Thinker
Jonathan Crary
Who
American art historian and cultural theorist, Columbia.
Core Idea
Techniques of the Observer — vision and attention are not natural but historically constructed. 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep — the attack on sleep is the final enclosure of human time by capital. Attention is a political battlefield.
Key Works
- Techniques of the Observer (1990)
- 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (2013)
Relevance
The political economy of attention — directly relevant to your "emotional economy of platforms" domain. Attention is not a neutral resource that platforms monetize. It is a form of time that is expropriated. For MENA audiences specifically: the competition for attention in information-restricted environments has a different structure than in open-internet contexts.
Connected To
- Byung-Chul Han — Han's burnout society and Crary's 24/7 are parallel diagnoses of capitalist time colonization
- Arlie Hochschild — the expropriation of sleep/time as extension of emotional labor into biological life
- Eva Illouz — emotional capitalism requires total availability; Crary shows its temporal cost
- Shoshana Zuboff — attention as the raw material surveillance capitalism harvests
