ACFM - ACFM Trip 29: Sleep

Episode Date: November 27, 2022

We don’t get enough of it. We take drugs all day to fend it off. We’ll do it when we’re dead. And it’s our last line of defence against 24/7 capitalism. Sleep, the main course in life’s feast! The ACFM crew rouse themselves from slumber to wokeness in this month’s Trip, exploring the political and […]

Hello and welcome to Hello and welcome to ACFM, the home of the weird left. My name's Kear Milbin and I'm joined by my very good friend Nadia Idle. Hello. And my other very good friend, Jeremy Gilbert. Hello. And today, as the night's draw in, as the days get shorter,

we're going to tackle the very cozy topic of sleep. Nadia, this is your idea, wasn't it? This is a great idea, I think, sleep as a topic. But why did you want to talk about it? I guess I'm interested in sleep because it's something, we spend a quarter to a third of our lives doing, and it's inextricably linked to our short and long-term physical and mental health, and it's something that every human being does and need. But we don't seem to be spending enough time talking about it as a subject. So I guess

I want to politicise sleep and understand its relationship with early capitalism and late capitalism, where we're living now, and yeah, and politicise it. So I want to discover through doing this episode, what the progressive anti-capitalist position on sleep is. And is sleep a natural obstacle to capitalists, you know, value expansion? I think it probably is. And it also just provides a sleep, provides us with an interesting lens through which to talk about, you know, capitalism and capitalism's discourses and needs and dynamics in general. But also I think we can explore sleep's relationship to work more specifically, but also leisure, and maybe how those things have changed over time in Britain or as much as, you know, evidence we can find out about

that. Specifically, I'd like to explore this crazy statistic that we came across that 7.5 million people, I think it was, in Britain, habitually get less than five hours sleep a night, which is way less than, you know, what an adult should be getting. I think the recommended is something between seven to nine in general. And when it's habitually less than that, it's, you know, it's mental that so many people are not getting enough sleep. But also going back to, I think, like, theory and philosophy, the vast majority of philosophy and theory is pegged around this paradigm of the awake and non-sleeping subject.

So there isn't, you know, very much written about sleeping. So, you know, I think we should start a trend. And then following on from all of that, how sleep shows up in culture, like what sort of discourses develop as either coping mechanisms or even, you know, the narratives we tell ourselves about the sort of people we are and the sorts of people other people who don't sleep like we sleep are and when and how that differentiation occurs. So I guess I've spent half of my life living in the UK and half of my life living in Egypt and it's clear that the way people relate to and talk to sleep in everyday life is quite different. And my theory

is that it transcends things like class and gender. But also I think I thought about this topic because, you know, as you mentioned, Kier, we're now, you know, in autumn, winter, and I love sleeping. It is, it's one of my favorite activities, you know, and I prioritize that. But it's not really Ophé to admit that in the UK, unless it's linked to, like, partying all nights or your kids keeping you up, and therefore you need, you need all this sleep. It's a bit naft to admit that you'd rather be asleep than doing X, Y, Z. And so, yeah, those are some of the reasons why I'm interested in talking about sleep today. So that's me.

What about you guys? Well, I think that sleepiness is all woke nonsense, if you ask me. We'll talk about that later. But that idea of like woke as like this derogatory term. But it sort of picks up on this general trend of thinking about activity, or valorizing activity and, well, consciousness, actually, because sleep is basically, it's not unconsciousness. It's when the conscious brain is not fully in control, etc.

So we could talk about that sort of, area as well, I think. What about you, Jim? I mean, fundamentally, we don't have a society in which things are organised such that adults can really look after themselves, basically, especially people with children. You're literally, I mean, we're contemporary working patterns and patterns of social reproduction and childcare. They just literally don't leave behind, they don't leave a situation whereby most adults with children are physically able to do all the stuff they need to do to keep a roof over their heads and look after the kids and get enough sleep and exercise. Like, especially if they want to have any sort of ordinary leisure. You know, it's kind of extraordinary that we can't,

there's a repeated, I would say, near hysterical tone to the sort of medical pronouncements we hear about the kind of crisis of sleep. I mean, it's a really common thing. About every 18 months, I'll see something in the press or the news about some report saying people are just not getting enough sleep, like the quality of sleep and the amounts of sleep that especially working adults are getting, but also increasingly teenagers, actually, because so many of them are on the phones all night. It's just not bad. It's just chronically unhealthy, according to medical professionals. But this is never framed, this is never, ever, ever situated alongside any real attempt to explain why this is happening. And as far as there is an explanation, it's this sort of

unbelievably childish sort of technological determinism, as I just indicated, actually. You know, the reason people aren't sleeping is because they're spending too much time on screens, but there's no real analysis for why is that? And more than anything else, just, you know, how is this connected to a whole set of social and political arrangements and decisions that have been made over the past few years that have produced that situation? It's an issue that should be politicised, but again, I mean, it's one that people don't like to think about because I sort of think, if we're going to live in a society in which

the standard model of child care is that the responsibility, most of the responsibility of looking after the kids is entirely devolved onto their two biological parents. And you figure out how much time that involves. And then you say, what would it be like for people to be able to do that and have just like a couple of hours in the evening of leisure?

Yeah, without the kids, after they've gone sleep, and to be able to get enough exercise to be actually healthy. The result of that calculation would be that, I mean, people shouldn't really be working more than four hours a day. Like, there isn't really time to work more than that if you're going to do all that.

stuff. And of course, nobody wants to confront, nobody wants to think about the fact that we're living in a society where it's normal for people to work more than eight hours a day. And they shouldn't really only be working about half that. And just the gulf between what it would mean, actually, for this to be biologically healthy and where we are, we're so depressing. I think often even people, you know, on the left, like we don't want to think about it. And I think that sort of, to some extent, that not thinking about it and that sort of fetishization of, you know, the unideal of sleeplessness, you know, I'll sleep when I'm dead or something. I think it is partly a displacement.

