are marketed in terms of their ability to combat drowsiness. SF writers, on the other hand, are far less upbeat about the future impacts of technology on human slumber. SF is certainly fascinated by the idea of ever-more-powerful manifestations of technosleep but it is also at pains to distance itself from the likely ethical implications and human consequences of unchecked progress in this field. Narratives such as J. G. Ballard’s dystopian short story ‘Manhole 69’ (1957/2006), where the three human guinea pigs in an experiment to eliminate sleep rapidly lose their sanity, suggest that any cure for human somnolence would be infinitely worse that the ‘disease’ that it purports to remedy. Plans to hack, upgrade, transform or expunge sleep are typically hatched in these narratives by scientists who are at best eccentric crackpots and at worst dangerous megalomaniacs. Whether they are envisioning a ‘narcotomy’ (Ballard, 1957/2006) that surgically removes our ability to sleep, an over-the-counter ‘cure’ for sleep (Gillon & Gillon, 1962) or a ‘Morpheus System’ (Molotnikov, 2015) that compresses hours of sleep into minutes, SF writers ‘invent’ these grotesque forms of technosleep in the hope that they will never come to pass in real life. SF narratives of sleep and technology often engage with the question of what people would do to, or with, sleep if they could get their hands on it. A trailblazing text in this regard is a short story by the Cambridge educator and man of letters Ernest Edward Kellett entitled ‘A Corner in Sleep’ (1900). Kellett’s story concerns one Adolphus J. Vallancy, a crackpot scientist who develops technology that measures, absorbs and stores sleep. Armed with his ‘absorbers’, ‘accumulators’ and ‘reservoirs’, he is poised to come into his own as an entrepreneur of human slumber at a time when sleep is becoming increasingly scarce; indeed, the possibility the human race will ‘perish of insomnia’ (Kellett, 1900: 9) will make him its saviour. Kellett’s protagonist, clearly in the grip of something like a messiah complex, is himself responsible for exacerbating the very sleepdeprivation that he laments. Having quietly harvested huge amounts of sleep from the environment, he triggers a ‘terrific sleep-famine’ (p. 12)

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during which he enjoys a ‘practical monopoly on sleep’ (p. 13). Vallancy makes a fortune as a hoarder of and profiteer in sleep, but in the end, he has to use his personal reservoir of sleep to subdue an angry sleepdeprived lynch mob that converges on his house. Sleep, in other words, has in the course of Kellett’s story been measured, captured, stockpiled, monetized, commercialized, politicized and—in the end—weaponized. One primary target of the satire is pseudo-science, with its promise of capturing and measuring phenomena that are, by their nature, subjective, insubstantial and evanescent. And yet—such ambitions would to an extent be realized through the emergence of sleep science in the mid-twentieth century. But what about the more outlandish and alarmist prophecies in Kellett’s text? Should we, for example, steel ourselves against a possible future in which technology might restrict our access to sleep or in which ordinary people might have to campaign to liberate their sleep from the grasp of the super-rich? It’s certainly fair to say that ‘A Corner in Sleep’ is one of the first pieces of imaginative writing to foresee the advent in the modern world of the multibillion-dollar industry of ‘sleeponomics’. The prediction that our world will witness a worldwide insomnia epidemic has also proved to be prophetic. Not because the modern world has been plunged into involuntary sleeplessness but rather because modern science fiction, from Adrian Barnes’s Nod to Kenneth Calhoun’s Black Moon, has over and over again, rehearsed the scenario of enforced wakefulness. ‘A Corner in Sleep’ is thus the first draft or prototype of the narrative of collective insomnia that would undergo a remarkable resurgence in the early twenty-first century. What is remarkable about recent SF visions of sleep’s possible future narratives is their near-unanimity on the idea that technology is bad for your sleep. SF texts abound in stories of sleep under threat—polluted, fragmented or warped out of natural shape by the effects of technology. Scientists do not, on the whole, get a good press in these texts. The scientific desire to understand sleep seems to be motivated by intolerance of its mysteries and impatience with its seeming wastefulness; technoscience, as represented by SF writers, is in the grip of an obsessive desire to master sleep—to bring it under the jurisdiction and control of rational wakefulness. Typical in this regard is Ballard’s ‘Manhole 69’ in which a scientist who abhors sleep—he views it as a wasteful, retrograde and mildly sordid state—works to disinvent it. Sleep, inasmuch as it represents darkness, oblivion, ignorance and the weird irrationality of dreams, is the antithesis of everything that the scientific mindset champions. His solution for this

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problem is a ‘narcotomy’, a surgical procedure that eliminates the need for sleep but has horrendous unintended consequences. Science, when it tinkers disastrously with sleep, reveals that it is more than capable of producing its own nightmares. The scientific hostility to sleep is unmasked in this story as a classic case of projection in which the techonscientific gaze uses the somnolent sleeper as a scapegoat for its own blind spots. Often, the injurious effects of technology are ascribed to a particularly dangerous and irresponsible innovation such as the narcotomy in Ballard or the sinister Morpheus System encountered by the Doctor in a memorably nightmarish episode of Doctor Who. But the blame does not always exclusively rest with futuristic innovations. SF often focuses in a futuristic way on as-yet-uninvented gadgets and contraptions that may compromise our sleep lives, but these texts often also gesture towards the systems and gadgets that are already here, a wider technologized landscape of email, laptops, computer games, social networking platforms, CCTV, neon lighting, television, cinema and smartphones—a hi-tech hinterland whose corrosive effects our sleep are taking place right now. Sara Maitland, in a story about the fate of slumber in a hi-tech world, represents modern sleepers as victims of what she calls the ‘electricity plague’ (Lewis & Page, 2015: 75). Victims of this plague are everywhere in contemporary fiction. One of the new nocturnal subcultures that Charlie Huston’s Sleepless explores is an underground world of non-stop videogaming where the elite competitors are insomniacs fixated on their screens. Videogaming keeps people awake, and this technologically-induced insomnia makes them better at videogaming. The implied causality is self-perpetuating and curiously overdetermined in a way that recalls Scrivner’s model of the co-evolution of technology and insomnia in nineteenth-century scientific culture (Scrivner, 2014). A 24/7 culture of overstimulation gives people endless enticing reasons to stay awake. Protracted hours of screen time, with the retina exposed to artificial light, are a recipe for insomnia. Insomnia gives elite players an unfair advantage over their somnolent rivals. Insomnia means they get better at the game, but the game means that they get better at insomnia. It is a strange allegory of a 24/7 consumer culture as a game played between insomniac winners and somnolent losers. All of which is to say that technology in the world of Huston’s novel is a force that causes, caters to, prolongs and rewards insomnia; it produces an insomniac subjectivity that—in its affectless, trance-like qualities—is in the end not a million miles from sleep. The specific sleep-related technologies in SF texts may seem outlandishly

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improbable, then, but one of their symbolic functions is to sound the alarm about what is supposedly happening anyway as sleep is transformed by the effects of twenty-first-century technocapitalism.

The Vulnerability of Sleep When SF writers engage with human slumber they continually (re-) discover two of its crucial interrelated qualities: sleep is a state of radical vulnerability and sleep is a limit or frontier. The equation between sleep and vulnerability hinges on the fact that sleep is a state in which our guard is down, in which we cannot assess risk, monitor our environment as it changes, anticipate danger—whether in the form of a sudden emergency or natural disaster (fire, flood, violent weather), or the attentions of predatory animals or of human beings who might wish us harm (see Heyes, 2020; Williams, 2007). The act of going to sleep always involves a hopeful—or at least non-pessimistic—bargain with space. The person who chooses a place to sleep does so on the assumption that it will be more or less as safe, comfortable and protective when they wake up as it was when they settled down to rest. In addition to all this we are, as Williams notes, ‘vulnerable to ourselves ’ (Williams, 2007: 146; emphasis in original) in our sleep. The sleeper is physically unprotected but also prone to bad dreams and nightmares, bed-wetting, teeth-grinding and night terrors. Sleep is a state in which the body may lose its discipline and the mind may come crazily unstuck from reality. Sleep, in other words, represents a point of acute structural weakness in the architecture of embodied human selfhood. How do we respond practically and intellectually to this weakness? On the practical side of things, one function of long-standing technologies of sleep, from fire and bedding to alarm clocks or smoke detectors, is to mitigate the discomforts, harms and risks associated with sleep. Technology in these contexts is a prosthesis—it does for us what we can’t do for ourselves. Bedding reduces the effects of exposure to the elements and to changing temperatures; the alarm clock compensates for the sleeper’s lack of any sense of time; the smoke detector compensates for the lack of awareness of potential threats. Even a guard dog might be described as a kind of organic technology of surveillance and protection. How comfortable should we be about entrusting our sleeping selves to non-human systems of protection and surveillance? This question is vividly posed

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by Tade Thompson’s SF murder mystery, Far from the Light of Heaven (2021), in which the crew of an interplanetary vessel awake from hypersleep to find that dozens of their passengers have been slaughtered in the sleep by a rogue military AI that has hijacked the vessel’s control systems. In space, the vulnerability of sleep is pushed to an extreme. Space, in its imaginably vast distances, its unfathomable darkness and its cold emptiness, is absolutely inhospitable to humanity. For this reason, we have to suspend a lot of what makes us human—self-awareness, choice, a sense of time—in order to pass through it. In space, the proverbial connection between sleep and death has never been closer. Technology in SF often appears in the guise of something that will reduce the risks of sleep. A staple of science fiction, from Ballard and the Gillons to Kress and Winterson, is a technology that often serves to compress or control the amount of time we spend asleep and therefore reduces our exposure to its risks. Often understood as an attempt to mitigate, if not eliminate, the vulnerability of sleep, such technology is often championed and pioneered by obsessive scientists who despise sleep, which they associate with a deplorable weakness that technology will help us to overcome—either by reducing the time we spend asleep or by eliminating it altogether. Nowhere is the vulnerability of the sleeper more poignantly embodied than in the figure of the sleeping child that haunts all four of these novels. The sleep of children and babies is a fragile thing at the best of times, but in the Sleepless World text any hope for the future is bound up with the possibility that the naturalness of the children’s sleep, as-yetuncontaminated by the nightmarish wakefulness of contemporary society, might provide the basis of some future restoration our ancient relationship with somnolence. In Barnes’s Nod, it’s mainly children who are still able to sleep, and the protagonists take one of these miraculously somnolent youngsters, a four-year-old girl whom they name Zoe, into their care. Zoe is of course the Greek word for life in its creaturely or biological form outside of collective, socialized existence; and this girl’s role in Barnes’s novel is as a living, breathing—and sleeping—the personification of a post-24/7 society in which sleep has been triumphantly reclaimed as our shared birthright. Not all of the Sleepless World texts are quite so sentimental in their use of children. In Russell’s Sleep Donation, a 6month-old sleep donor is the source of a miracle cure for the insomnia epidemic, and it’s not long before her sleep is being cynically commercialized. The harvesting of her sleep suggests that even zoe—even creaturely

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life—will be commodified by a culture that, having exhausted its natural resources, can only survive through a kind of parasitic feeding on the future that children embody. Sleep, technology and vulnerability also come into conjunction in Huxley’s Brave New World (1932/2007), a novel whose representation of sleep-learning suggests that when totalitarianism comes it will come for us when we sleep—it will infiltrate and shape our minds when our critical faculties are suspended by slumber. Sleep in Huxley’s novel is thus a state of acute cognitive and political vulnerability. The totalitarian system in this novel seems to have conflicted plans for sleep. On the one hand, it converts sleep into an extra shift of cognitive labour—that is, it makes sleepers useful by converting them into learners. On the other, it is happy for its waking citizens to drift into an innocuous daze, a blissedout stupor that is by its nature quietist and innocuously apolitical. Sleep becomes a quasi-wakeful state, whereas wakefulness is a kind of quasisleep. Huxley’s novel is thus paradoxical, conflicted and contradictory in what it says about and does with human slumber. Brave New World has a protective, even tender attitude to the figure of the sleeper—and, especially, through its investment in the figure of the sleeping child (something it shares with Barnes’s Nod and Russell’s Sleep Donation) as an incarnation of pre-technological naturalness and innocence—in all their human vulnerability but it also exhibits a disparaging view of the state sleep as wholly inferior to rational, self-possessed wakefulness. But sleep, in this novel, is also a trope. Huxley’s suggestion is that the citizens of the World State are always ‘asleep’, not least when they are under the stupefying influence of the state-sanctioned narcotic soma. Like so many SF narratives, Brave New World operates with a dual sense of sleep as both an organic or physiological state and as a literary device, a trope for some larger theme such as (in this case) the collective life of the citizenry in the totalitarian body politic. To put it simplistically, in Huxley’s novel ‘real’ (ie biological) sleep is a good thing, a healthy and natural state, albeit one that is vulnerable to various kinds of political and technological interference, whereas ‘figurative’ sleep (ie false consciousness) is a bad thing, a state of diminished selfhood and political subservience. A remarkable recent text on the politics of technosleep is Jordan Peele’s horror movie, Get Out (2017). Peele’s film is by no means the only horror movie to focus on fears attached to the state of sleep. The sleeping body has long occupied a central role in this genre, prey to ghosts, vampires

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and all sorts of nightmarish nocturnal threats. What’s new and distinctive in Peele’s film is its emphasis on sleep as a state whose exploitation permits the fetishization and exploitation of Black bodies by a dominant white culture. The film’s hero, an African-American photographer, discovers that his girlfriend’s family are part of a sinister community who have found a way to implant the subjectivity of ageing white people in the bodies of young, healthy Black men and women whom they have abducted and hypnotized. Hypnosis, in other words, allows whites to colonize and inhabit Black bodies and to repress Black subjectivity. In the racist culture explored and satirized by the film, whiteness is thus aligned with power, privilege and consciousness while blackness is aligned with subordination, exploitation and slumber. Hypnosis in Get Out is technology of soft power, one that dupes and lulls its subjects into a position of disastrous and potentially irreversible vulnerability and endeavours to make Black sleep the condition of white wakefulness—indeed, white immortality. What is more, the hypnotized sleeping black body in this movie is itself a technology, a kind of prosthesis for white subjectivity. The roots of this film extend back to the history of slavery in pre-Civil War America but at the same time its satirical interrogation of anti-black racism couldn’t be more topical in the era of Black Lives Matter. With a hero who survives his ordeal and escapes his captors by finding an ingenious way to resist hypnosis and keep himself awake, Get Out is, in both the literal and the political senses of the term, a woke film in which resistance to sleep is not just consciousness-raising but life-saving.

