This essay is part of a series from participants in the 2025 AIR Retreat, organized by the Aspen Art Museum in collaboration with e-flux journal and the Doris Duke Foundation. The conversations at the retreat centered on machine-learning technologies and the acute social frictions surrounding new forms and long histories of identification, labor, and control, as well as ways that artistic practice can interact with and interfere in these tendencies. The gathering was conceived by a working group consisting of Paul Chan, Aria Dean, Zoë Hitzig, and Evan Calder Williams, with Aspen Art Museum curators-at-large Vic Brooks and Anisa Jackson.
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1. Is the Bedroom a Factory?
A subtle shift in how we think about idleness might have arrived, largely unnoticed, in 2021, when Twitch and Kick began welcoming a new category of sleep streamers: “I’m only sleeping.” Previously the platforms had banned streamers for being away from keyboard for too long, deeming it “idle content” or “unattended content.” But during the pandemic, sleep streaming became a lucrative source of revenue—for some. Top sleepers can earn as much as ten or fifteen thousand dollars in one night, if they count revenue from new subscribers to their OnlyFans. This is a figure that most other streamers can only dream about.
At first glance, sleep is one of the few remaining refuges from the workday: Jonathan Crary spells out this line of thought in 24/7, describing sleep as the “only remaining barrier … that capitalism cannot eliminate.”1 But sleep and dreaming have increasingly become sites of work. In addition to the sleep streamers themselves, who often recount their nightmares or dreams to their audience immediately after they wake up, there are tech start-ups researching how to make dreaming more productive. MIT’s Dream Lab, for example, has developed a device called Dormio to “dream hack.” As they write, “Dreaming is really just thinking at night,” and they want to remake sleep into a productive extension of the daytime.2 Using audio cues to prompt users to dream about specific subjects, and then waking them up in the middle of hypnagogic sleep, Dormio is designed to spark creative thinking in engineers and inventors. Of course, there is a longstanding and intimate connection between sleep and labor. As nineteenth-century laborers expressed in Jacques Rancière’s Nights of Labor, sleep was complicit with the drive to make them productive at work the next day. Night, they believed, “belongs to those who order the labors of the day.”3 Refusing this injunction, they instead stayed up late to engage in “unproductive” forms of creativity and social critique.
If this logic of the productivity of sleep is a historical one, what new forms of this logic might we see in the sleep streamers? Or, as the artist Paul Heintz asked me: Is the bedroom a factory, and if so, what does resistance to it look like? We were in his studio to discuss his new film and installation, Sleep Work (2026).4 It follows the lives of several sleep streamers, including Stephen, a former veteran from Oregon with PTSD; Andrew, from New Jersey, who wants to promote his sneaker business; and Dottea, from Kansas, who has depression, and who therefore reasons that “if I’m going to always be in bed, at least let me try to capitalize on it.” Yet this job also has its dark side. If sleep streaming has become a form of entertainment, Dottea likens it to a “game show—you’re a contestant at this great stage with this incredible prize before you. But the audience is all laughing at you.” While most sleep streams are passive, producing ad revenue during sleep and offering a place for fans to simply hang out and chat, some of them earn money by letting their audience pay to wake them up with obnoxious noises, videos, even electric shocks.
Sleep Work’s title suggests the contemporary fantasy of literally making money in your sleep. Warren Buffett’s quote—“If you don’t find a way to make money while you sleep, you will work until you die”—popularized a sentiment that seems to have been common since at least the 1860s, when advertisements for land, agricultural machines, and other dubious investments dominated the popular press. (Usury’s sinful ability to multiply money endlessly, even while the lender sleeps, might be part of this prehistory.) Given the increasingly narrow path for wealth creation through traditional employment, the “free money” side of American-style digital capitalism has surged in popularity. Stephen mentions investing subscription money in Bitcoin and in meme stocks such as Gamestop and AMC. But we could also think of drop-shipping on Amazon, deriving income from vending machines, and selling generative AI–written books. Sleep streaming is supposed to bring in “free money” too: while streamers often invest in their bedroom “set” or hire live moderators, there should be almost no work involved once the stream is up and running, at least in theory. All of these money-making “gimmicks,” in Sianne Ngai’s sense of the word—elaborate setups that seem to save labor, while also creating new, unnecessary forms of labor—index the anxiety that there’s no real work left to do.5 They trap people in a paradoxical oscillation between entrepreneurism and passivity, suggesting that sleep streaming is really a fantasy about the future of work as done by machines or other automated agents.