It's partly a way of not having to stare in the face, like the awfulness of the actuality of the situation. Perhaps one place we could also start is with our own relationships with sleep. Because I have a sort of problematic relationship with sleep. I used to actually love going to bed and falling asleep when I was young when I was a kid. And then even a teenager, actually. But then, you know, the last few decades I had periods of insomnia, always linked really directly to stress basically.

feeling really stressed. And then it was that inability to turn your mind off. And I've got into this habit where I have to, I always read before, read a novel before falling asleep. You know, I have to read until my eyes droop and I've lost my place on the page. Perhaps I'll do that twice. And then I'll switch my, switch the light off. I have a little reading light that clips onto the book. That gets us into like sleep cues, the cues you associate with sleep. But it's just really obvious to me that it's linked to stress and having too much going from my mind. Insomnia, is one of those things which is, it's a little bit like those angels in Doctor Who, if you look at them, they stay still. If you look away, they move and come towards you to try to kill

you sort of thing. The thing about sleep is you can't think about it. If you start thinking about it and worrying about it, that's when you can trigger insomnia. So you have to sort of try to not think about or worry about insomnia or you will get it. Yeah, no, I love sleeping. I grew up in the Mediterranean and everybody sleeps and I come from a family of early to bed, early to rise. But I have had, you know, through periods of the year, if I'm having, you know, if there's something I'm particularly stressed about, an issue with, you know, going to bed with my mind racing. But I wouldn't say that I've ever had a problem with insomnia. I think when I've had depressive episodes in my life, if anything, it's been

the other way around. It's been that sleep is an escape from the conscious mind. I don't know whether this is an overactive brain or not, but I'm very, very cognitively active first thing in the morning. So it's almost like I feel like I need to fall asleep by a certain time because my brain's been doing too much in a way. So it feels like, I mean, that might not scientifically be entirely correct that it makes sense for me that, you know, by about 8pm, I don't want to have a conversation with anyone. I want to wind down and go to sleep. And I think even though I don't feel like I've got a similar character to my Egyptian family that I grew up with, that whole kind of winding down towards sleep was something that I definitely grew up with.

And so I'm, you know, touch wood, quite a good sleeper. I have had bouts where I've woken up in the middle of the night, but that's mostly related to alcohol, which is one of the main, main reasons that I basically don't drink anymore or very rarely drink. I mean, one thing I know that sleep scientists are fairly divided over is the question of just to what extent people's sleep patterns are sort of organically programmed? Because there is, there's quite a strong body of evidence that, like, your circadian rhythms, like your natural sleep rhythms are pretty much like built into your, they're in your cells. So according to this model anyway, which is contested by some scientists, but I think it's not

contested by most of them as far as I understand it. I think about 15% of people, like naturally, fall asleep really late, like, and get up really late and an equivalent number naturally get up really early and fall to sleep really early. But then about 70% of people, if they're adults, naturally fall to sleep about 11.30 and should sleep till about 7 in the morning. You know, we're so laden with the habitual, like, cultural things that we attach to sleeping early or late and what it says about ourselves, that we stop ourselves in, you know, either direction or like you said at the beginning, Jeremy, because we literally don't have the time to wind down, is I need that, I feel like I need

that extra hour of, you know, scrolling or watching shit TV because I would need to wind down or I need to do something that's not putting the kids to bed or working too hard, etc. But the whole thing with like the circadian rhythms, I think it is, I think sleep is really interesting because it is one of those holdout moments in which our sleep is related to the various natural rhythms of, well, the turning of the earth on its axis, but also, you know, the seasons, et cetera, where night and day get longer and short. Yeah, where they do. And this is where I'm interested in this, because, you know, it depends where you are

in the world. And we've got this concept of what the day and the month and the year looks like. If you live somewhere like the UK, it's just not the same if you're somewhere equatorial. And it's not the same if you're in the polls. And it'll be interesting to see how, you know, the relationship between literally where you are in the globe and, you know, what the mode of production is and what the, what the politics of, you know, how capitalism operates. And then other things like, you know, age and stuff, how all of those things interact together. I've been in Finland in the middle of

summer for an academic conference and like everybody was going completely crazy because they couldn't, because nobody was sleeping for that after like three days. It's definitely the case if you go, if you're used to being somewhere where there are longer nights, and you go to somewhere where there's basically no night for some time of the year, then it's really, really to sleep. I mean, most people can't. I've been to the polar area in midsummer and it was a weird experience to be like 11.30 and to be sleepy and not know why. And then you look at your clock and you're like, right, that's why. But yeah, no, my point, my point is basically, are we able to train ourselves in and out of different ways of sleeping? And is that directly linked to the needs that we

have to be able to function in society, you know, to earn money, etc. So is there, is there, there, are there different ways of sleeping that can work for human beings? Or is it that, you know, this model of a, you know, people need seven to nine hours, sleep a night? Does that only apply to societies like hours where the seasons or the days and nights are as short as long as they are? So that's, I think, the question for me, like, are these things variable? Because I'm really interested in this idea that perhaps over history, you were saying, Jeremy, that we're not sure if there is much evidence for this. There's some theory around the idea

that in the UK in a kind of pre-capitalist era, there was the biphasic sleep, this two sleeps idea, which was also apparently found in other places of the world where you have this early sleep between 9pm and 11pm and then people actually

got up and did stuff and then they went back to sleep in the early hours and then got up again. And apparently that's where the term of like being wakefulness was called The Watch and there's all of this concept of not on my watch and stuff around what used to happen and what people used to get up to in kind of the middle of the night in the UK, which I think is really interesting because, you know, if you think about that in terms

of its relationship with capitalism, well, capitalism needs you not to do that, but maybe it worked for, you know, agrarian societies in the past. And when the idea of the clock and waking and sleeping on the clock becomes a thing, and alarm clocks were not invented before 1787, apparently, well the most obvious song for us to talk about in an episode about sleep is the Beatles I'm only sleeping this groundbreaking piece of dream pop on their seminal album revolver 1966 undoubtedly the Beatles best album I'm sorry I know it's now fashionable to think it boring to say that that's the Beatles best album because it was critical orthodoxy for such a long period that it was but it simply was clearly the

best album. And I'm only sleeping. It is really, I mean, it's sort of fascinating. It's this, it's this deliberately dreamy track. It's quite self-consciously articulating a position which is counterposed to the sort of masculinist, valocentric energy of rock music. It's a really early example of what critics like Simon Reynolds and Joy Press would later see is this sort of feminine tradition in rock music, which is the psychedelic. and cosmic and kind of anti-heroic but in a in a pleasant way and it's clearly is closely related to the fact that they're experimenting a lot with weed and acid

at this point as well so really fascinating record a great team Please don't wait me No, no, don't shake me Leave me where I am I'm only sleeping Everybody seems to think I'm lazy I don't mind