The Limits of Sleep As well as marking a significant point of vulnerability in embodied human subjectivity, sleep is also a limit—or, rather, it represents multiple limits or frontiers. Inasmuch as it limits our capacity for active involvement in the social world, sleep separates us from other people. Inasmuch as it limits our cognitive activity—our capacity for rational introspection or outwardlooking vigilance—it separates us from ourselves. It also represents a limit to what the rational, scientific gaze can see. Science has made considerable advances in its understanding of the physiology and neurology of sleep but there is still no one definitive answer to the question of why we sleep. Sleep is also a temporal frontier, separating one day from the next—and for this reason it has often been understood as a version of the ultimate temporal limit on human experience: death (which is why

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technological efforts to ‘overcome’ sleep often tout themselves as offensives in what is nothing less than a proxy war between life and death). Unlike other indispensable resources—such as food and water—there is theoretically no limit to our supply of sleep, but the ‘substance’ of sleep is limited in the sense that it is unshareable. You can share food or water but you can’t share sleep. Many would accept that all of these physical and psychological limits are non-negotiable elements of the architecture of what makes us human. But in some quarters there is a powerful desire to transcend the limitations that sleep places on us. SF writings frequently explore the broadly transhumanist notion that the state of sleep is an insult to human dignity, rationality and self-awareness—an age-old obstacle we need to overcome if we are to realize our possibilities for development as a species. A warning note that is struck repeatedly by SF narratives of sleep relates to the question of privacy. There is something unnerving about a technology that gets on intimate terms with us when we sleep. The heroine of Lisa Tuttle’s ‘The Night Husband’ (Lewis & Page, 2015: 143–158) is indignant at the notion that polysomnograph technology might know her sleep better than she herself does. In Martyn Bedford’s ‘My Soul to Keep’ (Lewis & Page, 2015: 43–58), a young woman in a state of pathological hypersomnia sleeps for a year and become a media celebrity with a worldwide following. An unresolved question hovers over this story: has its sleeping heroine escaped into absolute privacy? Or have the attentions of the mass media converted her private identity into public property? One of the great breakthroughs of modern sleep science is that its technology makes sleep transparent, visible and measurable; however, the technology, and the systems in which it is embedded, can be disconcertingly opaque. How does technosleep work? Whose interests does it serve? What happens to the data it collects? Does it siphon human slumber away from the individual sleeper and into a commercial realm? Who—if anyone—now ‘owns’ sleep? Such questions are sharply raised in a spate of recent stories about the possible effects of a new generation of apps on our sleep lives. In Sarah Schofield’s ‘Benzene Dreams’ (Lewis & Page, 2015: 83–94), an app called Dreamsolvr that claims to boost the dreaming mind’s problem-solving abilities is vulnerable to commercial or political exploitation. The app, even as it is marked as a ‘solver’, spawns a new set of problems. In Andy Hedgecock’s ‘Counting Sleep’ (Lewis & Page, 2015: 101–119) Linden Harper, a lecturer in a humanities department that is undergoing restructuring, agrees to use

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the ‘Dormouse Sleep Management Programme’, a sleep-tracking app that is designed to improve sleep quality, well-being, mental health—and, by extension, professional performance. It’s a story in which managerialism joins forces with technology to colonize and infiltrate the corners of human lives that are normally devoted to rest, darkness and peaceable, unproductive oblivion. Harper eagerly records his ‘sleep efficiency index’ as a measure of his ‘sleep performance’ (p. 107) from one day to the next—that is, like a good and obedient subject (a kind of ‘sheep’), he enthusiastically internalizes the technobureaucratic surveillance of waking and sleeping lives. His colleagues are more robustly sceptical, objecting that sleep is ‘really none of your business’ (p. 105). The pun here on ‘business’ points to the erosion of any frontier between workplace and private domesticity, between productive economic activity and unproductive downtime. Apps make sleep into business, and into busy-ness—they capture idleness as labour, they make sleepers into workaholics. As the story progresses, Harper seems to fade from social and even corporeal existence, to become a disembodied creature of pure data, kind of hitech ghost for whom other people are nothing more than reams of data—scores, grades, averages, marks, metrics. Late in the story he tosses his smartphone into a canal. It’s a liberating moment of disconnection from technology—perhaps a fantasy that healthy, organic, natural or pretechnological sleep is still there for the taking if we can summon up the will to unplug ourselves from the system—but for the hero of ‘Counting Sheep’ it is too late. A cautionary narrative about the technological abolition of human slumber is offered by ‘Sleep No More’, episode nine of season nine of the long-running BBC science fiction show Dr Who. This episode finds the time travelling Doctor (Peter Capaldi) and his companion Clara (Jenna Colman) on board the Le Verrier Lab, a seemingly deserted space station orbiting Neptune some time in the thirty-ninth century. On board the station they find technology associated with the ‘Morpheus System’— a set of ‘sleep pods’ that have been designed to compress one night’s sleep into a single five-minute burst in order to release human beings from the unproductive downtime of sleep in order to live more industrious, dynamic and efficient lives. The system is not without division and controversy. Society is now divided into the ‘Wide-Awakes’ who embrace the new technology and the ‘Rips’ (short for Rip Van Winkles—but also, more sinisterly, ‘Rest in Peace’) who remain loyal to sleep in what they regard as it natural, authentic form. One member of the rescue team is a

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proud Rip—played, significantly, by the British Asian actor Neet Mohan— who refuses to use the Morpheus technology, describing it as a sinister attempt to ‘colonize’ sleep. Sleep, in other words, is envisaged in this episode as the ‘final frontier’, beyond which technoscience is determined to travel in order to annex new territory that is has not yet been able to claim as its own. In a final pair of inter-related twists, we learn that the mild-mannered Professor Rasmussen—the episode’s Frankenstein figure—has edited the sound footage on which the episode is seemingly based as a kind of booby-trapped anti-lullaby that will send a sleep-destroying signal into the mind of anyone who watches it. There is a notably self-conscious, metatelevisual quality to this episode—indeed, a self-consciousness that shades into hyper-alert paranoia. The idea is that viewers of Dr Who will themselves not be able to sleep after viewing this episode—though in a sense that has always been the point of this kind of SF, in which we expose ourselves to shocks and scares in order to indulge in a kind of relatively harmless recreational insomnia. The episode thus revolves around a paradox that its investment in sleep as a precious ‘blessing’ (an inexplicable but benign gift rather than something we can measure, regulate, control or subdue) is at odds with its allegiance to the technoscientific innovations that are seemingly destroying sleep. The paradox is embodied in the figure of the Doctor himself, the hyperactive eccentric with his time machine and sonic sunglasses and his technological knowhow who doesn’t seem to have had much time in his centuries-long life for slumber. When Clara asks him directly if he ever sleeps, he replies, with an evasive jokiness, ‘When you’re not looking’. Is the Doctor, the alien who speaks so eloquently in defence of human sleep, himself the prototypical ‘Wide-Awake’? The demographic division in ‘Sleep No More’ between the ‘WideAwake’ and the ‘Rips’ is reminiscent of a comparable one between the Sleepers and Sleepless in what is quite the most ambitious exploration of a possible ‘post-sleep’ future for humanity, Nancy Kress’s Beggars trilogy (1993, 1995, 1996). For the geneticist Susan Melling in Beggars in Spain (1993), sleep is a ‘left-over mechanism, a vestige’ (p. 11) whose functions, such as they are, can be more efficiently discharged by the waking body. Accordingly, the genetic modifications pioneered by Melling and her colleagues produce a new generation of permanently wakeful human beings who are nicknamed the Sleepless. The Sleepless, in Kress’s novel, are a generation of over-achievers—Pulitzer Prize-winning

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writers, Olympic-standard athletes, outstandingly successful entrepreneurs and scientists. If there is a field of competitive endeavour where success can be measured, the Sleepless will excel in that field, massively outperforming the sleeping populace. What is distinctive about Kress’s novel is its imagining of sleeplessness as a privilege with almost no downside. In other SF texts of sleeplessness, the side-effects of sleeplessness might be experienced on a spectrum from bloodshot eyes and frayed nerves to psychotic disengagement from reality, but in Beggars in Spain sleep is missed only in the poignant sense that it has never been experienced. Continuous, lifelong wakefulness has an upfront price but no psychological cost beyond the envy it provokes in those who continue to sleep. At the same time, the stigma of abnormality clings to the Sleepless. They are reviled as ‘mutants’ and ‘freaks’ and are ostracized, harassed and persecuted by sleepers. Whatever the future may have in store for sleep, it seems that it will never not be a site of division, contention and inequality. Other contemporary SF writers have been even more alarmist in their representations of technologically induced mass insomnia. Texts by Barnes (2015), Russell (2013) and Huston (2011) all provide variations on the notion that present-day technology is the arch-enemy of slumber, and that our incurable addiction to technology means that we are living through a slow-motion ‘sleep crisis’ that is happening now rather than in some dystopian future. Such a diagnosis finds corroboration in a number of polemical and alarmist books that appeared in the same decade (Crary, 2013; Walker, 2017), suggesting that Western culture reached a kind of peak cultural insomnia in the 2010s. A less literal-minded take on the sleep crisis is offered by Benjamin Reiss, who suggests that such narratives ‘hold up mass insomnia as a metaphor for the fate of citizens in an era of global commerce’ (Reiss, 2017: 214). One of the more playful representations of a modern crisis in sleep is offered by Jeanette Winterson’s short story ‘Disappearance I’, a mildly dream-like portrait of an alternative reality in which sleep has become a taboo behaviour in a world that has embraced the ‘no-sleep lifestyle’ (p. 109) and the opportunities it affords for non-stop labour and increased productivity. Sleep has not vanished, but it is viewed with puritanical horror as a kind of sordid peccadillo—wasteful, self-indulgent and somehow morally unclean—that has no place in decent society: Most jobs these days insist on a non-sleeper. Sleeping is dirty, unhygienic, wasteful and disrespectful to others. All public spaces are designated ‘Non-Sleeping’ and even a quick nap on a park bench carries a £50

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fine. You can still sleep in your own home but all new beds are required by law to have a personal alarm clock built into the mattress. If you get caught on a bed check, with a dead alarm, that’s another £50 fine. Three fines and you are disqualified from sleeping for a year. (Winterson, 1998: 105). Winterson’s story taps into the suspicion that sleep is humanity’s dirty little secret, a state in which homo erectus —a species that prides itself on, and indeed defines itself in terms of, its dignified self-possession and intellectual self-awareness—embarrassingly surrenders to creaturely weakness and to the uncensored irrationality of dreams. While Ballard’s ‘Manhole 69’ presents enforced sleeplessness as a one-way journey to madness, Winterson’s story is a droll thought-experiment that trusts to the resilience of human somnolence in the face of the anti-sleep forces that are marshalled against it in the modern world. Some of these technologies, such as the alarm clock embedded in the mattress, are hybrids of what we already have. The hybrid of mattresses and alarm clocks shows how contemporary technologies might seem to cater in an even-handed way for both sleep and wakefulness, but also place them in uncomfortable tension with one another. Others, such as dream-capturing technology used by the protagonist, are altogether more futuristic. In the world of ‘Disappearance I’, sleep is driven underground by an economic imperative towards non-stop productivity that is policed and enforced by new systems of government surveillance but also taboos of moral distaste. On the one hand, sleep is regarded as somehow obscene, something disgusting that should not be visible; on the other, citizens are obliged to submit their sleep lives to regulatory inspection, to make them visible to the all-seeing eye of a state that now routinely practices ‘bed-checks’ that are designed to bring the sleep lives of its citizens under panoptic control. The figure of the sleepless person thus emerges in Winterson’s story as an exemplary citizen, someone who is living the ideological imperatives and technological regimes of the state as embodied practice.

Sleep Regained Whether they focus on the future or the present, or whether they subtly elide the two, SF narratives of sleep operate on the nostalgic assumption that before it was captured or infiltrated by modern scientific innovations there was, once upon a time, what you might call a pretechnological sleep—a state of slumber that was pure, healthy, natural,

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untainted by artificial light, unpolluted by chemicals and untapped by the violently ‘extractivist’ mechanisms of industrial capitalism. The central ambition or fantasy of SF narratives of sleep’s futures is to invent and assemble technosleep only to campaign for its pre-emptive disinvention, to redeem human slumber by driving a wedge between the techno and the sleep. For all their futuristic qualities, SF narratives of sleep and its technologized futures are thus suffused with nostalgia for what sleep used to be. Sleep is grasped in the past tense—the emphasis is on what sleep was. In ‘Sleep No More’ when the Doctorcottons on to the true horror of the Sleep Pods, he is moved to quote Shakespeare: Methought I heard a voice cry, Sleep no more: Macbeth does murder Sleep, the innocent Sleep, Sleep that knits up the ravel’d Sleeve of Care, The death of each day’s Life, sore Labor’s Bath, Balme of hurt Mindes, great Nature’s second Course, Chief nourisher in’ife’s Feast. (II, ii, 34–9)

Delivered by the hero in Act 2, Scene 2 of Macbeth (Shakespeare 1606/1952), this speech is one of the most celebrated evocations of sleep in literary history. It has become a favourite point of reference—see also Roberts (2015), Winterson (1998)—for writers who are nostalgically attached to the idea of how sleep used to be. Shakespeare’s early seventeenth-century poetic drama, in such contexts, stands for a humane, organic, preindustrial model of human slumber that has long since been eroded by technocapitalist modernity. The poets and philosophers, the Doctor insists, have got sleep right—and the scientists, on the other hand, are prone to getting it disastrously wrong. The future of sleep is one in which we will be obliged continually to unlearn and re-learn the wisdom of pre-modern discourses of sleep. More generally such nostalgic evocations of Shakespeare tend to operate on the assumption that poetry and literature contain truths about sleep that are inaccessible to technoscience. Sleep is envisaged by Macbeth as something that is restorative, cleansing, soothing and nourishing—but, crucially, is only grasped as such when it is under threat. You might say that discourses around the significance of sleep operate according to a scarcity theory of value— the less sleep is available, the more we cling to it, cherish it, idealize it and mourn its loss. These words evoke a time when sleep was accorded its rightful place as a mysterious, even quasi-sacred phenomenon. But sleep, in Macbeth, is in disarray. The rightful King of Scotland has been

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murdered in his sleep, and the perpetrators’ sleep is itself disrupted— Macbeth cannot sleep, while Lady Macbeth walks in her sleep. Macbeth, in other words, is a powerful example of the way in which the sleep that we idealize, the sleep that we champion as pure, natural and good, is the sleep we have irretrievably lost. ‘Sleep No More’ thus journeys into a sleepless future only to discover that sleeplessness was there all along in human experience, that we have always cast lingering nostalgic glances back at what sleep used to be.