This fantasy is often regressive; our techno-feudal lords use it to justify replacing human labor with AI agents. They promise that this will unlock time for people to engage in creativity and leisure (which is to say, consumption), a promise that Aaron Bastani refers to as “fully automated luxury communism.”6 But sleep streaming also contains the seed of a future without work at its center, a future where political change is decoupled from the struggle over work. Consider that two of Heintz’s subjects have disabilities that keep them from working conventional jobs. As Neta Alexander points out, to focus only on strong forms of resistance, such as factory strikes, ignores subjects who are unable to participate. To cite one of the epigraphs in Alexander’s book Interface Frictions: How Digital Debility Reshapes Our Bodies—the epigraph is from Johanna Hedva’s “Sick Woman Theory”—what use is it to “throw a brick through the window of a bank if you can’t get out of bed?”7
Alexander points to communities of disability, where one might work to allow others to rest, as an example of how crip practices can “bend the domestic environment to meet the injured body instead of forcefully feeding it into health.”8 That last phrase, “forcefully feeding it into health,” suggests the violent ways that the idea of health can be used against workers, but also the possibility of redesigning the working environment so it is not a zero-sum game. As Alexander reminds us, “Crip time teaches us that misalignment can sometimes prove crucial for creativity, healing, and new orientations from which to see the world.”9 Even though most subjects strive, by necessity, to align themselves with the physical demands of capitalism, they may still find space for misalignment sometimes. Sleeping as working is a kind of hack that frees up more of the day to dream, or to escape by interrupting the normative rhythms of work-sleep-work. But by turning dreaming into content, it also acknowledges the way that nearly everything in our world (even respite) is subject to the demands of capital.
While Heintz told me about another kind of hack—streamers sometimes substitute recorded video of themselves sleeping for live video—I was more interested in the ways that dream and nighttime can be cleaved apart. As Stephen explains to the camera, “Weed makes it so you don’t dream, so I don’t have too many dreams.” Not dreaming can be a relief. Stephen describes dark and violent dreams about his deployment in Iraq, and how he and other veterans turn to sleep medicine and supplements to avoid debilitating insomnia. Indeed, every streamer Heintz talked to smokes weed; many of them need it get to sleep so they can keep streaming. Stephen’s experience with weed echoes that of Amazon warehouse workers, who commonly use weed as a way of managing their exhaustion, as well as their anxiety and stress about not keeping up with the required work rate. (Amazon no longer tests for weed and is considered one of the most “weed-friendly” workplaces.) Glad to not have nightmares intruding on their sleep, weed smokers sometimes speak of the terrifying anxiety that accompanies the return of dreams. Here the contrast between the productive, creative, entrepreneurial class of dream hackers and the poorer sleepers, in both senses of the word, becomes clear. The latter see nothing at all in their dreams.
In a public conversation at AIR 2025 about Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Rafiq Bhatia’s film On Blue (2022), artist P. Staff and psychoanalyst Jamieson Webster reflected on the film’s depiction of an insomniac finally able to sleep. Staff wondered if there was a “productivity to dreaming” that goes against the common understanding of dreaming as “sifting through documents as if … clearing out a junky downloads folder.”10 There is a wonderful literalness to Staff’s office-work metaphor that is worth staying with. Many of the dreams the streamers recount in Sleep Work have to do with the work of streaming: one streamer dreams that he is trying to stream cats on his phone, while another dreams that he is still live and still streaming himself for five hundred dollars. If dreams are a way of working on oneself, whether through analysis or the reshuffling of one’s memories, refusing to dream must also be a way of refusing oneself, lethargically.11 While Rancière’s workers sought to “take back the time that was refused them … winning from nightly rest the time to discuss, write, compose verses, or develop philosophies,” the goal of sleep streaming is instead to refuse the wakefulness that philosophers typically aspire to, and to forget the temporal bonds between sleep and work rather than reinforce them.12 By showing how flat dreaming can be when tethered to digital capitalism, the streamers register their discord with that system of labor. Refusing to see the world, pessimistic as that may be, is another way of seeing the world differently; both reject the present’s inevitability.