I think they're crazy Running everywhere at such a speed Until they find We talked before on this show about E.P. Thompson's work on clock time, etc. He wrote this article, Time, Work, Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism, which is just really, really famous about how the introduction of capitalism involved a huge transformation in how we understood time, you know, our relationship to time, whereas previously these sort of cyclical ideas of time

link to things like, you know, the rotation of the airfare on the sun and the rotation of the air for on its axis, etc. So time was experienced in this sort of cyclical way, but also in a sort of task-based way. So we'd have conceptions of time which are related to certain tasks. So the one I always like to talk about is a sleeping, no, a pissing while is a particular period of time. A what? A pissing while. I'm just off for a piss. I'll be long. I'll be a pissing while. Presumably shorter than a shitting while. where you'd have to go a bit further away, perhaps. And then, you know, basically when you get early capitalism

and the creation of the cities and people get pushed off the land through the enclosure of the commons and so forth into the new cities where the new factories are, then they have to get introduced to this completely new conception of time, which is like clock time. So you have to be at the factory gates at 9 o'clock, and that will not follow the patterns of the seasons,

although we do have British summertime, etc., when the clocks go forward and back. That's a completely new sort of conception of time, and that surely must impact on our relationship to sleep. This idea of bifasic sleep, presumably people went to sleep when it got dark because there weren't... There's a couple of hours after dusk is my...

I think the most comprehensive study I've sort of seen or read a summary of on this historical theory that before the 17th century, it was normal for people to sleep in, main cycles. It says that it was normally you'd go to sleep a couple of hours after dusk and you'd sleep for four hours, then you'd get up for an hour or two, then you'd sleep for another four hours. I mean, the evidence is fairly compelling and it's quite plausible. But it's also one of the reasons like sleep doctors think it's interesting is because a lot of people, they think

a lot of people who report insomnia actually what's happening to them is they're waking up at what is this fairly natural time to wake up, so halfway through its leap. And then instead of just thinking, well, this is normal, I'll just do some stuff for an hour or so, then sleep for another four hours. They're sort of panicking about the fact they're not getting their seven or eight hours. And I mean, one of the arguments that's made in relation to this is it's actually, you have to have an incredibly highly trained body, like as an adult, let's say as a child, to like stay asleep for like eight hours without needing a snack or without going to the toilet or anything like that. And it also creates a lot of anxiety in people who feel that

they should be doing that and they're not. And that's one of the one major cause of sleep dysfunction according to this theory, which is quite interesting. But what were people doing in the middle of the night? I mean, I can imagine there was a lot of sex going on. Yeah, exactly. So that's one of the thing. They said it's really good time for sex, really good time for like kind of house admin tasks, apparently. That was another thing. Yeah, people were doing. Like they would set themselves certain tasks also like a chat because a lot of people slept in the same. bed often, apparently if you had visitors or whatever, you could have one massive bed and there were rules about who slept in what order. This is the UK I'm talking about whether the research

that I've read. But yeah, this idea that there were, you know, there were some kind of like tasks that were set for that time. And even prayer of course. Yes, of course. Yeah. Sex and prayer. The two cornerstones of any. Civilized. But it but it is, Because it's also related to the access to light, isn't it? Because, you know, we're talking about the pre-electricity. Pre-pre-price. Pre-pray-gas lighting. So this is like we're talking about candles, which presumably were relatively expensive

and, you know, give out that much light. So that limits the amount of tasks you can do and probably dictates much more when you would, when you'd want to go to sleep. Presumably, being exhausted because you're doing hard work in the fields at certain times of the year, less harder at other times. presumably that's also a driver of sleep in this sort of period. Yeah, but it's interesting what we were saying before about like telling the time.

Because, you know, like, I mean, there's the same with place as it not everybody uses northwest, south, east or whatever. In countries like Egypt where it's in the cities, it's like a modern, whether you're in Cairo, for example, these are modern cities and people have clocks and everybody's got mobile phones and smartphones, etc. The time is still told by the five calls for prayer. That's just in common. That's nothing to do with how religious you are. It's, it's, you know, it's how people talk. And of course, those times shift depending on when sunset and sunrises. But everybody knows that. But it's still how time is told. And it probably relates to how people sleep as well. Because, you know, if you're doing the mid midnight prayer, as you know, Jeremy pointed that, then you get up, especially if it's Ramadan or some, a religious month. You get up in the middle of the night, pray, have something to eat and go back to bed. That's really interesting. I'm quite excited about this. I want to try this now.

I'm going to try that like two-phase sleep. By phasic sleep. But how are you going to do this under late capitalism? You need to report back and tell us we need to have a follow-up episode. Yeah. Well, I've got a pretty flexible schedule mate at the time. Well, let's schedule the next ACFM recording for 11 p.m. Yeah.

Right. I think we should play, where did you sleep last night? the Nirvana version from their amazing 1994 MTV Unplugged album. It was a real stellar performance. They were covering the song by Lead Belly, I think, but apparently the song might be as old as 1880. It's quite a haunting song about jealousy and murder. Where did you sleep last night by Nirvana?

My girl, my girl, don't lie to me. Well, didn't you sleep last night? In the pines, in the pines where the sun don't ever shine. I would shiver the whole night through. Shall we talk about how, a little bit more about how this functions in under capitalism? Like go back a little bit to talking about. You know, the eight-hour workday, like what that does to sleep? Yeah, well, I mean, the eight-hour workday was the end result of like a hundred year of struggle, basically,

because it started off as a 16-hour work day in the early factories, and it went down to 12. The struggle for the eight-hour day was one of the, it was the big struggle around the working class movement formed around. One way of understanding this relationship of sleep to capitalism is capitalism is predicated on infinite growth, basically. capitalism is just the surplus is invested to create more surplus so it's got this self-expansive dynamic it always grows and so Marx talks about he talks about like capitalism sort of bursting every barrier that it comes across basically but like sleep is perhaps the one barrier it hasn't been able to eliminate it it's certainly encroached on it and started to dominate it when we talk about insomnia and so forth so you could sort of see sleep as like the one holdout of that cyclical temporality against capitalism's drive to sort of dominate it or eliminate it some degree. And there's been lots of research about people trying to work out how you, is it possible to eliminate sleep or the need, the body's need for sleep? I mean, exactly, which is why I feel

like, you know, sleep is an anti-capitalist resistance in a way, because partly capitalism is unable to extract full value from, you know, labour, because labour needs to go to sleep. Hence, AI and all of these other, you know, potential arguments that are put out there for, you know, if humans can't do this 24 hours a day, then we need to get this tasks done by something that can. But of course, this falls into the whole productivity discourse, you know, as well as, you know, some of the microdosing discourses of, you know, if I could just be more efficient or I could be more productive doing this one thing where, you know, and again, as we spoke about before on the show, the whole like self-help agenda around that, which, you know,

some of which is quite centred around that productivity. Yeah, but we or rather, I should say, I am absolutely caught up in that, drive to be productive and active all the time. We don't sit outside this, obviously. We're caught up in these things as much as possible. So does that make you not sleep enough, do you think? I'm not sure. It's just thinking about sleep as just this period of like,

of inactivity and like, you know, and like basically non-consciousness is another way to put it. And basically, it made me think about how much I valorize activity and being busy all the time. One of those moments when you sort of recognize that you're obviously being caught up in forces that's bigger than you. But this is exactly what I mean. I'm really happy you said this because I don't feel the same way. Like, I'm pro work as in I think all human beings need to work. My problem is with wage labor and the way that value extraction is organized under capitalism, right? But I think human beings need to work, whatever that work is.