Conclusions In the SF texts under discussion, sleep in the modern world is no longer a creaturely state that is available to us directly in a way that it perhaps was to our ancestors; rather, it is mediated to us through technology in various forms—by an app, a pill, a smartphone or a wearable device. But sleep is also mediated to us, in a broader way, by cultural representations, not least the kind of novels and stories under discussion in this chapter. This is to say that the SF narratives under discussion in this chapter are not simply ‘about’ sleep; they are not a transparent window onto sleep as an objective, external reality. Rather they seek to shape our sense of what sleep is, to influence the ways in which we perceive it, to re-think what it means, how it is valuable and where it belongs in the rhythms of our creaturely and cultural lives. All of which is to say that, while SF showcases some hair-raisingly disturbing imagined configurations of technosleep, it can itself also be understood as comprising a secondary technology of sleep. Sleep is not the same once it has been filtered through writing, signification and narrative. SF texts of sleep, from ‘A Corner in Sleep’ to Get Out, for all their technophobia, are narrative machines designed to run scenarios, speculate on outcomes, shape understandings of slumber, and to mediate sleep back to us as a source of value, an object of knowledge and a site of debate. SF writers are surprisingly ‘unscientific’ in the model of sleep that they champion—one that is natural, spontaneous, soothing, therapeutic and universal. But their stories of sleep are anything but soothing. SF has explored and articulated a range of complex, contradictory attitudes that range from upbeat technophilia to paranoid technophobia. It has variously seen technology as the enemy of sleep and as its potential saviour—sometimes in the same text. As envisioned in these writings, sleep is complex, distorted, unevenly distributed, and strangely entangled with technology. Sleep may be, in

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Macbeth’s words, that which ‘knits up the raveled sleeve of care’—but contemporary SF continues to unravel our assumptions and re-awaken our anxieties about human slumber and its future.

References Ballard, J. G. (1957/2006). Manhole 69. The complete short stories (Vol. 1, pp. 66–89). Harper. Barnes, A. (2015). Nod. Titan. Calhoun, K. (2014). Black moon. Hogarth. Crary, J. (2013). 24/7: Terminal capitalism and the ends of sleep. Verso. Gillon, D., & Gillon, M. (1962). The unsleep. Ballantine Books. Heyes, C. J. (2020). Anaesthetics of existence: Essays on existence at the edge. Duke University Press. Huston, C. (2011). Sleepless. Phoenix. Huxley, A. (1932/2007). Brave new world. Vintage. Istvan, Z. (2016). Let’s cure the disease of sleeping. Vice. https://www.vice.com/ en_us/article/aekgd5/lets-cure-the-disease-of-sleeping Jones, M. (2015). Sleep, radical hospitality, and makeover’s anti-matter. International Journal of Cultural Studies, 18(3), 333–345. Kellett, E. E. (1900). A corner in sleep. A corner in sleep and other impossibilities (pp. 7–23). Jarrod. Kress, N. (1993). Beggars in Spain. Penguin. Kress, N. (1995). Beggars Ride. Penguin. Kress, N. (1996). Beggars and Choosers. Penguin. Lewis, P. A., & Page, R. (2015). Spindles: Stories from the science of sleep. Comma. Molotnikov, J. (2015). Sleep no more. BBC. Peele, J. (2017). Get out. Universal Pictures. Reiss, B. (2017). Wild nights: How taming sleep created our restless world. Basic Books. Russell, K. (2013). Sleep donation. Atavist Books. Scott, R. (1979). Alien. 20th Century Fox. Scrivner, L. (2014). Becoming insomniac: How sleeplessness alarmed modernity. Palgrave. Shakespeare, W. (1606/1952). Macbeth. In K. Muir (Ed.), The Arden Shakespeare works (8th edn.). Methuen. Steinberg, D. L. (2008). Reading sleep through science fiction: The parable of beggars and choosers. Body & Society, 14(4), 115–135. Suvin, D. (1979). Metamorphosis of science fiction: On the poetics and history of a literary genre. Yale University Press. Thompson, T. (2021). Far from the light of heaven. Orbit.

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Walker, M. (2017). Why we sleep: The new science of sleep and dreams. Penguin. Wells, H. G. (1910/2005). The sleeper awakes. Penguin. Williams, S. J. (2007). Vulnerable/dangerous bodies? The trials and tribulations of sleep. Sociological Review, 55(1), 142–155. Willis, M. (2019). Sleeping science-fictionally: Nineteenth-century utopian fictions and contemporary sleep research. Osiris, 34(1), 261–276. Winterson, J. (1998). Disappearance I. The world and other places (pp. 101–116). Vintage.

CHAPTER 7

Stratified Technosleep Futures

As we have discussed previously, the twenty-first century has seen an influx of new sleep technologies that have the potential to radically alter the ways we think about sleep, come to know and understand sleep, our sleep rhythms, routines and practices and the values we give to it. In this chapter, we return to one of the questions posed at the very beginning of this book, does sleep as we know it have a future? While science fiction stories and narratives tend to imagine the future of sleep at its provocative extremes, the frontier between technosleep as reality and fantasy is not clear-cut. Technosleep fictions circulate across different domains in the twenty-first century, whether that be visions and promises embedded within scientific and medical papers anticipating how we will study sleep and diagnose and treat sleep problems in the future, to the consumer marketplace where technosleep is imagined as a new possibility for what sleep could or should be. In what follows, we present an empirical analysis of how ‘futures’ for sleep are being articulated across several interrelated domains—the medicoscientific, the technoscientific-industrial and in popular culture. Through the theoretical frame of sociotechnical imaginaries, we look at how the interests, views and discourses surrounding these different domains come together in the production of particular technosleep futures, and critically analyse the spaces these create, discussing the various issues and implications they throw into focus. Exploring how sleep futures © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 C. Coveney et al., Technosleep, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30599-3_7

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are being articulated will inevitably bring this chapter into close contact with many of the examples already encountered in this book. However, the future-orientated analysis here opens up new spaces for thinking about sleep–technology relations, and their possible implications. Asking how ‘futures’ are articulated also helps further unravel the temporality of technosleep. As noted in Chapter 1, as well as denoting individual experience of time, temporality captures how past, present and future become tied together in a particular narrative (Gokmenoglu, 2022). Taken together, this all helps us ask ‘what does the future hold for (techno)sleep’?

Sociology of ‘The Future’ Theoretically, our approach to studying sleep futures is situated between Sociology and Science and Technology Studies (STS), taking inspiration from Barbara Adam’s work on temporalities (2004a, 2004b), Cynthia Selin’s writing on the sociology of the future (2008) and work in STS on sociotechnical imaginaries (Jasanoff & Kim, 2009, 2015) and promissory discourses within sociology of expectations (van Lente, 1993). Social imaginaries can be understood as collective sets of beliefs, shared understandings or expectations about ourselves and our social worlds. Jasanoff and Kim (2015) talk about imaginaries as describing ‘an imagined and invented world’, whereas for Harro van Lente (1993), expectations are ‘forceful fictions’. These are statements which might contain scripts of particular roles to be played by various actors and can act to shape attitudes, frame debates and structure agendas. Taken together, stories, imaginaries, images, expectations and statements craft particular futures that infiltrate popular consciousness as they circulate and recirculate across various cultural spaces. It is through these imaginaries that ‘we perceive, judge, and act in the world’ Steger (2014: 25). Imaginaries then, can influence how we come to understand ourselves, our actions and their legitimacy. Selin (2008) talks about futures as being ‘immaterial real’—that even though futures produced (as stories) and traded (as promises and expectations) do not exist in material form, the process of their making grants them some sort of ontological status. From this perspective, we can think of ‘futures’ not just as stories or fictions but as performative and generative. Once articulated, visions, expectations and imaginaries of the future can shape attitudes in the present, frame debates and structure agendas by attracting the interest of various actors. For example, in innovation

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networks, groups of investors, regulators and users can start to cluster around particular visions of the future (Borup et al., 2006) and put resources into their creation. Thus, we begin to see mutually binding obligations and agendas being built around these visions and imaginaries, concrete steps which help bring them into being. Thinking of the imaginary as analytical device then provides us with a tool to help make sense of future-orientated discourse (Hudson, 2020). Questions this prompts with respect to (techno)sleep include, inter alia: . What does the coming together of sleep and technology represent? What promises or fears are articulated? How are users of sleep tech imagined? . What technosleep futures are built into these narratives? . What are these imaginaries doing and what epistemic value do they have? In offering a critical sweep of these technosleep futures, our analysis draws on a range of sources as empirical data. These include academic literature, film and TV, advertising materials and popular media articles to identify how, where and what sleep futures are being imagined. Following Williams et al. (2015, 2021) the claims we make are based on a preliminary scoping of these matters in the making; of a newly emerging problem space in society today.

Technosleep Imaginaries Even a cursory glance at these sources suggests the existence of multiple technosleep imaginaries. Of note is how, across all of these domains, discussions of sleep futures intertwine with imagined future capabilities of technologies. Consequently, sleep futures are entangled with visions of technology futures too. For example, there are discussions of how dream management technologies will infiltrate our sleep in coming years, how advances in drug delivery will enable us to learn while we sleep, how advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) will enable digital devices to learn more about our sleep patterns and propensities, providing us with more personalized and customized insights into our sleep, and how advances in virtual reality and robotics will impact on our sleep in various ways.

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Typically, this conflates what the devices we currently have available to us can do now and what they, or entirely new technologies, may possibly be able to do at some unknown point in the future. For example, AI powered devices which learn a user’s sleep pattern (see Rider, 2021) and provide them with personalized insights and recommendations to help them improve their sleep are central to sleep future narratives. Yet, we also hear how technologies are already becoming ‘more acquainted’ with our own sleep propensities and are ‘ready to make customized suggestions’ (Dialani, 2020). Thus, mixing up what technologies can do already, with promises of what they will be able to do in the future. This resonates with Meadows et al.’s (2020: 4) analysis of mental health chatbots being used in mental health recovery. As the authors write, there are ‘temporal ambiguities surrounding the ways in which AI is discussed; including a mix up of tenses between what AI could do and what AI actually does presently’. This temporal ambiguity has implications; complicating the role being claimed for AI in recovery while also complicating what recovery is. In what follows, we present four short key narratives embedded within different domains and temporal landscapes. First we outline three technoscientific imaginaries—(bio)medicalized, customized, optionalized— before turning our attention to how sleep features in imaginaries of posthuman futures that are circulating in popular media. While these imaginaries coexist and overlap, each highlights different aspects of technosleep futures. Following a discussion of these imaginaries we turn to discuss how inequalities in sleep are framed within these narratives (if at all).

Technoscientific Imaginaries The data we draw on in this section is a preliminary analysis of a corpus of peer reviewed and published scientific texts (1975–20221 ), together with a sample of online documents we collected via simple google searches using the terms ‘sleep and future’. This gave us a surprising rich sample of media and other articles written predominantly by journalists, tech industry insiders, futurists, scientists and medics.2 Our analysis of these documents generated three dominant technosleep imaginaries that are discussed in turn below.

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i. Biomedicalized sleep futures Found predominantly within peer reviewed and published scientific texts, these imaginaries are strongly linked to scientific research and medical practice. As can be seen in the examples in Box 7.1, early medicoscientific visions of technosleep futures emphasize how through advances in science and technology we will be able to evaluate and understand sleep better, unlocking the mysteries of sleep. This, it is imagined, will enable the medicoscientific community to better understand and monitor sleep need and deprivation in specific populations such as children, pilots, professional drivers, shift workers and cancer patients, for example. Future entanglements of sleep and technology, it is suggested, will enable scientists and clinicians to learn more about the impacts of sleep loss on health, how substances such as caffeine impact on sleep and alertness and enable the scientific community to establish sleep norms in specific populations. Authors also imagine advances in technology impacting on the future of medical education, leading to better trained practitioners, improved diagnostics and new scientific discoveries such as better understanding of the mechanisms of diseases and disorders like Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS), narcolepsy and sleep apnoea. Biomedicalized visions of the future of sleep appear to have accelerated from around 2015 (see Fig. 7.1). Around that time the American Association of Sleep Technologists were meeting to discuss how regulatory and economic pressures were changing the way sleep disorder patients were to be diagnosed and treated. In the USA, home testing started to be reimbursed by Medicare and an increasing number of private providers—as well as being recognized as an alternative for diagnosis by the National Institute of Health (Brooks & Trimble, 2014). The proliferation of consumer sleep devices led Kholsa et al. (2018: 878) to proclaim that: ‘In today’s reality of ever-changing technology, sleep practitioners should have a working knowledge of epistemology and methodology of these technologies, even if they are unfamiliar with the specific devices’.

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Box 7.1: Early examples of technosleep futures in scientific and medical texts 1998—[A look toward the future] There will be many changes in the sleep field in the next 5 to 10 years. These will include increments in our knowledge of the basic neurobiologic mechanisms driving sleep and the impact of sleep loss on general health. The technology used in the sleep laboratory will likely change as well, leading to a larger range of available tests and new ways to conduct standard ones. Finally, as the knowledge base in sleep increases, the expertise required to practice sleep medicine will rise, leading to a better-trained, more focused practitioner (White, 1998). 2007—[Technologies of sleep research] Progress in genomics has brought new insights in sleep regulation, the best example being the discovery of hypocretin/orexin deficiency as the cause of narcolepsy. Gene manipulation holds great promise for the future since it is possible not only to investigate the functions of different genes under normal conditions, but also to mimic human pathology in much greater detail (Deboer, 2007). 2011—[Narcolespy and orexins: an example of progress in sleep research] Sleep is a highly intricate and regulated state, and narcolepsy is a disorder that still remains as one of the unsolved mysteries in science. Nevertheless, advances and development of technology in neuroscience will provide us with the necessary tools to unravel the narcolepsy puzzle in the near future (De la Herrán-Arita et al., 2011).