2. Sleeping with Others
It is difficult to resist comparing sleep work to other nighttime work in the bedroom. And it’s surely true that the mise-en-scène of the streamer’s bedroom bears a loose, generic resemblance to camming and sex work. Many popular sleep streamers, such as Amouranth, blur the line between soporific and sexualized content, when they do things like stream from hot tubs in swimsuits. In performing the “sleeping beauty” fantasy, they are perhaps reenacting the slippage between sleep and sex that Matthew Fuller summarizes (via the Endymion myth) thus: “Since you are lying down we might as well have sex.”13
But if we immediately resolve the euphemism “sleeping with” someone into sex, we miss something about sleep itself, namely its power to perceive and feel, as José Muñoz puts it, “modes of being in the world that might be less knowable than sex.”14 Thus to see sleep streaming as sex work is to miss something fundamental about how sleep streamers propose other modes of being. The same holds true, reciprocally, for sex itself. We think we know what sex is as a discrete act—did they have sex? did they not?—but historically, sex acts have existed on a spectrum, with different gradations determined by ecclesiastical law and other customs. Sleep and sex also shadow each other in complicated ways. Before artificial light, it was once the custom to wake up in the middle of the night, often to have sex; it was also the custom to sleep communally with friends, travelers, or strangers, almost always without sex. In the early modern period, there was an anxiety that sex might be immoral if it disrupted a good night’s rest; similarly, one cause of today’s “sex recession” is poor sleep from stress, or precarity. Put simply: perhaps when we are talking about sex, we ought to be talking about sleep too.
A sleep stream positions a viewer somewhere in this expanded field—somewhere between sleepiness and sex and stranger-friendship and care. Like ASMR, many viewers use sleep streams to fall asleep themselves. Sleep streams facilitate a sense of communal sleeping, where the streamer is the impetus for gathering; it’s one of the few places where live online chats are possible on modern social media platforms. The result is a queer form of feeling with others. At first this feeling may seem completely unconscious, but sleep streamers often describe waking up several times a night, seeing their screen with the stream of themselves on it, and going back to sleep. The image registers with gaps in it, in moments of being half-awake.
Experiments with sleep streaming began as soon as technology made it possible: Paul Sermon’s Telematic Dreaming (1992), for example, was a media artwork where two beds in different locations were connected by video over ISDN link, with one user projected onto the other’s bed in a dark room. Though this work was designed to explore the potential of interaction—“touching with our eyes as if touching with our hands”—it still suggests a different sense of proximity that is possible when the body is lying flat and at rest (rather than, say, performing alertness in a Zoom meeting).15 But perhaps the most relevant comparison is Weerasethakul’s SLEEPCINEMAHOTEL (2018), an installation designed to let a visitor fall asleep inside a continuous reel of cinema, alongside other “hotel” guests. As Jean Ma writes, its moving images are not a perfect text to be studied and pored over like a good critic, but something experienced with the half-light of the projection washing over you. This oscillation between attention and inattention, as well as the vulnerability of being asleep with others, weakens our sense of individual autonomy. Ma argues that this is a good thing: it potentially offers new ways of being with others.16 While exhaustion is nominally a property of the individual, these images point to an exhaustion that is a wilder and less known state than we usually imagine, because it is a shared state.
How rarely we are asleep with others in public! Sleep has become a private matter in the West, with just a few exceptions: sleeping in airports and on streets and park benches; sleeping in the cinema, a place often used both for respite and for lovers to enjoy a tryst (hence its early association with licentious behavior); sleeping in libraries, where it is still predominantly the domain of the racialized or socially excluded subject. See, for example, the “Sleepy Asians” meme; Danielle Wong writes that “Asians Sleeping at the University Library” are seen as “too efficient,” given the proximity between their work and their sleep.17 We are uncomfortable with work and sleep overlapping too much; no wonder we are quick to rush to sex as a way of understanding streamers.
Sleep is also the result of one’s attention waning, of a slackening interest—in short, of boredom. As Plan C has polemically written, boredom was the price that mid-century workers paid for achieving job security.18 Though precarity has upset this grand bargain, being labelled boring is still a stinging insult. So there’s something patronizing about how culture depicts the working class as both easily amused by escapist distractions in their efforts to overcome “boredom” at work, and as bored by high culture (for example, by falling asleep at the movies). But if “interest” and attention is how one asserts one’s autonomy (or even class status), can sleep streaming direct us elsewhere?