They need to do stuff with their bodies. They need to be active. And they also need to have time for food. They need to have time for affection and relationships. And they need to have time for sleep. That's what makes healthy human beings. But I don't have ingrained anywhere in me that I am wasting my life if I'm not active all of the time.

I just don't feel that way. in relation compared to sleep. Like, I think, like, I just really like sleeping, basically. I don't know. I don't think it's more important to be working than sleeping, but I understand that I need to work for money to survive. You know, a friend of mine, Brian, did a poster

in the 1980s, which got quite famous. Went viral, as they would say now. And it's basically a picture of a woman lying in bed, all cozy, etc. And the words are, I didn't go to work today. I don't think I'll go tomorrow. let's take control of our lives and live for pleasure, not pain.

A real 1980 sort of dokelsie sort of poster. And I thought of that before this episode, I think, yeah, that's a, in fact, it's a bit of a genius poster because it's like that. It's almost like militant drowsiness or something. Do you know what I'm trying to weaponise that? But that exists, that there is this whole movement.

I can't remember which East Asian country was. I tried to look this up and I couldn't find it because there was a few pieces written about this last year where a whole set of young precarious workers, they had this whole movement and, you know, there's a term for it where they went on strike. Yeah, it's China. It's the laying down movement, isn't it?

It's cool. Yeah, where they're just like basically fuck this shit. Yeah. It's where we're supposed to be on all of the time with our precarious work, you know, where you're switched on working, checking your app to see if you need to go deliver something or whatever. And you don't have these kind of, the kind of original capitalist idea of, you know,

this is the time that is work time. and then you have the workers' time, whether it be like six hours or eight hours where you're not working. But now with a lot of precarious work, you're working all of the time or you're switched on to work all of the time. And yes, I think you're right.

It was called the Laying Down movement where people are just like, fuck this. Yeah, yeah. Just like, fuck this. We're just going to lie down as a protest. That poster, though, it's sort of, the point that I didn't go to work today, it's a real 80 sort of poster.

Because there was a big counterculture around Dole culture you know, basically adopted very different rhythms and rejecting the rhythms of work and that sort of stuff. But in a way, it's genius because it captures that moment of when the alarm clock goes off, when the alarm clock seems like the voice of the boss, do you know what I mean?

Because you're in that sort of like, why I really don't want to get up and sort of, if you can realize that like one of the reasons you're having to get up at this time when the body, it doesn't seem right to your body, it's because of these dynamics of capitalism, which basically needs to grow all the time, which means basically needs to get more and more out.

of you all the time. You know, that sort of sleepiness is a form of resistance. But like I was saying earlier, it's a very strange form of resistance because normally we associate resistance with, you know, self-activity and consciousness about the world. Do you know what I mean? It seems like an odd form of resistance to me, sleepiness. And its attributes totally go against the attributes I normally think about as resistance. This is in the tradition of Lefog's right to be lazy and the whole, the anti-work tradition that goes back to the 19th century and the moment of late 19th century sort of fantasy ecler

aestheticism, not asceticism, aestheticism, sort of intersecting with the growing kind of revolutionary socialist movement. And there's a long tradition and there are lots of friends of the show who've written about this and the idea that

work itself is the thing that we should be resisting because it's a, I mean, you said this on a really early show, kid, that work is a form of unfreedom. And from that point of view, you know, under the circumstance as we're describing, in which capitalism's drives,

that we include the determination to completely colonise every minute of the day and to take over every aspect of our life world and absorb every bit of our attention and our capacity for work, whether we're actually working or not. Like under those circumstances, then indeed it becomes, you know, one of the things we're trying to reclaim in a bid for freedom is some autonomy from those processes and just the right or the ability, the capacity to rest, to be lazy.

To be idle, right to be lazy, yeah. And, you know, my namesake concept, you know, talking about idleness and what idleness is. Nadia are idle. Right? Yeah, exactly. I mean, a lot of people don't believe it's my name hilariously because I'm quite an active person.

Is that some kind of joke? No, it's my surname. You know, and there's class stuff around that as well. Lots of class issues around that in the UK about, you know, who has the luxury of being idle, or was able to be idle and how that is viewed in culture. And again, back to this point of like being active and like working hard and the concept of working hard.

And also, you know, the way you guys have just been talking about work. I mean, again, this is working for the boss work rather than work as I was talking about earlier, which is physically doing stuff as a human being. Like whether it's, you know, tidying your house or like making art or like producing something or like cooking and a lot of the social reproduction stuff or, you know, planting your garden. I'm not talking about like big things. I'm talking about like stuff that I consider work

because I'm quite as a, how do I put this? As a self-employed person, like I'm quite, I do a clock on and off, which is interesting in itself. And maybe I am brainwashed by capitalism, but I put everything that I consider work underneath that. And a lot of that is not paid work and it's not wage labour. So in Marx, like Marx's tradition, it's like working the way that me and Jen were talking about it, not the way you were talking about it, as opposed to free activity, something like that, Marks would put it, which, and I think that's probably more what you're getting at is that free activity stuff, that freely chosen activity. But it's not all free, it's, it might be freely chosen, but it goes, this cycles back to what we were talking about before, is that if we're starting from the point of view of accepting that human beings have certain needs, right?

And in that catchment of needs is things like, no, sleep, food, relationship to other human beings, like, etc. Like, we need those to thrive as beings. Work, like doing stuff, let's call it doing stuff, is one of them. And while it's not the same as like, oh, I'm going to go and create this amazing art project, because some of that work might be cooking a meal or it might be, you know, taking care, like wiping a child's bum. Do you know what I mean?