A key aspect of this acceleration in discussion of the future of sleep within the medico-scientific literature is both a perceived ‘explosion’ of the consumer market for sleep tech and an expectation that this would continue to grow exponentially. For example, in their piece on the ‘future of sleep health’, Perez-Pozeulo et al. (2020: 1) state that: ‘there has been a significant expansion in the development and use of multi-modal sensors and technologies to monitor physical activity, sleep and circadian rhythms. These developments make accurate sleep monitoring at scale a possibility for the first time’.

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Fig. 7.1 An illustration of the acceleration in publications indexed by pubmed containing the words ‘Sleep’ and ‘Future’ 1–71, 2022

Box 7.2: Examples of how biomedical visions and imaginaries bring with them scientific validity and a sense of epistemic value 2018—[The emerging roles of wearable technologies in detection of arrhythmia] Limitations of wearable technologies include their accuracy and accessibility and the clinical implications of wearable-detected arrhythmias. Despite this, wearable technologies represent an important frontier in health evaluation. Future wearables will benefit from improved reliability and accuracy, collect additional health and fitness parameters, support management of chronic disease, and provide real-time connectivity and feedback that may supplant conventional medical monitoring. Wearables have the potential to become truly disruptive in our health care sector, with large segments of the population soon to have readily available health data that the physician must interpret (Cheung et al., 2018).

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2022: [How are Consumer Sleep Technology Data Being Used to Deliver Behavioral Sleep Medicine Interventions? A Systematic Review] The rapid growth of consumer sleep technology demonstrates the population’s interest in measuring sleep. However, the extent to which these devices can be used in the delivery of behavioral sleep interventions is currently unknown […] These studies demonstrate opportunities to utilize consumer sleep trackers in insomnia treatment and wellness programs, but most new and innovative interventions are in the early, feasibility stages. Future research is needed to determine how to leverage wearables to improve existing behavioral sleep treatments and determine how this technology can engage patients and reduce barriers to behavioral sleep medicine interventions (Glazer Baron et al., 2022).

These visions and imaginaries of technosleep futures bring with them scientific validity and a sense of epistemic value (Box 7.2). As we can see in these examples, the coming together of sleep and technology in the lab and the clinic is imagined as enabling researchers to work at the frontiers of sleep research and to improve medical monitoring and management of sleep disorders. This, in turn, links to calls for further research and more evidence on the accuracy and reliability of these new technologies, strengthening and mobilizing resources around particular research agendas and thus reinforcing the current trajectory of further technosleep relations. Much like in the scientific literature, we also find visions of biomedicalized sleep futures spilling over and recirculating in popular science and media texts. These are linked to medicoscientific imaginings of new technosleep relations that promise to lead us to better scientific and medical understandings, detection, diagnosis and treatment of disordered sleep. Within these imaginaries, there is the idea that a whole range of sleep problems (e.g. narcolepsy, insomnia, sleep apnoea, parasomnias, restless legs syndrome) are on the increase, along with our 24/7 lifestyles where the increasing blurring of work and homelife and increased stress are seen as driving an epidemic of sleep problems and sleep deprivation. In these imagined sleep futures, sleep technology is positioned as a way to resynchronize, normalize and optimize ‘natural sleep’ in various ways. This, in turn, relies on a particular view of natural sleep—one where an endogenous circadian clock is said to be ‘entrained’ by time cues, known as

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‘zeitgebers’ and is in keeping with the 24-hour day/night cycle (Dijk & Lazar, 2012). We see imaginings of how medical devices integrated with therapeutics will come together to allow us to make sleep disorders such as sleep apnoea ‘a thing of the past’ (Rider, 2021) and claims that ‘new discoveries will open the door to more effective and personalized treatments for sleep disorders and circadian misalignment’ (Lederle, 2019, online). Commentators speculate how ‘technology driven sleep management’ through devices that trigger the brain to follow natural sleep patterns or mimic brain patterns that help users fall asleep and stay asleep will ‘restore natural sleep cycles’ (Rider, 2021, online). For example, describing an app that tracks and measures sleep quality, a sponsored advert in the Wall Street Journal (2016, online) by United Polaris airline writes that ‘these reports can be used to help the general public have a deeper understanding of their own sleep habits and also to detect signs of disorders they may never have noticed on their own’. Porter (2020) meanwhile, tells us to expect an arms-race to happen between pharmaceutical and wearable sleep tech companies hoping to find the answer to the worldwide problem of poor sleep. Similarly, an article in the Washington Post entitled ‘7 reasons why the future of sleep could be wilder than your wildest dreams’ (Basulto, 2014, online) asks us to imagine: ‘…settling down for a brief night of sleep and donning a pair of smart pajamas [sic] that is instantly able to monitor your sleep patterns. These smart pajamas [sic] would be able to measure factors such as skin conductivity, blood pressure, heart rate and pulse – and then put all of these factors together to offer a custom medical diagnosis, all without a trip to the doctor’s office’. In these visions, technosleep is framed as providing the answers to poor sleep. What we might be seeing here is a biomedicalized sleep agenda where technosleep is considered a route to normalizing and optimizing hegemonic forms of ‘natural sleep’ (Wolf–Meyer, 2011). However, at the same time as experts are enthusing over future technological possibilities, others are also lamenting current capabilities and limits (Joy, 2019). A piece in Forbes (Medes-Roter, 2021, online) for example, reports a leading sleep expert saying: ‘Claims that sleep-monitoring wearables can aid [the diagnosis and treatment of] sleep disorders have yet to be validated in large-scale randomized control trials, especially with regard to debilitating health issues, like insomnia and comorbidity’. They are also warning of new ‘epidemics’ of the ‘chronorexic’ kind (Van den Bulck,

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2015), potential dangers of use of ‘gaming’ elements to motivate people in ‘non-game’ contexts (King et al., 2013), and how ‘sham’ feedback from wearable devices could influence daytime symptom reporting in individuals with insomnia, for example (Gavriloff et al., 2018). Thus, while some may resist further technological interventions in sleep, others promote (new) forms of technosleep as a way to preserve, protect and promote more ‘natural’ sleep, however problematic this recourse to the ‘natural’ might be. ii. Customized sleep futures Alongside the biomedicalized visions of technosleep leading to the normalization of disordered or disrupted sleep, we find imaginaries of customized technosleep futures. Customization is indeed implicated in contemporary processes of biomedicalization, which according to Clarke et al. (2010) are marked by the increasing technoscientific nature of medicine, an intensified focus on maintaining health rather than just treating illness, including at-risk susceptibilities, and the associated shifts from control and normalization to customization and enhancement of our bodies and minds. In focusing on processes of customization here, we acknowledge the overlap with contemporary biomedicine and thus processes of biomedicalization. However, demarcating customization from biomedicalization in this instance has analytical value, in that it directs our attention more specifically to the ways in which technosleep is being positioned as a way for people to change, control and configure their own sleep patterns and practices, beyond the confines of the clinic. As Williams and colleagues (2013: 40) suggest, there are various ways in which people can and do use technologies to ‘customise their sleep patterns and practices to fit around the escalating temporal demands of daily life’. Where ‘biomedicalized’ imaginaries were dominant within the scientific and medical domain, we found imaginaries of customized sleep circulating within media and other articles written predominantly by journalists, tech industry insiders and futurists. These tended to provide technoprogressive visions of the future, centring on how healthy people will come to use different technologies in their everyday lives, beyond the clinical and medical sphere, to transform their sleep patterns and practices in ways that are individualized, designed, customized and optimized

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for them. For example, articles suggest that in the future, smart lighting, webs of AI powered smart textiles connected by electro responsive fabrics and devices will work together to optimize our sleep environment in terms of light, noise, temperature and even scent, tracking our sleep patterns and stages through sensors and wearables. As well as being used for dream advertising, dream management systems and implants will guide us towards ‘the right dreams’, prevent nightmares and provide overnight therapy for things such as addition (Pomeroy, 2022). Drugs and other devices will allow us to amplify learning during sleep and augment our creativity (Bullerdick, 2016). Smart sleep cycle alarms will wake us up at our most optimal point in our sleep cycles to feel refreshed and robots will be ready to respond to our individual needs (Box 7.3). Box 7.3: Futurologists imagine the future of sleep 2030–2050 Almost any surface or fabric in the room will be capable of electronic enhancement whether it is scent production, monitoring our health or acting as a visual display or speaker. By monitoring guests unobtrusively throughout the night, the room will protect its occupiers from disturbance using anti-noise and ambient audio. An adaptive mattress and electronic fabrics will optimise guests rest period whilst the dream management system will ensure guests have the right dreams and wake feeling refreshed at the best possible time—when their sleep cycle is completed […] Hotels will use toys and robots to communicate with guests. A cuddly web linked voice recognition teddy bear will be able to act on behalf of hotel staff by chatting to guests, providing a cuddly wake-up call or just wander around the hotel being cute. (Pearson, 2011, The Future of sleep in hotel rooms in 2035). Ultimately, the new sleep will come down to “personalized optimization,” meaning it will be customized to an individual’s specific biology and brain functioning and be utilized for more than just rest. Perhaps sleep will be used to heal emotional and physical wounds, to earn a diploma or even to learn a new language. Or maybe we’ll become accustomed to taking “braincations,” ones where our dreams go beyond the wildest expectations of virtual reality enthusiasts (Futurist Jack Uldrich imagines sleep in 2050 in an interview for Insider magazine, 2016).

In a piece titled ‘Why Technology is the Future of Sleep’ for Forbes Magazine, Franceschetti (2018, online) writes ‘leveraging technology to optimize and enhance sleep will allow us to finally achieve maximum

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recovery and rest’. Tempur and Raconteur’s ‘The science of sleep’ report (2016, online) argues that the British are struggling to get enough sleep—possibly because of our love of technology—but the savour is most likely to be technology itself. As they argue, ‘the future of sleep may not be a return to the bi-model days of yore. It may instead be the one where slumber can be designed, improved and controlled’. In these visions of the future, getting ‘good sleep’ is often implicated with improving health; sleep quality is linked to cognitive performance and productivity, sleep is valued and positioned an essential aspect of our overall well-being. There is still the sense that people will want to use technology to improve and optimize their sleep patterns and practices in a normative sense, so helping them to sleep better at night so they can be more productive in the daytime, and to improve learning. As one article notes, ‘…high-powered Silicon Valley CEOs have devoted themselves to biohacking their own sleep habits to achieve optimum performance’ (Matthews, 2018, online). Individual choice and difference are also placed at the heart of these narratives. We see this alluded to in a ScienceFocus (McNamara, 2022, online) article: ‘but if you struggle to drift off, it can be a daunting task… Whether you’re in need of a soothing voice to put you to sleep, or bedding that regulates your body temperature, our round up of the best sleep gadgets has something for every kind of sleeper’. This individualizing of sleep can be situated alongside a vision and understanding of technologies as bounded objects outside of the social relationships, networks and systems that constitute them. What is left is an emphasis on the democratizing potential of technology and the dream of putting information into the hands of everyone who needs it (Peters, 2017). Notwithstanding this, these visions also provide space for alternative imaginaries to emerge where people may use technology to sleep in ways that go against the norm, to both sleep more (hypersleep), sleep less and sleep differently to the normative patterns we are accustomed to. The idea that we may be able to use sleep ‘for more than just rest’ also fits here—for healing, to learn new skills and for lucid dreaming (Box 7.3). iii. From optimized to optionalized sleep?

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Alongside visions of biomedicalized and customized sleep futures, we also see imaginaries centred around the idea that future scientific and technological advancements will render the need to sleep increasingly optional, and perhaps even obsolete. For example, Fast Company (Byrne, 2015) ask whether tools can help us live on less sleep. Other articles depict how particular groups of people—typically those ‘with money and time’ (O’Neil, 2016, online) will be able to take advantage of advancements in sleep technology in their quest to sleep less. These individuals, it suggests, will be able to radically cut down the amount of sleep they need, by using technologies including pharmaceuticals like modafinil and their next generation counterparts, genetic engineering and brain stimulation technologies to promote alert wakefulness and enhance their cognitive performance. As Penny Lewis, a leading scholar in this area writes in 2015: ‘the new science of Sleep Engineering offers ways by which we can optimize the sleep we get so that it has the maximal positive impact in the minimal time. Thus, we can deepen slow-wave sleep and increase its benefit to memory and cognition, and we can also trigger the replay of target memories in order to enhance their consolidation and the extent to which emotions are processed. Maybe this is the start of new technology that can at least shorten and optimise our sleep?’ (2015: 216) [emphasis added]. Taking arguments introduced in Chapter 2 even further, we hear how, in the next 20 years, military leaders will unlock sleep’s secrets. That soldiers of the future will be able to get by on two hours of sleep using a combination of devices and chemicals and even that a ‘sleepless elite’, will emerge—people who can sleep only a few hours each night without feeling cranky or fatigued. As Jack Uldrich suggests, ‘whilst the majority of the population will continue to sleep much the way it always has, a small percentage with money and daring will experience optimization to the max’ (Bullerdick, 2016, online). Although it remains unclear who those with ‘money and daring’ might be in the optionalized sleep futures imagined by Vice (O’Neil, 2016) or who will make up the ‘sleepless elite’, imaginaries of optionalized sleep futures—then—tend to align with the idea of capitalist notions that less sleep equates to greater economic productivity, departing from the biomedicalized narrative that better sleep leads to better health.