Sleep streaming is, despite its novelty and titillation, or perhaps because of it, boring, after a time. It is PG-13 at best; it lasts for a whole night; it is meant to make you fall asleep. It is produced to become “content,” and it exemplifies the logic of content: content is always, after enough time, boring, since content is infinitely replaceable by something else—for example, by a new TV show that replaces the old TV show when the latter’s streaming rights change. This is true even of genres such as camming that ought to excite and stimulate. Caleb Murray-Bozeman has written about a recorded live stream of a threesome in which not much actual sex happens; the performers interact with the chat function, wander off screen, and the stream freezes. In what he sees as a shift from earlier modes of online pornography, this recorded live stream shows that now, online “porn connotes both the pursuit of instant gratification and the perpetual deferral of that gratification … It perpetuates the frustration that it promises to relieve.”19
Sleep streamers don’t promise gratification of the same sort, but they incorporate boredom and deferral into the structure of their streaming. They are Murray-Bozeman’s threesome live stream taken to its extreme: they are all sleep and all chat, no sex (not explicitly—but often enough sex suffuses the bedroom nonetheless, leaving the sociality of sex without the act itself). And yet, for the overworked, and particularly for white-collar workers who pay good money for sleep apps to bore them to sleep, boredom is now a feature of online life, not a bug. The very structure of content—consuming without actually watching—becomes a genre that you can subscribe to. Even Twitch streams of violent first-person shooter games are often so virtuosic, repetitive, and mesmerizing that they become “calming, just enough stimulation to take your mind off whatever’s been keeping you awake but not enough to prevent you from nodding off.”20 Like winding down and even falling asleep in front of the television at the end of the day, live streams have become sleep aids. Put another way, boredom is no longer the result of boring content. Boredom, the “desire for desires” (as Tolstoy put it), is the highest expression of content now.21
One of the more controversial claims in Rancière’s study is that in order to find other worlds of experience, one must first let the “real” world (that is, the grind of work-sleep-work) fade away so that “those other worlds, which supposedly anesthetize the sufferings of the workers, can actually be the thing that … sharpens their awareness … and reveals a being dedicated to something else besides exploitation.”22 Here Rancière is defending hobbies and explorations that might seem to be “anesthetics,” such as sentimental poetry, which reads too much as an exaggeration of intellectual or bourgeoise writing for our comfort. But if seemingly “anesthetic” art is an alternate way of redistributing the senses, could we extend its aesthetic value to objects that we normally label as escapist, even to content?
This is why it is so striking when Heintz asks his streamers to read aloud from each other’s dream journals, creating a correspondence between streamers: “I’m on a boat; I get knowledge that it’s a pirate boat, and I like that. It’s a huge ocean liner, with solar sails.” More important than analyzing these dreams is to notice how the images from each streamer’s dreams rhyme with each other. They are social and vernacular, inflected by science fiction and genre fiction. Not quite Rancière’s poetry and intellectual study, they also fail to reveal a truer self that has been hidden by work. Instead, Heintz’s film reveals what happens during communal sleep with strangers. It shows a mode of being that by rights should be individual—dreaming—yet the result is collective speculation about what the end of the world looks like. This is itself a generic form—we’ve all heard or seen something involving escaping a doomed world by spaceship before—and it is also quirky and odd. It exceeds the boundaries of content and is only partially assimilable by it.
When all we can do is speculate—when we are living inside of science fiction and its scenarios, and when today’s technology is almost entirely based on technocapitalists misreading dystopian science fiction—these dreams about escape into space become banal and moving at the same time. Rather than Musk or Bezos’s rockets that leave the planet they have themselves despoiled, these dreams suggest that speculation itself is exhausted. I don’t mean that imagining radical new worlds is pointless. Instead, speculation has been co-opted, so that we find ourselves painted into a corner, forced to live in a futurity that evacuates attention to the present. In a moment where the slogan “another world is possible” feels increasingly empty (to invoke Sara Marcus’s book on political disappointment), what are we to call these nocturnal, otherworldly images of sleep streamers?23
For me, they point to the exhaustion of communication: How do we speak when we have no words? How do we feel, despite being burned out and numb? Most of all, if boredom is now an endless waiting for the next bit of content to alleviate it but also extend it, what other temporalities exist above and beyond boredom’s cycles of virality and distribution? The irony of boredom today is that its inexhaustibility is one of its selling points. What would it mean to see the world as exhausted, “out of time”?
3. After the End of the World
Sleep Work is not just a nocturnal film; the outside appears regularly. There’s a postapocalyptic shot of Stephen hunting with a metal detector on the beach; Dottea offers treats to the neighbor’s dogs; the film ends with a shot of Andrew dropping off a package for shipment in the dim light of his cellphone. These ordinary actions are completely different from the confined, nocturnal, screen-based existence that we initially expect. They could suggest that—like night-shift workers—the streamers’ true sense of “spare time,” when they are “fully present to themselves” (Humphrey Jennings), is not at night but during the day.24 But I understand these moments differently. One shot of Dottea outside feeding dogs is filmed by her own webcam, suggesting that the outside to the stream is also part of the performance.
