Against the Clock: Remote Work, Stolen Sleep, and the Limits of Extraction

The human circadian rhythm is both defined by biology and dependent on context. From a series of popular cave studies, where subjects were placed in experimental conditions of total darkness and isolation, we know that the body has an innate rhythm. Biologists have identified its genetic basis in a gene called the CLOCK gene (Circadian Locomotor Output Cycles Kaput). But without access to environmental cues like sunlight or social cues like an alarm clock—cues called Zeitgetbers, or “time givers”—the rhythm doesn’t sync to a twenty-four-hour day. Our circadian clocks affect most bodily processes, from digestion and metabolism to detoxification, blood pressure, and hormone fluctuation. Among all the Zeitgebers, sunlight is by far the most crucial for setting the clock. In simple terms, human health requires a regular daily pattern on local time. 

Yet around the world, few are exposed to bright sunlight or total darkness. We’re not living in caves—we’re living in screen-lit bedrooms, fluorescent-lit offices, stadium-lit highways, always-lit factories; in warehouses, malls, movie theaters, and arcades. Over 80 percent of the global population is subject to some degree of light pollution at night, and 20 percent work night hours, likely missing morning sunlight.1 At this point a large proportion of us are living in a state that could be called permanent jet lag. When capitalist logic overrides both the body’s inclinations and the sun’s rotation, it essentially pulls the body into another time zone.

Alex Rivera’s 2008 film Sleep Dealer, a cyberpunk fable in which workers in Tijuana sell their labor hours to operate robots across a border they cannot cross, captures this sense of how working conditions create artificial time zones. Among the movie’s many other insights, which are to me startlingly and almost spookily relevant nearly twenty years after its release, is the revelation that the destruction of circadian time is the logical end point and the goal of extractive capitalism. 

By now Sleep Dealer is a classic—if it’s a cult classic, its cults are plentiful. I’ve heard about it from sci-fi aficionados, labor historians, contemporary artists, and plenty of insomniacs. Rivera’s handling of technological novelty and his aesthetic choices make it a natural touchstone; it’s also solid entertainment with a clever script and satisfying plot. But what strikes me most is the way the movie portrays disjunctures in time. The way time feels is, I think, one of the hardest things to express. As a capsule of its historical context, as a work of genre fiction, and as part of Rivera’s ongoing body of work, Sleep Dealer shows what happens when the 24/7 economy treats the body clock as an inconvenience to be overcome—and what it might mean, in turn, to overcome the 24/7 economy.

Point and Click

Between 1942 and 1964, the Mexican Farm Labor Program brought four and a half million migrant workers from Mexico to the United States on short-term contracts. The plan, known as the Bracero Program, was established to address wartime labor shortages in agriculture while withholding long-term legal status and protections from the labor force. In Spanish, “bracero” roughly means “one who works with their arms”—essentially a manual laborer.

In 1997, the Peruvian director Alex Rivera released a short film called Why Cybraceros? that sardonically proposed a contemporary reintroduction of the Bracero Program, but this time: “Only the labor of Mexicans will cross the border. Mexican workers will no longer have to.” In this speculative scenario, remote workers in Mexico control versatile robots called “cybraceros,” which carry out many kinds of labor—from harvesting crops to building skyscrapers—on US soil.

Why Cybraceros?, dir. Alex Rivera, 1997, film still.

The film includes footage of 1940s advertisements made by the California Growers Association, over which an authoritative voice explains: “‘Cybracero’ means a worker who poses no threat of becoming a citizen. And that means quality products at low financial and social costs to you, the American consumer.” In one scene, a man sits before a screen showing a live-streamed orange grove and maneuvers a plastic joystick that controls a robotic arm thousands of miles away. “To the worker,” the narrator says, “it’s as simple as point and click to pick.”

In his 1964 book about the mid-century bracero, the academic and labor organizer Ernesto Galarza asked, “Is this indentured alien—an almost perfect model of the economic man, an ‘input factor’ stripped of the political and social attributes that liberal democracy likes to ascribe to all human beings ideally—is this bracero the prototype of the production man of the future?”2 Rivera takes up Galarza’s question, and answers in the affirmative. He provides an updated prototype of this “production man of the future” even further stripped of those political and social attributes than the bracero was.

The transition from imported manual laborer to the remote virtual laborer that Rivera’s project hinges on shows just how profoundly those attributes depend on territorially defined citizenship. And, as with any flimsy territorial contingency, the geographically inscribed borderland is both the limit and the testing ground for the erosion of those attributes everywhere. As Rivera said in a 2016 interview,

The future of what’s going to happen, the reality we’re all going to live in, the surveillance we’ll all live under, the way we’ll be treated legally, or the rights we’ll have, those are all first tested on the border. The surveillance technologies, the new ways of legally justifying search-and-seizure, the entire concept of rights is first … torn apart in the borderlands.3

Decades later, the updated version of Galarza’s “input factor” easily describes millions of remote workers around the world, from a chat “bot” that pops up at the bottom of a retail site to an “AI” transcription service, which are totally or partly controlled by human workers. Amazon’s unironically named Mechanical Turks are the best-known epitome of the lie of an automated machine with a person inside—except the Amazon worker is not inside the machine, as the eighteenth-century chess-playing automaton was, but elsewhere. Outsourced and displaced.