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Posthuman Imaginaries Next, we turn our attention to how technosleep features in more general imaginaries of posthuman futures circulating in popular culture. Posthumanism as a critique of anthropocentrism, can provide a useful theoretical lens to explore questions around how our convergence with technology, with the non-human, impacts on assumptions around identity and the integrity and dignity of the human body. Transhumanism on the other hand, is more anthropocentric in its focus and can be understood, according to Scott (2013) as the philosophy and practice of human improvement, or enhancement through technoscience. Transhumanism then, encapsulates efforts to bypass human nature, to strive for human perfectibility through technoscience. The ultimate goal of transhumanism, according to Le Devedec (2018) is transcendence—where technoscience will enable us to shed the constraints of our biological bodies to become new, evolved, superior beings. Images of both trans and post humans have long been depicted in science fiction, fantasy and horror—as superheroes and monsters, as both masters and slaves. Some may argue these figures dominate cultural representations of the future. Recent sci-fi fantasies, such as Upload (2019– 2022, Amazon Prime), Transcendence (2014 film), Altered Carbon (2014, Netflix) and Charlie Brooker’s dystopian series ‘Black Mirror’ (2011–2019, Netflix) present us with a variety of trans and post human beings, leaving us to grapple with various social and ethical issues surrounding these transformations in the process. In each of these texts, we see posthuman imaginaries of a future world where Ray Kurtzweil’s vision of the singularity—the coming together of humans and technology—has come to pass. Together, these stories, images and understandings craft particular versions of the future, and the future (post/trans) humans that inhabit them. Such imaginaries present us with a cybernetic definition of life (Hayles, 1999), where consciousness and personhood are located in the brain and can be isolated, extracted and reproduced in the virtual world, exuding the technocentric promise of not just transcendence from our flawed human bodies, but rebirth in the digital world leading to a digital immortality of sorts. What then of sleep in these trans and posthuman imaginings? If scientific understandings of sleep locate sleep within our brains, as part of our unconscious selves, is it imagined that sleep will travel with us and remain a part of us as we transform and transcend our biological bodies in these

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technologized futures? Or perhaps sleep transforms into something more subversive, a site of resistance against the ever-increasing technologization of our lives and ways of living? The answer to these questions is not straightforward. In their 2008 essay ‘why I want to be posthuman when I grow up’, philosopher Nick Bostrom suggests that in becoming posthuman we should shed our humanist ideas and conceptions of what our bodies ought to do, including about sleep. He writes: ‘If she became a posthuman who did not need to sleep, she would no longer have any reason so [sic] sleep. And the fact that she currently has a reason to sleep is not a reason for her not to become a sleepless posthuman’ (Bostrom, 2008: 67). Sleep however is not much discussed or debated within the transhumanist literature to date. Perhaps this is because it is regarded a vital necessity for our health, well-being and longevity, past, present and future; perhaps because dreams are valued; perhaps because it underwrites all other transhumanist dreams of upgraded futures; or perhaps because it frustrates these very dreams placing corporeal limits upon them. That transhumanist views on this dormant matter are complex and varied is clear nevertheless, with views ranging from those who think ‘sleeping is probably the most wasteful thing all humans do’ and therefore wish to ‘cure the disease of sleeping’ (Istvan, 2016) to those who declare they ‘ain’t givin’ up on sleep’ (Dvorsky, 2006) given the psychological and emotional as well physical costs involved in trying to do so. In the following section we further highlight these complexities through a discussion of how sleep is depicted in two popular TV shows— the comedy series UPLOAD! (Amazon Prime, 2020–2022) and the dystopian thriller Black Mirror (2011–2019, Netflix). In these imaginaries we see how sleep is replicated in the digital world as a signal of normality and where its absence signifies a lack of humanity. i. Rebirth, Reproduction and Replica UPLOAD, a sci-fi comedy set in 2033, imagines a near future where visions of complete human–technology transcendence is possible—the human mind can be uploaded and reproduced in digital form after biological death—a digital rebirth of sorts. The show’s protagonist is 27-year-old Nathan Brown, a white, heterosexual, affluent, coder who is uploaded to one of many virtual afterlife worlds, LakeView, following

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his untimely death, a probable murder. He is guided by his ‘angel’ Nora, a woman of colour who is a ‘living customer service rep’, connecting to the virtual world Nathan finds himself in and appearing as an avatar of her physical self. Nora attends to Nathan’s every request but can also access Nathan’s digital code and manipulate his digital appearance, his memory and put him to sleep. In one of our first encounters with the digital afterlife as viewers, we see Nathan lying in a large king-size bed in a luxurious bedroom which we are told is modelled on the grand Victorian hotels of America and Canada. Feeling overwhelmed by his death and rebirth into the digital afterlife, Nora tells Nathan to lie down and get some rest. He gets into bed and hugs a large pillow, Nora ‘puts him to sleep’ and wraps a tartan fleece around him. When he wakes up on ‘day 2’ of his digital afterlife he is lying in bed, a fire roaring in the corner of the room, bright morning sun streaming in through the window. He gets out of bed, takes a shower and goes to make a coffee. It might seem curious to us that sleep is a taken-for-granted aspect of the digital afterlife, a virtual world that has been built to mirror the structures, normative rhythms and routines of the lives we live today, including going to bed at night and sleeping. Later we are given the explanation that Uploads have to ‘believe it’s real’ to fully assimilate. The first Uploads, we are told, ‘didn’t even have eyelids and went psychotic within a week’. Uploads need to be asleep for technology updates to stop their code corrupting. Sleep is also positioned as a site of vulnerability for the Uploads, rendering them susceptible to attacks—in one episode Nora finds someone has altered Nathan’s code while he was sleeping to delete some of his memory files. Black Mirror on the other hand, presents us with a much darker and dystopian view of our posthuman futures and the posthuman, transhuman and cyborg beings that may come to inhabit them. These imagined futures are often racialized, classed and gendered—in these stories it is typically women, those less well-off and people of colour who find themselves being dominated, exploited and abused. While sleep does not overtly feature in any of these storylines, its absence can be an integral part of what makes these imagined posthuman futures so sinister. In the Episode ‘White Christmas’ (Season 2 Episode 2) we meet Greta, a white, affluent woman who undergoes a procedure to create a digital clone of her mind which is transferred into a piece of technology. The digital clone—or ‘cookie’ as it is referred to in the show—is portrayed as a fully sentient being who cannot believe that she is not ‘the real’

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Greta. Trapped in a technological existence, she has no physical needs and is unable to sleep. This is portrayed as a form of torture for the cloned Greta, her mind is constantly on, yet she has nothing to stimulate it. This eventually leads to the digital clone bending to the will of her human master—the embodied Greta—becoming her servant. Similarly, in the Episode ‘Black Museum’ (Season 4, Episode 6) we meet the Museum’s star exhibit Clayton, a sentient hologram. Clayton was a man of colour, who we find out was wrongly convicted of murder and convinced to sell his consciousness prior to his execution on death row as a way to provide financially for his family. Hologrammatic Clayton is trapped in a state of perpetual consciousness, repetitively reliving the pain of his execution for the rest of eternity. In the episode ‘Be Right Back’ (Episode 1 Season 2) we meet a young couple in love, Martha and Ash. When Ash is killed in a car accident, Martha is given the chance to interact with an AI-powered recreation of Ash’s personality generated from everything he ever did, said or looked at on social media. Although fictitious, the AI technology featured in the storyline does have some real-life counterparts—including chatbots that are being designed to mimic dead loved ones (Brown, 2021). At first Ash is just a voice, but soon after a body arrives that can walk, talk and have sex with Martha. However, the android Ash can only pretend to eat and does not need to sleep. His actions, memories and responses are only partial reflections of who the ‘real’ Ash was. At first android Ash lies next to Martha at night as she sleeps, and she is comforted by the physical presence. However, she quickly begins to feel uneasy at having this less than perfect replica, an approximation of the real Ash, lying by her side pretending to sleep and tells him to leave. In the final scene of the episode, we see android Ash sitting awake and staring forward in the attic, discarded among other old memories, photographs and childhood toys. These future imaginaries are fuelled by entertainment, excitement and anxiety, and although detached from the current state of technological possibility, they project technological advancements that could seem plausible in the not-too-distant future. While sleep is not necessary for the posthuman, except for perhaps preventing corruption of code during hardware updates, we find that sleep, along with other aspects of our contemporary lives, is often reproduced in these posthuman imaginaries. On the one hand, it is imagined in its current hegemonic form as a site of

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‘downtime’ and for ‘upgrading’ where the digital versions of ourselves can be restored, replenished, renewed. Imagining the digital realm as ‘real’ is achieved by mirroring the normative rhythms, routines and structures of everyday life. Hegemonic forms of sleep are present as a marker of normality and humanity, where the absence of sleep in the posthuman is construed as a form of torture, or a subtle indication that these future posthuman beings are worth less than their embodied human counterparts. We can see therefore how, much like in earlier science fiction stories (Chapter 6), sleep remains a critical aspect of our vitality, firmly attached to our biological bodies as a critical anchor of our corporality and serves as a reminder of the limits and constraints of our humanity.

Inequalities and Inequities The above discussion allows us to heuristically summarize some of the multiple and overlapping ways in which technosleep futures are being imagined in our data as (i) Biomedicalized (ii) Customized (iii) Optionalized (iv) Posthuman. What remains are questions regardingwhose interests these technosleep imaginaries serve, who wins and who loses out? For Hale and Hale (2009), sleep is a matter of social justice; in part because decisions which characterize sleep are not ‘voluntary’ and are therefore significantly different from those regarding other health behaviours; and an individual’s sleep is always tied to aspects of their life circumstances. As Billings et al., (2021: 1232) write, ‘sleep heath disparities are impacted by socioeconomic status, racism, discrimination, neighborhood segregation, geography, social patterns, and access to health care as well as by cultural beliefs, necessitating a cultural appropriateness component in any intervention devised for reducing sleep health disparities’. It becomes important to ask how inequalities are being imagined in technosleep futures for the very reason that these futures can themselves generate, define and restrict a range of possibilities. i. Slain inequalities?

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Sleep inequalities and inequities have an absent/presence in our data, often being hinted at without being fully addressed. Further, inequalities are multiple within these particular domains. This complex situation where inequalities are both absent/present and multiple seems to result from several assumptions operating with these futures. First, there is a blurring of temporalities. For example, an article in Weslyen University Magazine (Curiel, 2021, online) addresses these issues as a current concern and one where we might ‘take action in the present and have faith it grows and influences in ways you couldn’t envision’. Here, we may see examples of technology being depicted as inequality’s slayer as technology becomes available to all who need it in the future. Slain inequalities includes an increased individualized view of sleep, and tends to take a technoprogressive stance and positive commitment to the democratizing impact of technology. ii. Maintained inequalities Adding to the idea that inequalities are both absent/present and multiple in these futures, there is the fact that inequalities already exist; and these are already seen (in part) as to do with problems in data collection, such people inaccurately reporting their sleep—where ‘the degree of inaccuracy may vary among racial and ethnic groups’ (Suni, 2022, online). Technology can therefore be situated as not necessarily exacerbating or causing the current problem, but as reproducing existing systems of domination and discrimination as depicted in several of the Black Mirror storylines. Maintained inequalities appear to rest on an idea that some things are just what they are and neither exacerbated nor helped by technology. Although it remains unclear who is purchasing and using sleep monitoring and enhancement technologies, despite numerous market analysis reports, there are some clues from studies which have analysed the big data captured by some of these technologies. For example, Rezaei and Grandner (2021) analysed sleep data from 163,524 active Fitbit users; 67% of whom were female and 45% were aged 30 to 49 years old. Somewhat similarly, Robbins et al. (2020) examined sleep duration and quality using 2,161,067 nights of data captured from 2015 to 2018 by Sleep Cycle. The average age of the sample was 31 years (SD 10.6). Here

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women represented 46.43% of the sample and men represented 53.57%. Yet, even with big data sets like this we learn little about other factors such as ethnicity, disability, and social class. Thus, the data predictions about hegemonic sleep patterns and practices, the tools being developed to detect disease and disorder and calculate risk of illness and accidents are based on datasets potentially biased towards particular populations. The futures envisaged above then, could rely on an individualized view of the sleeper that is already racialized, gendered and classed. This in turn gives rise to questions surrounding use, accessibility, affordability and legibility. The association of sleep problems with age may lead to an inverse digital divide; with those most likely to benefit least likely or able to engage. On the other hand, we may question what constitutes the wrong side of the digital divide; with the plaintiffs in Brickman et al. v. Fitbit Inc., for example, arguing that Fitbit over-reports sleep and that this can cause health consequences to the user especially over the long term. We might also ask whether and how gender differences are being imagined, and how the night-time economy is being re-imagined—and with what impact. iii. Widened inequalities Next, we consider how some inequalities may be widened. This seems pertinent in relation to social class. For instance, the article in Vice (O’Neil, 2016) mentioned earlier considers a future where wealthy people have a completely different biological experience to those less financially secure. As O’Neil writes, ‘some experts believe that sleep reduction gadgets will intensify the planet’s income inequality problem, because only wealthy people will be able to afford them and can spend those extra waking hours working, making the rich even richer (2016, online)’. There is also the challenge of competing with an increasingly automated workforce. In this version of the future, it is imagined that the number of jobs will decline and those who don’t have to sleep as much will have a huge advantage. Somewhat, similar, when interviewed for Business Insider (2016) futurist Jack Uldrich suggests that, while the majority of the population will continue to sleep much the way it always has, only a small percentage—those he describes as ‘with money and daring’— will ‘experience optimization to the max’. It is likely, we are told, that these people will become more productive, energetic, creative and will

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have a competitive edge in life. Thus, it is imagined that there is potential for socioeconomic biases in access to technosleep for some groups, potentially leading to technologically driven winners and losers. This is a common trope in science fiction and something which Coveney et al. (2019) also found in their analysis of peoples’ views of modafinil use for customizing sleep and enhancing cognition. A similar picture arises in more biomedicalized imaginaries. Academic papers alert us to the fact that ‘issues regarding bias and health disparities require continued evaluation and mitigation to avoid scaling inequities’ (Bandyopadhyay & Goldstein, 2022). There are also key issues raised about sleep futures and race. As discussed in Chapter 3, Dolata et al. (2021) note there is growing concern with the idea of ‘algorithmic fairness’ and with ‘technological solutions that prevent systematic harm (or benefits) to different subgroups in automated decision-making’. In their paper on the past, present and future of multisensory wearable technology to monitor sleep and circadian rhythms, Lujan and colleagues (2021) point to current variability in the accuracy of sensors across different types of skin. Noting debate and methodological issues, the authors suggest that: ‘this topic warrants further consideration and devices should be validated amongst diverse populations. This is especially important given the growing literature addressing sleep health disparities’ (Lujan et al., 2021: 14). For some researchers, algorithmic fairness is a technical phenomenon and solutions need to be found within technology. For others, it is a symptom of discrimination in society. For Dolata et al. (2021: 755) ‘unfairness in algorithmic decision making is not solely a technical phenomenon: it has societal, organization, and technical sources, is reinforced by both social and technical structures, and—as we argue—should be approached from a sociotechnical perspective’. Complexities surrounding neoliberal values such as ‘market liberalism’ and ‘informed consumers’—and the continued individualizing of sleep—may mean that even algorithmic fairness may prioritize some groups over others (Rich et al., 2019). What remains unspoken, as Wolf-Meyer (2015) so aptly reminds us, is how ‘white bodies […] exemplify social and cultural norms of biology and behaviour. Fundamental to (U.S.) medical ideas of normativity is that the white heteronormative subject is the standard against which disorderly and nonwhite subjects are to be judged’. As he argues, ‘race is abstracted into data and materialised through interpretation and practice’ and therefore these racialized understandings of [sleep/ing/less]