Like some of it is not going to be all nice stuff that's freely chosen. It's going to be work, but it's not the same as working for labor and having to, like, the alarm clock goes off. You have to go to your workplace. You have to earn a wage because that's the only way that you need to survive. And cycling back to sleep, like that's, I think, what makes, which creates this terror around not being able to sleep. And therefore, this whole concept of, actually, I'm just going to stop doing that is, you know, I can understand why there's a movement around it. But the problem is, is that in theory, if the stopping also meant that you then didn't move your body at all, you would then get psychologically ill. That's my point.

Yeah. So we can think about the need for sleep as like, that's a constriction of freedom which is related to human needs. So it's not a constriction of freedom. Whereas like the work where it's a constriction of freedom associated not a human need, but the need of capital to grow. Do you know what I mean? That's probably the distinction. If you want it to make a sort of idea of freedom around it, which includes the freedom to choose the amount of sleep that suits your body or something like that. Perhaps we'd put it that way, I don't know.

And when you do work and how you do it and who you do it with and where you do it, which you don't have the freedom of at all if you're, you know, working for capital. There's a couple of tracks I got which are instrumentals which both call themselves lullaby and obviously the idea of the lullaby the song, the piece of music which is designed to lull the child to sleep is an interesting idea

and quite a charming idea in some ways. One track we could play along those lines is John Coltrane's Russian Lullaby from the early 60s album's Soul Train I mean it's quite high energy it's not much of a lot I don't know why it's a lullaby

I don't know what Russian lullaby it's based on I should have researched that I should have researched that And another lullaby tune, and another lullaby tune, which I am very fond of would be Luther's Lullaby, which is a track by the American New Age guitarist, Alex de Grassy.

That is from 1978. And it's a very early Windham Hill Records release. Although Windham Hill became associated with not the most commercial, but the more commercial wing of New Age music, it's going to be seen as quite uncool. I've always loved Alex de Grassey. He's a technically very proficient guitarist. It's sort of fascinating that somebody...

I've always found it fascinating that somebody could be that technically gifted and be using this very, very technical, you know, multi-fingered guitar picking style to produce music, which is just aggressively pleasant. It's just intensively, aggressively nice, and listenable.

And I do sort of love it, and this is a nice example. Luther's Lullaby from his album, turning back. I mean we're being very, we're being very pro-sleep here, we're being very pro-sleep here. But obviously, you know, sleep is historically a metaphor often for delusion and inactivity and apathy. And part of the problem with that over-feticisation of non-work or idleness or laziness, well, I say it's part of the problem, but I think most of the people who've been in favour of it

have been quite conscious of what they were doing is that it goes against the historical grain of activist culture, within social movements, within political movements, because generally speaking, the position of the activist, even in the most minimally conceived sense, whether you're talking about a trade unionist or people working in a party or some other kind of movement, and this goes back hundreds of years, the position of the activist is as someone who feels that they are more conscious of the issues and more energetically engaged in trying to address them than most people. And part of what they're trying to do is persuade people to become more conscious of the whatever issues they're concerned with and more actively engaged with them.

If you go back to the 19th centuries, there's a strong overlap between the socialist movement and the prohibition and teetotal movements. We talked about this eight years ago on the show because people thought of intoxication and drunkenness as tools of the ruling class, as luring people into complacency. The vacuous, factuous hedonism. Yeah, well, I think it's complacency. I think complacency is an interesting idea here. I remember thinking from a very young age that the way to understand the sort of affective psychosocial disposition of somebody who had some kind of politics and the people who didn't was more to do with a sense of complacency or a lack of complacency. I think that thing in myself, which doesn't want to sleep too much and doesn't want to spend too much time relaxing, is really about a kind of horror of complacency. A fear that it is complacency is the thing which is going to lure people into complicity with ongoing capitalist exploitation and the destruction of the planet, etc. So I think it's interesting to think about, well, how do you have a positive attitude towards relaxation, leisure, idleness, sleep? How do you have positive relationships to those

things without ending up, just endorsing a sort of apathetic complacency? I mean, I think that's a really interesting framing. It's really good. I love that what you've just said, Jeremy, but I think there is actually an answer to it, which is, I mean, capitalism is opposed to us luxuriating over time with doing other things, right? So like long protracted conversations on a sofa with your loved one. or like a really, really long walk or a 24-hour rave, and it doesn't have to be, you know, it can be a daytime rave and very pro that, you know. Well, I think we're going to talk about leisure a bit later, but all of these things like

come up against capitalism and have its limits. And so I think what you, it sounds that you're getting at is that we're talking about how much time are you putting into actively opposing capitalism as opposed to living in an anti-capitalist way, because they're both forms. of protest, right? One is the Gandhi's position and the other one is that of the vanguard party about what action is. Well, that's true. I'm not sure I believe in the idea of living in an anti-capitalist way. I think that's the thing people believe themselves to be doing when they're actually doing nothing much. But I mean, a lot of people, there is a, I mean, I know what you're

saying, but a lot of people's idea of their way of fighting the system is that they, are going to opt out and do things in a way that they think is ethical. This is a widespread view. We've talked about this loads of times on the show. I think that's largely delusional. There are very limited circumstances under which that might be an inaccurate description of what they're doing. But actually, mostly I think it's delusional because capitalism can happily accommodate their diversification of lifestyle as long as they're not organising with other people to try to challenge the class relations that organize it. And just anecdotally, you know, most of the people I need, I I knew who in the late 80s were into like situationist slogans and claiming to be to have

just to be opting out of capitalism in some sense ended up working and advertising in the 90s. So I don't, I'm not convinced about it. But that's, I don't think anyone saying anything differently really. I think it's more, I think it was more interesting in some ways is thinking about these sort of metaphors. You know, I'm thinking about the way in which the metaphor of wakefulness has historically, but it's been really important. Again, we talked about this on a really early show when we talked about consciousness raising. Metaphors of wakefulness are really important

within both spiritual traditions and political traditions. So the term woke, you know, it originates as a term describing, you know, people who are regarded as being politically conscious. And I think that is, it is interesting. And I think part of the sort of polemical purpose of this show is not to say that's necessarily bad, that's wrong, but also to say, well, let's not be too complicit with a discourse which doesn't recognise the human need for sleep and the value of sleep and the value of rest and repose. Because there is this danger of complicity. We've already talked about it a bit, but clearly it is a real, it's a real feature of like Silicon Valley culture, this life hacking ideal that you can be like Margaret Thatcher and get by on

four hours of sleep and be hyperproductive and sleep is for losers. And if you take the right sets of smart drugs and hormones and modify your circadian rhythms in just the right way, you can get by on two to three hours of sleep and become a champion CEO by spending 22 hours a day working on your company and maybe meditating for an hour. I honestly, I think one of the phantasmatic sources of a lot of this idea is the fact that elves in Tolkien and clear and Vulcans in Star Trek, like don't sleep. I love this. They don't sleep.