We think that hearing about the streamers’ dreams makes us intimate with them somehow, but Heintz goes in another direction. How little we know of them, through their dreams and their confessions and their bodies sleeping. He doesn’t pull back the mechanism and show us who they really are, but instead shows us that sleep is a world “less knowable,” even to themselves.
Instead, the streamers wake up each morning to a larger set and setting of the alien: a garbage dump, a Dune-like planet, where a broken cell phone pulses with the dream of a pirate ship. Andrew concludes the film with a deflating comment: “To avoid real life I turn on the stream … I can only hope that it can be better, but that’s not the reality of it.” There’s something deflating about these illusory openings, in the way that a dream recounted out loud is always less impressive—even a little bit boring—to your friends or strangers than it is to yourself in the moment. In the light of day, its vividness has faded. Something has soured.
I have been thinking about this souring in terms of afterness. The larger world outside of the stream is still structured mostly the same as the streamers’ nighttime world of work—waiting to find buried metal that’s lost or discarded; hustling sales for a business. Nothing worse about this, but also not much better either. Little has changed; one has a sense that it will repeat again the next day. And yet—here is what I am trying to put my finger on—the “afterness” of the film, the feeling of a hangover as we awake from viewing it, is actually the point. We are conditioned to expect change, and yet we get precious little of it.
What I am describing as a hangover is, for me, more interesting than any universal possibilities of sleep itself. I think this is because, politically, we Americans seem to be in a constant state of being “after.” Most obviously, this is “after” the dream of liberalism, or left organizing.25 But afterness is also the indeterminate time of political exhaustion. Though it is easy to point to moments and events where everything seems to have changed (Covid-19, elections, etc.), we are after without always knowing after what, exactly. The other shoe is always about to drop, making it impossible to know the extent of the dread or damage. We only exist in that sense of ongoing loss that “after” refers to. Marcus’s description of twentieth-century America as structured by “political disappointment”—as in Langston Hughes’s “dream deferred”—feels timely today. And yet, as she argues, disappointment is a way of holding on to a desire for change.
I’d rather focus, then, on disappointment for its own sake. I find the frustrated desire for change (whether we experience it as discontentment, or a hangover, or merely the exhaustion of waiting or of running the gauntlet over and over) to be its own category of thought. Rather than simply the opposite of fulfillment, that frustration creates its own imaginaries. Roland Barthes, in his passage on waiting in Lover’s Discourse, writes: “The being I am waiting for is not real … I create it and re-create it over and over, starting from my capacity to love, starting from my own need for it.”26 The desire that illuminates the lover is “set loose” from what is nominally desired; it is something closer to the desire for desire. Perhaps more importantly, we should reframe the negativity within disappointment to reveal what it can say about the problem of “doing.” This would not result in immediate action but instead doing less, or degrowth, or even doing nothing at all: I think of Tega Brain and Sam Lavigne’s installation Perfect Sleep (2021), which puckishly argues that if we used their sleep app to sleep twenty-four hours a day, we would finally solve the climate crisis.
Many workers are already set loose from normative time. I have been interested in the way that sleep streamers and night-shift workers—such as nighttime call-center workers, who are beholden to callers’ chronopower—are untimely, detached from the rhythms of everyday life even as they occasionally cater to them. They are stuck—not quite diurnal, not quite on schedule—in a state that night-shift workers describe as being permanently jetlagged. It goes without saying that this kind of work is exhausting, making those who do it too tired to be part of the day, oscillating between cycles of sleeping and working, with little time for anything in between, such as their own family. I have no way of redeeming this exhaustion. Yet I am thinking of a point made by urban theorist AbdouMaliq Simone about how residents of so-called uninhabitable spaces in the Global South, such as the favela, are in some sense indifferent to the official rhythms of everyday life:
If God has truly forgotten these places, then perhaps there is a kind of freedom not to be remembered by or incorporated into God’s analytics. For in environs full of everyday catastrophe, the only way to live with it is to attain some indifference, where all that which is capable of producing an unjustifiable or unnecessary death—when each death is necessary and therefore justified—is flattened out.27
In these spaces, many are indifferent to phrases such as “revolution,” even as they are all too familiar with the underside of political projects carried out in their name. But to study what Simone calls their “rhythms of endurance, the surges of life that carry bodies forward and back between destinations that are altered in each approach, each retreat” is necessarily to pay attention to their detachment from official rhythms.28 Though Simone is writing primarily about urban space in the Global South, his analysis also holds for time. The examples above, in which bodies are displaced from the usual regimes of a daytime job, suggest that even if the day is still used, ultimately, in support of making money at night, even if it is structured by official forms of time, it is still marked with its own rhythms, its own unknowns.