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bodies and behaviours influences how ‘individuals come to desire particular modes of being in the world and subject themselves to institutional demands and interventions to be normal’ (Wolf-Meyer, 2015: 456). This points towards a future where current inequalities in sleep are exacerbated; largely through who has access to technosleep and sleep quality. If the consumer sleep technologies referenced and emphasized in the above documents are set to empower ‘those with sleep difficulties with objective data to better understand their sleep problem and provide physician reports to catalyze patient/provider interactions to address these sleep issues’ (Watson et al., 2019: 159) they are only further empowering those who already have opportunities, control over life projects and optimal sleep durations and better quality sleep (Hale & Hale, 2009). iv. Absent voices? We may also consider concerns around sleep and disability here, which are largely absent from the future imaginaries we have discussed. In his article ‘Sleeping while disabled, disabled while sleeping’ Benjamin Reiss (2016) notes the numerous ways in which ‘abnormal’ sleep patterns can intersect with disability. Lived experiences of chronic illness and disability sit in juxtaposition to not only transhumanist visions of perfectible bodies, or indeed their transcendence, but also biomedicalized and bioconservative visions of the disordered or ill body as broken yet fixable through technoscience. Through our contemporary obsessions with work and productivity, where subjectivity is linked to neoliberal imperatives of being autonomous and economically independent, sleep becomes depicted as an unproductive and wasteful state. Not being able to keep up, not being able to keep going renders those bodies as deficient (Murray, 2020). However, the concept of ‘crip time’ from within critical disability studies offers a critique of normative understandings of bodily rhythms and pushes us to challenge these taken-for-granted temporalities and societal expectations (White, 2022). Reading technosleep through a disability lens, we might then reconceptualize the sleeping body as a site of resistance to these popular narratives of the productive, optimized superhuman who uses technology to customize their body for maximum efficiency and productivity in the 24/7 society. We might also attempt to reimagine how technosleep as a feature of (disabled) bodies can enhance

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their potential in non-normative ways that fall outside of capitalist notions of productivity. v. New inequalities? Views of inequalities are also bound up within assumptions about sleep and technology which are operating within these futures. SummersBremmer (2008), for example, suggests that there is a link between insomnia and the capitalist anxieties which arose as time became secularized and individuals became increasingly responsible for their use of it. Popular articles on the ‘future of sleep’ also alert us to possibilities for other forms of new inequalities. For example, those who try to approximate the benefits of technological promissory too early may inadvertently harm their sleep. In a blog on the ‘future of sleep’ Taylor (2022, online), describes how ‘experts in emerging technology predict that within 20 years, we’ll be developing devices and chemicals that can actually help us function on less sleep. In other words, it will literally give us more hours in the day—something we’ve all wished for at some point’. Taylor also identifies that—rather than wait for technology ‘to catch up’— polyphasic sleepers are already training themselves for shorter intervals of sleep. However, this practice is considered potentially harmful—while ‘that might not be the case with future technologies designed to allow us to function on less sleep’.

Conclusions: The Future of Technosleep Futures? Within this chapter we have suggested the presence of a series of technosleep futures: (i) Biomedicalized (ii) Customized (iii) Optionalized (iv) Posthuman. Whatever version or versions of the future are being discussed; it is clear to see that sleep is constructed as being problematic in the twenty-first century. We either cannot get enough, want less, or want better quality sleep. Furthermore, it is positioned as something that is inherently biological, located in individual bodies and brains rather than something that is social and relational. It is imagined that through tinkering with our biology we can transform sleep from the inside out, we can use technology to control and manipulate sleep to various ends. We can think of ‘futures’ not just as fictions but as performative, once articulated visions and imaginaries of the future can shape attitudes in the

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present, frame debates and structure agendas. For Tutton (2017) what makes the future so ‘wicked’—‘so difficult and pernicious’—is that it is an ‘entanglement of matter and meaning’. In looking at these ‘contested futures’ we are left to grapple with a high degree of uncertainty and complexity as these futures, as ‘objects of contestation’ (Selin, 2008), become embedded in various ways within our current sociotechnical systems and their associated values, norms and meanings. One thing we can do is continue to ask whose ideals, values and interests are shaping these sleep futures in the making? And whose values, norms, experiences are being obscured or silenced? Who wins and who loses out? Much of this currently remains unresolved. We have pointed to how inequalities operate in complex ways within these futures—being both absent/present and multiple in form. Slain inequalities include an increased individualized view of sleep and a positive commitment to the democratizing impact of technology. Widened inequalities involves a vision where access to technologies is uneven for some groups. This points towards a future where current inequalities in sleep are exacerbated; largely through who has access to sleep quality. Maintained inequalities appear to rest on an idea that some things are just what they are and neither exacerbated nor helped by technology. New inequalities emphasize the risks of attempting to approximate the promissory benefit of technology but without it. Following Rowland and Spaniol’s (2015) recent work on future possibilities, we can also ask whether we are seeing the (i) the future as singular and as inevitable; (ii) the future as singular and as malleable (iii) the future as plural; and/or (iv) the future as plural and singular simultaneously. This prompts us to consider whether the futures noted above are qualitatively, and sufficiently, distinct—and therefore plural, futures—or whether they merge into a singular future where all things coexist. The latter is a distinct possibility and, despite contradictions and contestations, technosleep may be offering a vision of the future which is—at one and the same time—biomedicalized, customized, optionalized and posthuman. Similarly, inequalities become simultaneously slain, maintained, widened and increased. While it may be argued that these things currently coexist, a key difference in this technofuture relates to how they coexist. Values, epistemologies and norms alter and multiply—in turn relating to altered forms and practices. This also suggests a technosleep future defined by neo-tribes; with people belonging to different groups and shifting effortless between them. To adapt Maffesoli (1996: 76), as new forms of sleep sociality arise, it becomes less a question of belonging to a group, norm of form than of seamlessly switching from one to another.

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Notes 1. We conducted a PubMed search in June 2022 using the key words ‘Sleep + Future + Technology’ which gave 1263 results spanning 1979–2022. We selected a sub-set of these articles (n = 75) spanning the entire timeframe thematically analysing future orientated statements found in the abstracts of these texts to gain an impression of the medicoscientific imaginaries being articulated. 2. We analysed 25 of these texts thematically, pulling out future orientated statements, such as scripts of particular roles to be played by different actors, about sleep and technology relationships, and about promises and fears about things that may change in these visions for the future.

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CHAPTER 8

Conclusions: Technosleep, Frontiers, Fictions and Futures

It is somewhat misleading perhaps to call this chapter ‘conclusions’ given the largely open-ended nature of the very issues we discuss here in closing. Such is the fate, the fortunes, the frontiers, the futures we have sought to chart in this book with these technosleep matters in mind. Matters indeed on further investigation that raise as many questions as they answer. Be that as it may, we have sought to trace the ongoing entanglements between sleep and technology in the twenty-first century and, in so doing, to contribute to debates about the future—or futures—of sleep. What we have called ‘technosleep’ is a coming together of sleep and technology in many different ways, forms and fashions in a late modern world where pharmaceuticals, neuro-enhancements, wearable technologies and the like all bring these technologies into ever more intimate proximity with human slumber and where science fiction writers have imagined still more strange and disturbing conjunctions between sleepers and machines. ‘Technosleep’ as we have engaged with it in this study is not a singular or monolithic entity but a complex, emerging set of relationships—between human somnolence and its technologized conditions and environments— a process by which sleep is induced, restricted, measured, captured, recorded, optimized and customized in countless ways. We have argued that technosleep has an empirical existence in phenomena from digital sleep tracking devices to EEG headbands and CPAP masks and machines but also an emergent existence in the form of a new set of possibilities © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 C. Coveney et al., Technosleep, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30599-3_8

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that become imaginable for sleep as it becomes entangled with state-ofthe-art technologies of many different kinds, within and beyond the lab and the clinic. While technosleep in some ways is far from new or novel here on these counts, with its own history indeed, our focus in the main has been on a new phase in this unfolding storyline through the advent of new developments and dynamics in these relations, including new technologies, new technosleep assemblages or configurations, newly emerging norms and forms of slumber and new futures in the making. The ongoing emergence of technosleep, we have argued, has implications for how we come to know, act upon and do, if not undo, sleep as well as the values we accord this slumber of ours. What is more, in addition to the already-thorny question of what is sleep exactly, it obliges us to ask the supplementary question: what will sleep be or become in the future? Our strategy here, on these ontological counts, has been to keep what sleep is an open question throughout the book rather than foreclose it in any way. What sleep is after all, let alone what ‘normal’, ‘good’ or ‘bad’ sleep is, is a far from settled matter. Nor, as we have argued throughout the book and as the very notion of technosleep suggests, is it ever possible to speak of sleep as anything other than an always already entangled matter. Never just sleep, in other words, in some pure, pristine form or fashion. Hence our emphasis on the multiple things, both biological and social, material and cultural, human and non-human, that together make up sleep at any one moment in time, and the multiple contexts within which it is embedded and enacted—from the lab to the home, the clinic to the workplace, the care home to the sports track, the battlefield to the space shuttle. Technosleep in these ways then troubles, rather than forecloses ontological matters such that what ‘sleep’ is becomes an increasingly open question of an interdisciplinary kind. To the extent furthermore that this emphasis on assembling or making sleep opens up productive new areas and avenues of inquiry in the social sciences, arts and humanities regarding sleep not simply qua ‘process’ but sleep qua ‘object’ too, albeit a fragile, unstable one, then this is to be welcomed going forward in future. There is also very clearly more than one way of telling this technosleep story. On the one hand, we could say that modern technology provides a great leap forward in our relationship with sleep. It is thanks to modern technology and the landmark achievements of twentieth-century sleep scientists that we are closer than ever to knowing what sleep is,

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unlocking its puzzles and mysteries. Technology enables us to ‘see’ sleep, to monitor it, record it and measure it—to maximize its potential and to fix it when it goes wrong. To oversimplify slightly we could say that if the twentieth century was the age of the sleep lab (a centralized space for monitoring and knowing sleep), the twenty-first century witnesses a dispersion of those practices into any bedroom where sleepers are finetuning their sleep with state-of-the-art drugs or measuring their sleep with wearable tech. A state that might have once seemed enigmatic, uncontrollable and frustratingly opaque may now, at long last, thanks to technology, becomes increasingly susceptible of control, improvement, customization and optimization in line with individual and/or collective needs and preferences. But, as we have seen, there is an altogether less optimistic if not dystopian way of telling this story. It seems intuitively persuasive, to many commentators, that modern technology—electric light, smartphones and unsleeping digital environments—is disastrously bad for our sleep, and that every shiny new technological innovation represents, if not another nail in sleep’s coffin, then another phase in our progressive alienation or estrangement from slumber. Even technologies that are supposedly friendly to sleep, on this logic, are suspect because their ambition is to optimize sleep in the name of performance or efficiency and/or to harvest the intimate privacy of sleep as lucrative data whose ownership is transferred to corporations. Technosleep, in other words, brings what might be termed the ‘unsleepingness’ of the system into the bedroom and converts private slumber into corporate profit. Our aim in this book therefore has been to acknowledge the compelling elements in both stories without being drawn into a partisan commitment either to technophile futuristic optimism or to technophobic polemic. One reason that technophobia and technophilia are inadequate is that they foreclose all too quickly the question of which technology and whose sleep we are talking about. Different technologies are available to different sleepers and deployed in different ways. Differences of age, race, gender, social class and disability, meanwhile, preclude any easy generalizations about technosleep as a universal experience. One of the purposes of this book has been to make a case for a more circumspect and discerning approach to the question of sleep in the era of technocapitalism. Rather than saying in a hastily polemical way that ‘technology is ruining our sleep’ we wanted to ask: what technologies? And who, exactly, are ‘we’? The technologies of sleep and their purposes are many and varied; so too are our potential relations with those technologies (we can use them and

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be used by them, hack them and repurpose them); and so too are the individuals and groups. Sweeping statements about, for example, the effect of social networking on sleep don’t apply to, for example, the hundreds of millions of people who don’t own a smartphone and have never been online. The key socioeconomic context for technosleep, we have argued is contemporary capitalism and its neoliberal ideologies and practices. Contemporary capitalism qua technocapitalism, that is to say, whereby sleep is sold back to us in the form of new gadgets and apps and in which our own sleep is optimized in the name of productivity and efficiency as the condition of possibility for technosleep—which is not to say that sleepers are always perfectly aligned with the imperatives of neoliberalism or seamlessly synchronized with their apps and sleep trackers. If there is something cyborg-like in the late modern sleeper as a figure whose sleep happens at and is conditioned by the interface between the organic and the mechanical, this is not to say that they sleep in robotic obedience to the norms and regimes of neoliberalism. Technosleep indeed is often at its most revealing when it goes wrong, or when its lived reality is vexingly at odds with the beguiling promises with which it is marketed. ‘What gets measured gets done’ is a familiar mantra in the contexts of contemporary management-speak and self-improvement, and the practice of self-improvement through self-measurement may apply to, for example, someone who uses a pedometer to ensure that they rack up at least 10,000 steps per day. However, if the same person is struggling to achieve eight hours’ sleep per night, then sleep tracking technology isn’t necessarily an overnight solution to their problem. It seems unlikely that the practice of diligently measuring sleep translates reliably into more sleep or better sleep—and there are good reasons for supposing the reverse might well be the case. It might be objected that even if it does not help us do sleep better, technosleep at the very least helps us know sleep better, but even here there are problems. Sleep tracking technology promises, rightly or wrongly, that it can peer into an otherwise obscure and mysterious region of human experience, to shed light on the darkness of sleep. As we have seen, however, the ‘trackability’ of sleep is by no means a given. Sleep tracking technology may or may not be accurate in what it tells us about sleep, and it may or may not be useful or reliable in terms of the norms that it asks us to internalize or work towards. The ‘data gaze’ or ‘technogaze’ in these contexts is by no means all-seeing. Given the tribulations