It's mentioned early on somewhere in the original series of Star Trek about Vulcans and it's definitely mentioned and made clear about elves in Tolkien that they don't have to sleep. They just meditate for a couple of hours a night and that's all they have to do is sleep. And I've got absolutely no question in my mind that that has implanted in the minds of like now two generations of geeks, the idea, yeah, that's what I want to do. how to be super successful. I'm just going to learn mindfulness and take smart drugs and then I won't ever have to sleep. And I think that is, it's a problem, but it's also a problem if you

are reproducing sort of notions of absolute organic, natural, biologically determined behaviour, and you don't acknowledge the extent to which those things are changeable. You can think about the philosopher Catherine Manabu, the French philosopher who sees herself as a sort of anarchist, but also sees that anarchist politics as consistent with her emphasis on the importance of trying to understand the political and philosophical implications of what she calls plasticity, which is really related to the neurological idea of the neuroscientific idea of neuroplasticity, the sense simply that humans and their bodies and their brains are changeable and can change themselves and are not simply fixed and given and don't have a singular, a historical essence. I think there's a tension. I think a lot of what we're talking about here today is this tension from a radical perspective between, on the one hand, the way we sleep changes over time, it's subject to circumstances, it is changeable, it's socially changeable, and because it's changeable, because it's historically variable, we could change it, we could figure out what

might be the best, most optimal way for us to be able to sleep, and the one that would facilitate the most creativity and the most sociality and the most conviviality and pleasure. But on the other hand, we also don't want to be complicit with the fact that capitalism is the greatest engine for transforming people's sleep patterns in history. And what it ultimately wants to do is just deprive us of sleep. As Jonathan Crary, the art critic, said in his book 24-7, you know, he's a really interesting sort of polemical book, 24-7, late capitalism and the ends of sleep. And his point is that contemporary capitalist culture, with its 24-7, non-stop, city that never sleeps, rolling news, you know, always on, always, have never turn your phone

off kind of culture, just absolutely mitigate against sleep and militate against sleep and doesn't want you to be able to sleep. So all of these things are true at the same time and it does create a situation in which it can be quite difficult to navigate. Now back on the theme of complacency, I tend to think my number one, my bottom line, the first thing I always want to say to people about sleep, and this is very much related to my attitude to exercise, is that actually the most dangerous thing for most people, or the thing that most people I think knew that it'll be good if more people could overcome, is complacency about sleeplessness. It's just accepting that there's not really anything you can do about the fact that people are

getting really bad sleep. People are really stressed out. They're getting health problems. They're getting mental health problems. Because I think depriving us of sleep, which is, of course, is a kind of torture. It's going to slow torture. I do sort of buy the idea that the capitalist machine, mostly what it's doing with people today, is depriving us of sleep. And by depriving us of sleep, it's making us physically weaker and psychologically weaker in ways which facilitates our exploitation. So I think it is important to get sleep. It is important for us to take control of the situation. But the first stage of taking control of the situation is recognizing that some, another, an inhuman force has already taking control of our sleep

or our ability to sleep when and where we want. And that is, you know, that is capitalism. We are all tired all the time. That's the generalized sort of state that's been everybody is at every moment. But that's sort of a generalized state of tiredness. And like one of the affects of a generalized state of tiredness is compliance acting in a way, which is like more habitual and like, you know, taking the easiest path. So that's another way of thinking about about wokefulness. No, well, wokefulness.

Like, what is, what is the, what is the analysis behind this idea of woefulness? It's really hard to talk about woke now because the right of weaponized it, etc.

But you're right, Jim, you talked earlier. We talk about people having political awakenings. That means they must have been asleep in some sort of metaphorical way beforehand. And like that sleep is probably something to do with, you know,

people basically acting habitually. And in fact, you, one of the favorite Gilbert, But ways of talking about hegemony is to say that, like, you know, the hegemonic block will provide a sort of path of least resistance for fruit down which a life will flow, basically, which are caused with their interest.

You know, so that is probably that is what people are getting at when we talk about people, or we associate people who are not awake, politically awake, as like basically people who are following the path that is set out for them in life. Do you know what I mean? And in fact, last... Wake up people, get some sleep. and go to sleep.

Yeah, I'm not going to say. But there's a weird. It is. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't like it as a way of talking about. But there is this thing of like, yeah, our analysis is you're all asleep, basically, by acting habitually. But of course, the affect of tiredness is basically to be compliant and just follow along and do things. But that shows you how much of an insult it is, because nobody wants to think about themselves as, quote, unquote, sheeple, right? Whatever that mean, nobody does. So it's from a communications perspective, like it's a terrible tactic.

Which is, yeah, but that's why the right have said, have seized on this word woke, basically, because implicitly it's got a patronising attitude towards the not woke. It is. It's terribly patronising quite right. That's why they've seized it and elevated it to their main insult, you know. Actually, there's a song by Chumber Womba that's really appropriate to what we've been discussing. I know we play Chumble a couple of times already on this show, you know, let's give that a pass their friends of mine. so they will come up.

The song is called I Wish That They'd Sack Me. It's a lovely little song It's off their album. The Boy Bands have won from 2008. And it's sort of like a little folk song. The lyrics are really what we're talking about.

They go five days of seven. The week's hardly mine. My alarm clock's gone over to enemy lines. I spend my day sewing what others will reap. I wish that they'd sack me and leave me to sleep. You know, it's totally on that, that weaponisation of drowsiness, militant, almost angry drowsiness, that anti-work weaponisation of drowsiness that we talked about

in relation to the poster that I didn't go to work today poster. It's not surprising, actually, because the chumbas are also friends with Brian who produced that poster. We're all part of the same scene. Anyway, potpickers, here's Chumbabwamba, provoking militant slumber with their 2008 non-hit, I wish that they'd sack me.

Six in the morning, I don't want to wake, sun laying low and the world sleeping late. Hate like the river runs heavy and deep. Oh, I wish that they'd sack me, and leave me to sleep I think we could move on from there to talk about, you know, staying up, like not sleeping and this idea of that as something that's pleasurable and desirable.

I mean, from the beginning of this show, because we were talking about collective joy, and because I run club nights, and I've written about rave, and we're interested in all that stuff, people often assume that we're really into. We're into raving. We're into staying up all night, partying, and fighting for our right to party and not sleeping till Brooklyn.