I have been using sleep streamers metaphorically, to show what might happen when we forget or unlearn our routines, to think about others who are “out of time.” This includes those whose bodies are misaligned with daytime or with capitalism, as well as those whose position coloniality has placed “out of time,” outside of modernity. I have been thinking of other forms of work that are “after,” such as hobbyists pouring nitric acid over the gold fingers and wires of old computer chips, or gleaners collecting misshapen vegetables at the edge of a field. There are still people who can glean pockets of respite and survival within that exhaustion.
I think this is why Stephen, the streamer with the metal detector, stands out to me—he’s sifting for lost artifacts from the recent past, buried under the shifting sand. This is the science fiction of exhaustion, the scavenging of outdated materials to write a new kind of story. There are also other genres that speak to the displacement of time, that can turn the “afterness” of disappointment into predictions for the future.
At the ends of exhaustion, there is a door called dawn or dusk: the show’s over; all the viewers have left, and there is only residual, uninhabitable time left. But living in the uninhabitable, Simone would point out, is itself a form of dwelling together.
Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (Verso, 2013), 72.
Tessa Love, “An MIT Lab Is Building Devices to Hack Your Dreams,” OneZero April 13, 2020 →.
Jacques Rancière, The Nights of Labor: The Workers’ Dream in Nineteenth-Century France (Temple University Press, 1989), 16.
Sleep Work is included in Heintz’s upcoming exhibition “Night Shift” at Le Grand Café, Saint-Nazaire, France, March 14–May 10, 2026 →.
Sianne Ngai, Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form (Harvard University Press, 2020).
Aaron Bastani, Fully Automated Luxury Communism: A Manifesto (Verso, 2019).
Johanna Hedva, “Sick Woman Theory” →. Quoted in Neta Alexander, Interface Frictions: How Digital Debility Reshapes Our Bodies (Duke University Press, 2025), 118.
Alexander, Interface Frictions, 138.
Alexander, Interface Frictions, 148.
“P. Staff and Jamieson Webster—After On Blue,” July 29, 2025, posted January 8, 2026, by Aspen Art Museum, Vimeo →.
On practices of refusing oneself, see Tung-Hui Hu, Digital Lethargy: Dispatches from An Age of Disconnection (MIT Press, 2022).
Jacques Rancière, “Preface to New English Edition,” Proletarian Nights: The Workers’ Dream in Nineteenth-Century France (Verso, 2012), ix.
Matthew Fuller, How to Sleep: The Art, Biology and Culture of Unconsciousness (Bloomsbury, 2018), 115.
José Esteban Muñoz, “The Sense of Watching Tony Sleep,” South Atlantic Quarterly 106, no. 3 (2007): 543.
Paul Sermon, “Telematic Dreaming – Statement,” paulsermon.org →.
Jean Ma, At the Edges of Sleep: Moving Images and Somnolent Spectators (University of California Press, 2022), 20.
Danielle Wong, “Sleepy Asians,” Representations 168, no. 1 (2024).
Plan C, “We Are All Very Anxious,” weareplanc.org, April 4, 2014 →.
Caleb Murray-Bozeman, “The Frustrated Promise of Online Porn,” Porn Studies 11, no. 2 (2024): 171.
Luke Winkie, “The Twitch Streamers Who Put People To Sleep (Literally),” Kotaku, July 12, 2019 →.
Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, trans. Constance Garnett (Simon & Schuster, 2010), 670.
Rancière, Nights of Labor, 19.
Sara Marcus, Political Disappointment: A Cultural History from Reconstruction to the AIDS Crisis (Harvard University Press, 2023).
Humphrey Jennings, Spare Time (film) (General Post Office Film Unit, 1939).
I also think of the use of “after” in Joshua Chambers-Letson, After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life (NYU Press, 2018).
Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, trans. Richard Howard (Hill & Wang, 1978), 39.
AbdouMaliq Simone, Improvised Lives: Rhythms of Endurance in an Urban South (Duke University Press, 2018), 9.
Simone, Improvised Lives, 10.