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and frustrations of many users of these gadgets, it is tempting to conceive of sleep, in idealistic terms, as everything that technology cannot capture. We see the truth of sleep not in the stream of data it generates but in the messy disconnect between subjective experience and technological record—and this mess is preferable to the fantasy of an immaculately clean, orderly, streamlined, efficient experience of slumber with no disruption or waste or loss. Not that the creators of sleep technology are being kept awake at night by these issues. On one level you could argue that the gadgetry of technosleep ‘works’ perfectly for as long as it is making money for its creators. It could even be argued that we pay for sleeptech twice—first, with money, when we buy the tech; second, with our own sleep when we use the tech. This second payment is a recurring one. The narcissistic thrill of finding out more about our sleep is paid for when we share that data with commercial entities. In the process of sleep tracking, sleep is abstracted from the snoring, snoozing body and converted into a dataobject with a life of its own. Sleep was never wholly private but it’s now circulating further than ever from the individual sleeper. Technology has always been part of our sleep, but it has taken up a new intimacy with us in our bedrooms, where our nocturnal repose might be at the mercy of a ping, a notification, a blinking light, a late-night call or message. The other side of the story is that technology now ministers to our sleep in unprecedented ways. If screen time is damaging our sleep then there will be an app that addresses the problem. If shift-work or the relentlessness of 24/7 culture are taking their toll, then a veritable pickand-mix of hypnotics and stimulants are available to anyone who wants to (and has resources to) fine-tune their sleep schedule in line with individual preferences or socioeconomic demands. The solution to technology and its problems is—more technology. Even as we come to rely on technology we may come to resent it, to be nostalgic for the uncomplicated pleasures of pre-technological sleep, imaginary or otherwise. Whatever the therapeutic benefits of CPAP technology for those suffering from obstructive sleep apnoea, for example, some users have found there is an emotional cost in using a device that seems to alienate them from ‘natural’ sleep.

Frontiers… We have focused our attention throughout the book on new technological frontiers, including those of a digital, pharmacological and neurological kind, which are potentially opening up new ways to know, do, act upon and

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value sleep, including the technoscientific knowledge at stake. Frontiers, too, have to do with the expanding territories and the colonization of our slumber in and through these technological developments. One of the promises of technosleep is that it gives the individual sleeper/consumer a certain power over their sleep—better sleep is available almost at the touch of a button if you buy the right tech and do what it tells you to do. But one perhaps surprising cost of this transaction is that the sleeper/consumer has to grant technology unprecedented access to their sleep lives. For some years now, the concept of sleep hygiene—the exclusion of all non-sleep-related distractions from the space devoted to slumber—has achieved a certain prominence and currency as a recipe for healthy sleep. But to what extent is all the paraphernalia of technosleep subject to norms of sleep hygiene? Does it represent good or bad sleep hygiene to sleep with a wristband or headband or with a smartphone under your pillow? A related paradox is technosleep’s status as an extension of the biomedical gaze into the quirks of everyday, or everynight, life. With the advent of norms for healthy sleep and with technology to measure our sleep patterns, we now see the emergence of new conditions or proto-conditions such as chronorexia and orthosomnia, to refer to the experiences of those whose sleep, whether in terms of its pattern or its overall quantity, does not match with agreed norms for healthy sleep. What exactly has been the role of technology in the emergence of these new forms of sleep disorder? Has it been an underlying cause, a visible symptom, a diagnostic tool or a potential therapeutic saviour? The answer, of course, is all of the above. The biomedicalization of our slumber, as we have seen, provides us with another critical point of reference here on these technosleep counts. It is no longer simply a case, if ever it was, of bringing our sleep up to or back to the norm in medicalized ways (Conrad, 2007), itself of course a partial, problematic and contested matter, but of going beyond these norms and of customizing our slumber in so doing beyond the lab or the clinic. Technosleep, on these counts, denotes the blurring if not the obliteration of former distinctions of the therapy/enhancement kind. It also, in keeping with this very notion of biomedicalization (Clarke et al., 2010), denotes what these authors take to be the increasingly technoscientific nature of biomedicine, the intensified focus on health, the elaboration of at-risk susceptibilities and somatic states and the shift from the control to the customization of bodies, sleep related or otherwise:

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processes which themselves of course are biopolitical matters through and through. Ambitions therefore for technosleep extend well beyond the goal of achieving averagely restful slumber. Technosleep can now be a way of achieving the edge in competitive situations—none more so than in the military, where the optimization of sleep has long been a strategic challenge and where sleep is now recognized as part of the so-called performance triad alongside exercise and nutrition. In the armies of the future, soldiers will be soldiers even in their sleep. The aspiration that underpins such research is for sleep to be technologically controlled, modified and molded to fit social demands and desires. Some of these aspirations—such as the idea that a night’s sleep might be compressed into 2.5 hours or that ‘dream engineering’ might harness the power of the somnolent mind—are so far-fetched that they seemingly take us towards the territory of science fiction.

Fictions… In science fiction narratives of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, there has been a remarkably persistent emphasis on the damage that modern technology may wreak on human slumber. Writers have ‘invented’ a range of sleep technologies that can do hair-raising things to our sleep. In the pages of science fiction, human slumber has been hacked, harnessed, stockpiled, transfused, compressed, suppressed and even weaponized. These alarmingly forward-looking texts are never less than nostalgic in their attachment to a natural or pre-technological model of slumber that was pure and freely available until modern technology began to colonize it. As is often the case in this genre, imaginative fiction is sharply at odds with the science from which it draws inspiration. Science fiction puts sleep and technology together in intimate conjunction in the hope that we can find ways to keep them apart. Imagining how we will sleep in the future invites us to reflect on what we consider to be normal, natural, healthy or authentic about sleep, and what it means to be creatures who submit to and are shaped by somnolence. What we like and value about our slumber—the darkness, solitude, rest, downtime and peace it may bring, the barrier it forms betwixt and between one day and the next—demarcates our private domesticity from the imperative to be economically productive. Sleep is often depicted in these stories as a marker of our humanity. The most ‘futuristic’ science fiction narratives of

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sleep are wedded, in the end, to traditionalist and organicist models of human slumber. Science fiction doesn’t so much invent the new generation of technosleep gadgets as launch a campaign for their pre-emptive disinvention. It prompts us to ask, in the face of ever expanding technoscientific explorations into sleep, do we want to keep hold of some of sleep’s mysteries? Yet, as we have shown, there is not a pure or ‘natural’ form of non-technologized sleep that we can reach for. In these fictions we can catch glimpses of contemporary culture’s fears, fantasies and desires about sleep and its evolving relation to technology. Not that scientists and industry figures seem particularly panicked by the alarmist messages emanating from their literary counterparts, and efforts to optimize and enhance sleep continue apace. If the fantasies of the hitech sleep industry are to be believed, sleepers of the future will be clad in smart pyjamas and hi-tech headbands, learning a new language and turning a profit while their dream worlds are populated with images and narratives derived from corporate marketing. There is even talk of the emergence in the near future of a new ‘sleepless elite’, as though in confirmation of what was only a thought experiment in Nancy Kress’s SF of the 1990s.

Futures… The very idea that sleep has a future is a product of fairly recent history— and the nature of this future is open and contested. Will sleep be transformed and upgraded into a primarily technological experience or state, or even transcended as per the fantasies of those despisers of sleep past and present? Or will sleep remain as a stubborn corporeal reminder of our creaturely qualities as finite, vulnerable, organic beings? And will everyone be on the same trajectory towards the same future? Given that sleep is already the site of socioeconomic inequality, there is no reason to suppose that human slumber will become more equitable over time— not least because so much sleep tech is primarily marketed at affluent consumers with disposable incomes. What is more, much of the discourse around sleep centres on the figure of the affluent, able-bodied, white, straight subject as the standard against which sleep’s norms are measured. For obvious reasons, it can be tempting to regard state-of-the-art sleep technology as the preserve of a lucky and privileged minority. It’s fair

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to assume that anyone who splashes out on a sleep ring or sleep headband already has access to the kind of secure and comfortable sleeping environment that many can only dream about. Yet those who buy (and buy into) these technologies are subjecting themselves to sleep normativities in ways that those who can’t afford the latest app simply can’t. Despite its proverbial status as the great leveller, it has long been recognized by many commentators that the social inequalities that characterize our waking lives persist into our sleep lives. Hype around the latest developments in sleep tech is not likely to find a receptive or enthusiastic audience among homeless people, asylum seekers, refugees or the unemployed and precariously employed—or anyone whose sleep life is already fragile and compromised. This is not to romanticize deprivation, nor is it to claim that the sleep of the precariat is somehow more pure, authentic and unmediated than that of affluent consumers with disposable income. Secure housing, air conditioning and decent ventilation are all technologies that enable a good night’s sleep, and we wouldn’t want to do without them in the name of purity and authenticity. Furthermore, the night, is a gendered space, reflecting wider inequalities of power within families (Taylor, 1993) where nighttime roles of care typically fall to women (Arber et al., 2012), looking after babies, children and older relatives. It is working women who undergo the second, third and fourth shifts (Venn, 2008), not only taking the lion’s share of the household chores, looking after others during the night but also dealing with the emotional labour of these caring roles which can impact on sleep. It is women who report poorer sleep than men, and who seem to experience insomnia, anxiety and depression to a greater extent than men. It is women who typically have their sleep disturbed by sharing their beds with partners who snore (Venn et al., 2008). It is also women who are told they should get their ‘beauty sleep’ and are the primary targets of cosmetics and other consumer goods on this count. It is women’s bodies that are scrutinized, policed and constructed as perfectible through technoscience. The gendered aspects of technosleep thus warrant further engagement and examination than we would have been able to justice here. Taking a feminist technoscience approach, in future research, we might ask, for example, whether and how technosleep impacts on gender disparities in sleep, and how through technosleep the night-time economy is being re-imagined—and with what impact. The same may be said for disability and those with medical conditions that result in alternative modes of sleep in one way or another.

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Analysing technosleep through the prism of disability poses other worthwhile questions that need to be attended to. Embedded in numerous facets of technosleep are discourses that reinforce ableism, which need to be theoretically elaborated and empirically scrutinized. And this also extends to the valences (Bush, 2009) and cultural practices of sleep technologies that privilege or conversely stigmatize certain types of bodies and bodily acts. Reading technosleep through a disability lens and drawing on the growing body of scholarship known as crip technoscience, we can start to critique normative understandings of bodily rhythms, temporal orders and neoliberal ideas about what constitutes productivity. No consideration of the possible future of sleep would be complete without some consideration of the relations between slumber, technology, and the climate crisis. One of the many devastating effects of global heating is that it makes some locales ‘unsleepable’. It pushes people out of their beds and their homes in search of safe and habitable environments. Such journeys may cover huge distances and involve enormous risks— exploitation at the hands of human traffickers, abuse from violent border enforcement authorities—and one thing that makes refugees visible are their sleep arrangements. From encampments and roadsides to beaches and unsafe boats, the story of climate migration is at one level a story of makeshift sleep arrangements and desperately vulnerable sleep lives. The plight of this global sleep precariat puts in sobering perspective the significance—or indeed, insignificance—of present-day sleep tech. It’s fair to say that in any move towards a more just and equitable society, the redistribution of sleep trackers or REM headbands will not be a particularly high priority. As we continue to examine the emergence of technosleep, then, it will be increasingly important to interrogate the connection (or disjunction) between individual examples of state-of-the-art sleep gadgetry and the wider infrastructures of sleep as they are experienced in an unequal world. Whatever the future of sleep, it is likely to be one in which difference and inequality persist and are possibly even exacerbated so long as the marketing fantasies sidestep the question of whose sleep will be transformed, upgraded, optimized—and whose will not. Questions of power, choice, agency and discretion will loom large in any account of technosleep and its possible futures. After all, one of the promises of technology is choice. We can choose whether or not to buy it, and we can choose whether or not to use it—every gadget has an off-switch. What is more, there is the promise of unprecedented choice around our sleep,

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which can now be customized like a haircut, tattoo or other form of elective body modification. In the marketplace of technosleep, we become consumers and the product is a new and improved version of ourselves and our own sleep lives. But what are the limits of this choice? Can we choose not to be consumers, and can we choose to be unaffected by technology? Could a latter-day Rip van Winkle sleep through the era of technosleep and emerge, unscathed and unchanged, on the other side? And what about those who wholeheartedly embrace technosleep and its ideologies. Will we really be in a position to choose to wield our technologically enhanced willpower against the hitherto irresistible drift into fatigue, somnolence and oblivion? Such a choice would be a dream come true for a system that would like nothing more than a culture of round-the-clock production and consumption. Whether robots sleep, and whether a sufficiently advanced robot would qualify for the right to sleep are also interesting questions to ponder. Such questions may seem to take us into the realm of science fiction, but they represent an alternative horizon of possibility for the future of technosleep—not one in which machines will erode, limit or even eliminate human slumber but rather one in which artificial entities will lay claim to what were once thought of as the distinctively human experiences of sleeping. As we have seen in our discussion of the notion of ‘sleep mode’, which has been a familiar part of computing parlance since at least the 1980s, the capacity to sleep has been extended—metaphorically and mimetically—to non-human entities. Yet, our exploration of technological sleep leads us to suggest that this in this coming together of sleep and technology important differences and asymmetries between human and technological sleep remain. Technosleep, in other words, will continue to complicate and problematize the interface of the human and the nonhuman, the organic and the mechanical, the individual and the collective, the literal and the metaphorical in ethically and socially significant ways. We are not in the business of making prophecies or predictions—or promises—but one thing we can say with reasonable confidence is that there will be no going back to some golden age of pre-technological sleep. There is no either/or choice between sleep and technology—that is, between a pure organic state of slumber and the hi-tech, wide awake stimulations of media society and digital culture. One of the eye-opening lessons of any close study of late modern technologies of slumber is that human somnolence has always existed in conjunction with some form of technology—whether that technology is candlelight, fires, mats,

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bedding, sleeping draughts, alcohol or caffeine. Technosleep, in other words, does not appear with the flick of a switch in the late twentieth century but rather emerges as the latest chapter in what has been a centuries-long saga of relations between the organic state of somnolence and the human-made contexts in which sleep is experienced and enabled. Technosleep nevertheless, as defined and deployed in this book at least, is no one-way street or escalator to a high-tech sleep future. On the contrary, as we have emphasized, technosleep, is a far from determinist, inevitable or foregone matter. Nor as we have stressed is it an either-or state but a matter of degree involving movements back and forth and cases not simply of outright rejection, refusal, resistance, abandonment and the like, but of agnosticism, ambivalence, hesitancy, reluctance and so on too.