And this is something everybody who I do all this stuff with knows about me is that I hate staying up all night. I hate the fact. And I have hated the fact since I was 20. That rave culture and dance culture mostly revolves around staying up all night. I think it's just a mistake. I mean, I'll say I'll do it. I'm not saying don't come to my all night parties because do. It's fun.

but I mean I've evolved a really specific set of practices which enable me to sort of recover from those really quickly and that's partly why not drinking not doing drugs just doing a lot of yoga like going to bed when I get home and going to bed early the next day and it's very very specific and apart from doing that which I've really had to train myself to do over decades I'd really hate staying up on and I wish in my ideal world we wouldn't be putting on those parties like till five or six of the morning. We'd be doing them in the daytime. We'd start at 12-1 in the afternoon, maybe after lunch, and just carry on until 10, and then everybody could go to bed. Because I think it's just ridiculous. I mean, simply from the point of view of safe, creative drug use, I mean, it's just a

medical fat. If you're taking something like MDMA or other drugs, like stimulant drugs or psychedelics, and you're taking them after your normal bedtime, then a large proportion of what the drug is being used for is fighting your body and brain's desire for sleep and counteracting the effect of the stress hormones which staying up late generates in massive quantities. You honestly will just have a much better time if you don't do that. You have a much better time if you take those drugs at other time, you know, when you're not, try it when your body doesn't want to go to sleep. There is this whole cultural idea that you have to do that sort of stuff. You have to do that stuff at night. You have to do it outside the daytime because the

daytime is the sphere of normality. It's the sphere of work. And the conservative people and the losers. That's the problem. Yeah. It's when the squares are out. Exactly. The squares are out. And I just think it is a form of complacency for me. It's a form of complicity with capitalism's insistence that all of our daytime existence must be taken up with work or with tedious forms of social reproduction and can't possibly be occupied with bliss and joy and ecstasy. You know, capitalism insist on that and we buy into it to the extent that we can't imagine like relaxing, cutting loose, letting go, feeling free on the dance floor any other time. I really don't like it.

I really, really don't like it. I mean, thinking on those, there's lots and lots of people, especially like our age, like the vast majority of people, don't think of things like club culture and dance culture as accessible to them anymore because it's just taken for granted the only way you can do that is if you can sort of afford in your life to lose a whole night's sleep which most people it's just generally accepted if you've got kids for the reasons i set out at the beginning of the show you just don't have the hours in the week to spare to be able to even possibly contemplate like voluntarily losing a night's sleep and i think that makes it sort of inaccessible to people in a ways it doesn't have to be so

I hate it. I absolutely hate it. I hate that. And I think there's, if you trace the origins of that kind of stay up all night culture in Britain, it really originates in Northern Seoul, the Northern Soul dancing of the 70s, which is exciting and interesting and intriguing for lots of reasons. But this was a dance culture and a dancing that revolved entirely around people taking loads of amphetamines. And amphetamines, you know, I'm sure one can make an argument for they're being creative, uses of amphetamines. But basically, they're drugs that were invented to keep Nazi soldiers awake, you know, so they could kill people. And there's this whole continuity between the kind of culture around amphetamines and the kind of macho, aggressive energy that they're designed to generate in people. And the fact they're designed to either make people thin and comply to a sort of certain kind of ideal body type, because amphetavines were marketed in the post-war period, mainly as slimming pills. Or to just keep people awake so they can kill people or work for days at a time of that sleep.

There's just, there's something about a culture which has historically, that has its roots in using those technologies. Are we putting speed and MDMA in the same catchment to you? No, well, this is an interesting question. This is based on really casual observations, because like I haven't taken MDMA for like decades. I never even,

I've never liked it that much. I know that's sort of sacrilegious thing to say for a lot of people. But I would say, based on casual observations, but also on based on things like reading, the kind of annual reports about drug use and about the drugs are in circulation, the markets, which I've always tried to do, keeping an eye on the historical development of that scene. We were saying this when we were preparing the show.

I mean, I think it was much more normal, like, when we were a lot younger, when Kear and I, were in our 20s, I think it was much more normal than I think it is now for people to go out raving for like an entire weekend. Weekend. And that was inherited from Northern Seoul, but that was because most of the pills people were taking work. a cut with speed and people were all people were just supplementing MDMA with speed. Right, okay, because I was just trying to define terms.

Yeah, and it did become really noticeable to me that once, like, pure MDMA became much cheaper and much more widely available, and once amphetamine sort of became much less widely consumed, become much more normal than those younger people. You know, this riff is a great excuse to play Weekender by Flowerdale. We cannot. You go to work, a Friday is payday, we can't, do that's the total epitome of that, like 90s basically, you know, you go out all weekend, and like, you go out all weekend and like you live for the weekends basically and the week is a blur where you do meaningless

you know you're meaningless work etc and the only thing you're excited about is staying up all weekend but what's worse doing that or like interdispersing precarious work where you're on all the time with scrolling through your phone and chatting with people because you're unable to have whole you know segments of time or the day to yourself yeah but i think i think people sort of thought about that weekender culture has a sort of resistance to capitalism, as resistance to your whole life being dominated by work. And it's a particularly effective resistance.

But, you know, you have to recognise there was a big politicisation of rave in the 90s, etc, primarily because it got cracked down on by the government and by the police and all that sort of stuff. Well, it's true, but the most politicised wing of it involved the connections between the emergent rave culture and the festival scene. And the festival, the free festivals historically had not been about, that it had been about, like, dancing and partying in the daytime. in the countryside yeah but like spiral tribe and all of that lot where like we won't they're all

on speed and we won't sleep for like five six days or something like yeah i know they were absolutely scary no foes as well i think we should play the fantastic song insomnia by faithless it's a 1995 track that's got this amazing energy yeah i love that insomnia that faithless track insomnia but that it's like an ode to the to the come down insomnia you know that inability to fall asleep because you're so wired and all that sort of stuff really relates actually to a lot of what we were saying

about raving through the night time. The other song about Insomnia, we should probably mention, is I'm So Tired by the Beatles. It's actually a John Lennon's song of the White album. The White album, which is, of course, well-recognized as the best Beatles album ever. I've perhaps got that. But the lyrics are, you know, I'm so tired. I haven't slept a wink. I'm so tired.

My mind is on the blink. I get up and fix myself a drink. No, no, no. I'm so tired. I don't know what to do. I'm so tired. My mind is set on you. I wonder should I call you, but I know what you would do.