Concluding Comments That these foregoing technosleep matters are political should also be clear by now: another important dimension of the politics of sleep that is to say (Williams, 2011). Whether indeed it be the digital self-tracking of sleep, the social life of this sleep data of ours, the colonization and corporate capture of our sleep through technoscience and technocapitalism, the consuming of drugs to keep us awake or send us to sleep, the institutional regulation of sleep in prisons, care homes and such like, or even the futures envisaged for our slumber by sleep experts, science fiction writers and so on, these are all political matters through and through. Political matters have not simply to do with the governance of our bodies and ourselves but with the governance of these technologies too. To the extent, furthermore, as already touched on above, that technosleep is part and parcel of wider debates on technology and the future of humanity then it becomes yet another critical issue where implicit or explicit technoprogessive agendas vie with other more technoliberatarian if not technoanarchic ones, which themselves in turn compete or clash with those of a more bioconservative if not bioluddist kind. In the end, instead of offering predictions—whether euphoric or doom-laden—about the future of the sleep, this book has traced an emergent trend, speculated about its direction of travel and framed a set of questions about how it might be understood. What will technosleep be? Where will it be? And how will inequalities, inequities and injustices in sleep be experienced and/or perpetuated and/or mitigated via technology in years to come? The future of sleep, like all futures, is

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characterized by profound uncertainty, but such questions will help us contemplate its emergence with our eyes wide open.

References Arber, S., Meadows, R., & Venn, S. (2012). Sleep and society. The Oxford handbook of sleep and sleep disorders (pp. 223–247). Oxford University Press. Bush, C. G. (2009). Women and the assessment of technology: To think, to be; to unthink, to free. In D. Kaplan (Ed.), Readings in the philosophy of technology (pp. 137–152). Rowman and Littlefield. Clarke, A., Malmo, L., Fosket, J. R., Fishman, J., & Shim, J. K. (Eds.). (2010). Biomedicalization: Technoscience, Health and Illness in the US. Duke University Press. Conrad, P. (2007). The medicalization of society: On the transformation of human conditions into treatable disorders (p. 4). Johns Hopkins University Press. Taylor, B. (1993). Unconsciousness and society: The sociology of sleep. International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, 463–471. Venn, S., Arber, S., Meadows, R., & Hislop, J. (2008). The fourth shift: Exploring the gendered nature of sleep disruption among couples with children. The British Journal of Sociology, 59(1), 79–97. Williams, S. (2011). The politics of sleep: Governing (un) consciousness in the late modern age. Springer.

Index

A Ableism, 192 Accelerometer, 50 Actants, 3, 4, 39, 110, 111 Actigraphy, 25, 33 Adam, Barbara, 154 Adderall, 86 Affects, 35, 109, 111, 116–118 Affordances, 58, 113, 124 Algorithms, 14, 51, 59–62, 66, 69, 95, 114 algorithmic injustice, 60 Ambivalence, 10, 49, 82, 194 American Association of Sleep Technologist, 157 Android, 109 Antidepressants, 83 Antihistamines, 83 Arber, Sara, viii, 22, 26, 34, 63, 64, 191 Artefacts, 4, 8, 9, 33, 39, 48 Artificial intelligence (AI), 51, 66, 67, 94, 96, 109, 114, 120, 121, 141, 155, 156, 163, 169

Assemblage, 4, 110 Autoethnography, 11 Automated driverless vehicles (AVs), 96, 97

B Ballard, James Graham, 137–139, 141, 148 Big data, 38, 65–67, 171, 172 Biohacking, 91–93, 164 Biometrics, 50 Biomimicry, 125 Biosocial, 36, 38 Bostrom, Nick, 167

C Capitalism, 10, 11, 14, 17, 24, 29, 31, 36, 37, 64, 67, 119, 149, 186 Chronic illness, 64, 174 Chronobiology, 22, 30 Circadian, 27, 36, 76, 78, 79, 86, 158, 160, 161, 173

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 C. Coveney et al., Technosleep, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30599-3

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INDEX

Cognitive enhancement, 85 Commercialization, 14 Consumers, 2, 38, 134, 173, 190, 191, 193 Continuous Positive Airway Pressure (CPAP), 30, 80–82, 183, 187 Coveney, Catherine, 5, 34, 53, 62, 81–83, 85, 86 Covid-19, 26, 28, 30, 36, 67 Crary, Jonathan, 10, 37, 119, 147 Customisation, 10, 76, 84, 85, 162, 185, 188 D Data as flows, 14, 52, 66 gaze, 52, 186 object, 14, 48, 52, 187 proxy, 49, 68 Datafication, 48, 51, 60 Dement, William C., 3, 22, 23, 33 Democratisation, 93 Disability, 172, 174, 185, 191, 192 Discourse, 3, 9, 21, 38, 55, 59, 66, 87, 97, 117, 118, 123, 149, 153–155, 190, 192 Doctor, 14, 32, 82, 83, 98, 139, 145, 146, 149, 161 Dreams, 22, 37, 61, 88–90, 120, 134, 138, 140, 148, 161, 163, 167 Driving, 36, 96, 149, 160 Driverless vehicles, 14 E Ekirch, A Roger, 24, 25, 77 Electroencephalograms (EEG), 22, 25, 33, 183 Emotions, 11, 25, 165 Enhancement, 6, 76, 86, 162, 166, 171, 188 Ethics, 31

Ethnicity, 26, 35, 172 Expectations, 2, 5, 62, 98, 108, 111, 124, 134, 154, 174 Experts, 7, 27, 34, 111, 161, 172, 175, 194 F Foucauldian, 58 Frontiers, v, 1, 2, 6, 11, 14, 16, 67, 87, 143, 160, 183, 187, 188 G Gabe, Jonathan, 30, 82, 83 Grandner, Michael A., 26, 34, 35, 38, 78, 98, 171 H Hale, Lauren, 28, 170, 174 Hislop, Jenny, viii, 35, 63, 64 Hsu, Eric, vii Huxley, Aldous Leonard, 15, 133 I Imaginaries, 2, 6, 16, 38, 68, 86, 153–157, 159, 160, 162, 164–167, 169, 170, 173–175, 177 Inequalities, 3, 11, 16, 17, 33, 35, 38, 66, 156, 170–172, 174–176, 191, 194 Insomnia, 30–32, 34, 79, 88, 136, 138, 139, 141, 146, 147, 161, 162, 175, 191 Istvan, Zoltan, 137, 167 K Knowledge, v, 2, 5, 7–9, 13, 14, 24, 30, 48, 53, 55, 57, 58, 60, 66, 68, 98, 135, 150, 157, 188

INDEX

Kress, Nancy, 15, 133, 135, 146, 147, 190 Kroker, Kenton, 32, 36, 38, 65, 66, 69, 81

L Lewis, Penny, 88, 126, 139, 144, 165 Lucid as dream, dreaming, 89, 164 Lupton, Deborah, 49, 58, 66–68

M Masks, 76, 79, 80, 82, 97, 183 Materiality, 3, 39, 68 Meadows, Robert, 31, 35, 36, 62, 156 Media, viii, 11, 28, 37, 38, 95, 144, 155, 156, 160, 162, 169, 193 Medicalisation, 29, 30, 38, 80, 81, 84 Melbin, Murray, 1, 6 Metaphor, 93, 115–119, 121, 124, 125, 147 Military, 27, 86, 165, 189

N National Institute of Health, 157 Neoliberalism, 17, 186 Nettleton, Sarah, 4, 9, 35, 36, 61, 110, 115 Neuroscience, 36, 116, 120 Night, 23, 24, 38, 50–53, 57, 60, 61, 63, 64, 68, 69, 77–81, 83, 88, 111, 161, 164, 165, 168, 169, 171, 186, 187, 191 Normativity, 59, 173

O Ontology, 4, 39, 55, 123 Optimisation, 51, 76, 84, 86, 185

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P Patients, 11, 23, 30, 32, 70, 82, 83, 157 Peele, Jordan, 142 Pharmaceuticalisation, 14, 82, 85 Pharmaceuticals, 8, 29, 76, 79, 80, 82–88, 91, 133, 134, 161, 165, 183 Posthumanism, 166 Promises, 2, 5, 6, 8, 17, 52, 57, 68, 69, 76, 86, 88, 125, 138, 153–156, 160, 166, 177, 186, 188, 192, 193 R Reiss, Benjamin, 17, 25, 37, 78, 147, 174 Rhythms, rhythmic, vii, 3, 5, 27, 30, 36, 61, 62, 77, 79, 81, 85–87, 111, 150, 158, 168, 170, 173, 174, 192 Ritalin, 86 Robots, 14, 76, 94, 95, 109, 110, 122, 123, 163, 193 S Science and Technology Studies (STS), xvii, 4, 5, 16, 154 Science fiction (SF) dystopian, 137, 147 fantasy, 149 films, 2 novels, 2 TV shows, 167 Self as governance, 55 as help, 11, 30 as hood, 53, 70, 140, 142 as tracking, 12, 14, 47, 48, 52, 53, 58, 59, 64, 68, 70, 71, 91, 194

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Selin, Cynthia, 2, 16, 154, 176 Sleep as a boundary object , 34 as a process, 33 as wasteful, 138 Biology of, 27, 62 biphasic, 25, 32 clinics, 7 cultures, 2, 3, 6, 21, 25, 26, 134 cycles, 8, 23, 26, 28, 51, 57, 61, 78, 79, 84, 87, 88, 163 deprivation, 27, 38, 68, 86, 87, 121, 123, 137, 160 disparities, 26 ecosystem, 35 environments, 62–64, 92 gender, 26 hacking, 91, 92 histories of, 3, 13, 21, 22 hygiene, 29, 57, 63, 78, 188 in children, 141 in older adults/ageing, 31, 57, 60 in students, 62 in the workplace, 68, 117, 145, 184 labs, 7, 32, 65, 89, 185 metrics, 51, 59 norms, 69, 157 optionalisation of, 88, 165 rhythms of, 29, 36, 61, 79, 153 rituals and routines, 8, 75 schedule, 57, 62, 187 science of, 3, 7, 9, 22, 25, 32, 33, 39, 52, 65, 84, 88, 89, 138, 144 tracking, 11–13, 48–53, 55, 57, 59, 60, 65, 67, 69, 71, 94, 186, 187 transformations of, 80 upgraded, 134 wave, 23, 88, 165 Sleep disorders Chronorexia, 188

Circadian rhythm disorders, 30, 33 cures for, 137 epidemiology of, 33 insomnia, 28, 160 narcolepsy, 157, 160 night terrors, 140 obstructive sleep apnoea (OSA), 24, 79, 80, 187 orthosomnia, 188 Sleep apnoea, 23, 67, 80, 157, 160, 161 Sleep medicines alertness promoting, 85 benzodiazepines, 23, 82 chronotherapies, 30, 87 hypnotics, 30, 82, 85, 86, 187 modafinil, 85, 86, 137, 165 nitrazepam, 82 orexins, 87, 88 sedatives, 82, 85 temazepam, 82, 86 zolpidem, 82, 86 Zopiclone, 82 Sleep Monitoring Technology (SMT), 60 Sleep technology advertising, 90, 163 apps, 2, 7, 57, 59, 94, 145, 186 digital, 7, 13, 14, 48, 57, 67, 78, 167 Fitbit, 48, 67, 171 Oura Ring, 50 passive use, 48 rejection of, 10 sensors, 68, 163 smart watches and other wearables, 11 tracking devices, 51, 52, 57, 68, 183 Smith, Gavin D., 49, 53, 55, 68 Social justice, 170

INDEX

Sociotechnical, 2, 5, 16, 153, 154, 173, 176 Stigma, 82, 147 Surveillance, 30, 67, 68, 140, 145, 148 T Targeted Dream Incubation (TDI), 89 Technoscience, 138, 146, 149, 166, 174, 191, 192, 194 The body corporeality, 52, 145, 167, 190 hormone, 3, 77 perfectibility of, 166 Therapeutics, 161 Time, v, vii, 6, 8–10, 12, 17, 21, 24, 26, 30–32, 36–38, 53, 57, 59, 61, 77, 78, 81, 88–91, 93, 109, 110, 112, 113, 115, 141, 154 temporalities, 6, 30, 36, 154 Transhumanism, 166 U Uncertainty, 3, 34, 176, 195 Upload, 67, 166, 168

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V Venn, Sue, viii, 17, 63, 83, 191 Visions of the future, 93, 155, 157, 162, 164 Vitalities, 52, 66 Vulnerability, 140–143, 168 W Wakefulness, 2, 8, 24, 33, 61, 77, 80, 85, 87, 138, 141–143, 147, 148, 165 Whiteness, 143 Williams, Simon J., 3, 5, 7, 17, 21–26, 28–31, 36, 65, 66, 69, 76, 79, 80, 84, 85, 95, 110–112, 121–123, 140, 155 Winterson, Jeanette, 15, 133, 141, 147–149 Wolf-Meyer, Matthew, 17, 24, 29, 31, 33, 34, 36, 79, 110, 122, 123, 174 Z Zarhin, Dana, 30, 35, 63, 112, 114, 122 Zeitgebers, 161