I read that Jonathan Crary book this week, that 24-7. And that opens with this vignette about a bird that, what is it, a white crown sparrow or something. So this is this bird that when it's migrating can stay awake for seven days straight, basically. The US Department of Defense DARPA, their Research Institute, spent loads of money trying to sort of study this to sort of, could we learn how to like crack sleep so that your body doesn't need sleep, rather than like the...

Could we become elves? Could we become elves? Could we become Vulcans? I really, really would not be surprised if that was one of the research department's things. Yeah, because basically, because you already mentioned it, Jim, about speed has been this really huge tool, particularly in World War II, where, you know, troops on both sides were given, and particularly pilots and stuff, were given speed to keep them up and to keep going for days on end and all that sort of stuff. But the problem with that is that that doesn't over, that, that stimulates. alertness or whatever or awakeness, but it doesn't overcome the body's need for sleep. So you pay a hefty price later on, as did people at Spiral Drive parties and all that sort of

stuff. So, you know, there's, and there's huge literatures about, like, you know, loads and loads of people, most of people take speed at work in order to get through arduous work routines. Is Ritalin in that class? It is an amphetamine, yeah, it's not speed, but yeah. Yeah, because that's, you know, there's a whole, you know, obviously in the US there's a whole culture of, like, people taking pills. There's obviously, which is terrible, I think, just popping pills for all sorts of reasons. That's a really good point. I mean, that is a direct descendant. That's a direct descendant, I think, of that mid-century, mid-20th, mid-to-late 20th century, infatimines culture. Because that was, I mean, amphetamins were the performance-enhancing drugs of the early, you know, from like the 1920s,

in the 1970s. Of course, before that, like Coke was, like Freud, Sigmund Freud, a young Sigmund Freud wrote a paper, he wrote a paper about how cocaine was this miracle drug because it was a performance enhancer because it keeps you awake and it, like super caffeine, it enhances your cognitive facilities. That's why Conan Doyle had Sherlock Holmes addicted to cocaine. People always think it's opium because that's what they think of now, but it was, in the stories, Sherlock Holmes is addicted to coke. I always say it's one of the most, it's one of the definite signs

that we live in a sick and diseased culture that we turned cocaine, which is an anaesthetic and a work drug. We've turned it into the leisure drug. It's a symptom of a sick society. It's a drug that was designed to let people do loads of work and to be an anaesthetic,

like to dull the senses. So anyway, that's my anti- cocaine. We should stick to Buffetton. of speed, that's what I mean. But then speed, then speed becomes the performance enhancing drug. And that's like the northern soul parties, they're all taking these pills, which are like robbed from pharmacies and stuff. It's not, they haven't got like meth labs. They're just, there's a huge industry. And speed's being prescribed like to housewives, the slimming pills. It's being to prescribe to anyone who goes to the doctor and says, I'm a bit tired. Do you get prescribed, you know, amphetamine pills? But then, yeah, Ritalin and the whole, the whole kind of ADD diagnosis, industry. Overdiagnosis, yeah. I always like using that as a teaching example for students when talking about teaching Foucault or something like that because it's a really interesting example of how the line between phenomena being purely socially constructed or having some actual biophysical

reality is a blurry line because on the one hand you can say most ADD diagnoses have just isolated a set of behaviours which are perfectly normal in the people they're being isolated in and I can easily be explained by lifestyle beaches, like they don't get enough exercise, they have too much sugar, they watch too much TV, etc. And you can easily say that from that point of view, like most ADD is fictional

and shouldn't be treated pharmacologically. On the other hand, once you are in a society where what you will do, if that diagnosis is made, is you will give people very powerful amphetamine, you know, super advanced amphetamins that will affect their brain chemistry very powerfully, very immediately.

Then it becomes a material. theory or reality, it becomes a physical thing. Yeah, and the pendulum approach to drugs has a huge effect on sleep, if we're going to go back, you know, pointing on the subject, is that if you're having, you know, the caffeine to wake you up, you know, alcohol to help you relax, you know, it's just that whole, like, Ritalin for this, and then, you know, I don't know, Prozac for that or whatever, that will affect your sleep horrendously. Yeah, but also sleeping pills with the other side of this. I mean, the other side of this is the history of sleeping pills, the medication, I mean, there was this huge, there was an epidemic of people being prescribed

powerful barbiturates, like for decades in the 20th century. And we can play the fall song Roach Rumble, which is a sort of protest song about the over-prescription of mood-altering medication, especially Valium. Roche! A Rosh! A Rumble! It's Valium! Vyam! Vig!

Valium! Vig! Roche, a Rumble, and that's Rumble. I'm sure there's listeners to the show who are not in the UK, you know, in the US. I mean, people still say, like casually say, I took a volume, I took half a volume, you know, is what people do. I mean, people take it in the UK as well. Yeah, they do, yeah, people take Xanax all the top. Loads of people take Xanax.

And, I mean, all that's happened is these things have been replaced by much more sophisticated. drugs. They've been much more sophisticated ones that don't have the same recreational capacities for the most part. I mean, one doesn't want to write it off. I mean, I've got close friends who take antidepressants and they are beneficial to them. So again, it's one of these phenomena where we want to avoid being like censorious and avoid denying that. It has benefits for some people, but you have to look at the macro data as well. My attitude to all of those drugs is a bit like your attitude to agriculture, Jeremy. It was a terrible mistake, but it's too late now.

Let's dive in and go through the other side. Yeah, I think you're probably right. But it's probably interesting that sleep deprivation is this really prominent form of torture, basically. I think it's always been used as a form of torture, but like it really took off it in the post-9-11 era in the US where enhanced interrogations, I think the word was, you know, basically became this

form of like really programmed activity. There was a guy one of the most documented, well-documented cases. It's in the John Crary book is this guy called Mohammed al-Katani who basically was kept awake for two months or as much as they could possibly

keep them awake for two months. At the same time he was subject to like waterboarding etc. It sort of relates to this idea that when you're tired, you're really compliant and all that's what they get wanting to get out of them. But like it produces in you this form of helplessness, basically, this tiredness, which is in you this form of helplessness and compliance, but it's of absolutely no use for extracting information, basically, because the person will tell

you whatever they think you will want to hear in order for you to leave them alone so they can get some sleep. It's sort of like an extreme experiment to give us some indication of what, the role that, the brought in role that sleep plays in helping us maintain a sense of ourselves, do you know what I mean, of like process and experiences and be able to become acting. do you know what I mean? So perhaps that answer to the whole woke thing is, you know, if you want people to become active and conscious and self-reflective and they have to have enough sleep, do you know what I mean? So let the non-woke sleep more fully and then they will become woke. I think that's where I'm going with this.

Wow, that's too far out.