Despite the alleged split between manual and remote labor, remote workers have always also been manual laborers. Every virtual task is performed by a person with a nervous system, a threshold for pain and exhaustion, a circadian rhythm. There is no such thing as disembodied work, only work that is harder to see. From another vantage, anyone using the internet could be considered a remote worker, an input factor subjected to tasks as the basic price of entry, completing CAPTCHAs, uploading photos, or generating data through targeted ads. The invisibilization of the remotely working person only serves to uphold a fantasy that human “resources” are not being exploited (just as “the cloud” is hardly ephemeral or placeless but a conglomeration of server farms that today consume the energy equivalent of a nation the size of Japan.)4 And yet, the cultural narrative continues: “To the worker it’s as simple as point and click to pick.”

Sleep Dealer

Rivera expanded the concept of the cybracero from a sketch to a ninety-minute feature in his 2008 Sleep Dealer. The movie’s protagonist, Memo Cruz, lives with his family of subsistence farmers on a milpa—a field where corn and beans symbiotically depend on each other to grow—in the Oaxacan municipality of Santa Ana del Rio in Mexico. The region’s formerly free-flowing river has been dammed up by the multinational Del Rio Water Inc., which now controls the water supply, and the area is in perpetual artificial drought. Locals feed dollar bills into an ATM-like machine to retrieve meager bucketfuls.

Memo’s father reminisces about a time before the dam and its armed patrols. In an early scene, he hurls a single stone at the lens of a surveillance camera perched atop the massive dam, in a recognizable gesture of resistance in the face of hyperbolically asymmetrical power. Yet Memo imagines an exciting high-tech urban life and longs to migrate north.

Sleep Dealer, dir. Alex Rivera, 2008, film still.

True to genre, Memo is a hacker. He has rigged up a pirate radio station in a shack near his home, where he intercepts transmissions from US army command in San Diego. But the army flags his eavesdropping, locates his coordinates, and, citing his proximity to the contested dam, designates him a “water terrorist.” In San Diego, a rookie drone pilot named Rudy Ramirez is assigned his first mission: to target Memo’s home in Santa Ana Del Rio. From a booth that resembles an arcade-style shooter game, Rudy steers a drone to Memo’s house, where it detonates and kills Memo’s father.

Riddled with guilt and desperate to support his family, Memo leaves for Tijuana, “the city of the future.” There he plans to find work in one of the many job sites known as “sleep dealers”: warehouses for workers remotely operating cybraceros across the border. But first he needs to find a “coyotek” to implant his arms and neck with “nodes”—which resemble ports for speaker jacks—in order to wire himself into the online system, a kind of hyper-immersive virtual reality. People implant nodes for all sorts of reasons—sports, sex, partying, gambling—but their underlying economic function is to enable work. Memo’s earlier fantasy of the urban playground full of opportunity belies a new level of exploitation.

Conveniently, Memo meets a love interest (Luz) on the bus to Tijuana who has nodes and knows how to install them. She brings him to a back-alley bar with the requisite equipment, and while she shoots a node into his flesh, she explains: “It’s a two-way connection. Sometimes you control the machine. Sometimes it controls you.” She means this literally, in the sense that there’s a feedback loop between the user and the machine, but she’s also describing the entrapment of indentured labor that Memo is about to enter into.

The Contact Lens

With his new body mods, Memo has no trouble finding a gig in a sleep dealer. In a behind-the-scenes film, Before the Making of Sleep Dealer, Rivera explains how the set designer made the warehouse look infinite through clever use of mirrors (the movie was made on a $2-million budget).5 On both sides of the warehouse are infinite rows of workers outfitted in coveralls, bodies plugged into glowing blue wires, eerily moving their limbs like automata. Rivera says that he wanted each worker to look “like a marionette suspended from these cables.”

These human marionettes control proxy robots on US soil. They pluck fruit, carve meat in slaughterhouses, care for young children. After the initial shock of suiting up, Memo enters his second body: a bot laying beams for a skyscraper hundreds of stories in the air. From below, a (white, human) foreman shouts up at Memo to get to work. “Finally,” Memo says, “I could connect my nervous system to the other system: the global economy.” There is no limit on the number of hours Memo can work. If he drifts off, the system zaps him awake.

The term “dealer” suggests work that exists in a legal gray area, like other kinds of illicit labor, say, selling drugs or sex. From the perspective of that “global economy” Memo speaks of, he is expendable (and, at best, invisible, given that he’s still designated a terrorist). What he’s dealing are not exactly goods or services, but the hours he should be resting. When the rhythms of the body are made irrelevant by the rhythms of the market, sleep time is converted into resource. “My energy was being drained, sent far away,” he says, equating land and body. “What happened to the river was happening to me.” The sleep dealer warehouse runs without pause, indifferent to the body’s demands, indifferent to whether it is day or night in Oaxaca or California or anywhere else. If capital doesn’t sleep, neither do its workers.

If you’re dealing your nighttime hours, you’re inevitably dealing your daytime hours too, to compensate for the lost rest. Some of the most robust research on circadian-rhythm disruption comes from studies on night-shift workers, whose schedules essentially invert day and night. Night-shift work elevates risks for Type 2 diabetes, depression, cardiovascular disease, obesity, and hormone-sensitive cancers like breast cancer, which are linked to melatonin production. The World Health Organization currently classifies night-shift labor as a Group 2A carcinogen, alongside lead exposure. Memo may be outsourced, but millions of workers within the US are also subject to shift work: in healthcare, security, transportation. Shift work is unevenly distributed, with demographics disproportionately lower income and people of color.

The fulfillment of Galarza’s “total economic man” is the completely sleepless person. The demands of remote work obliterate the relevance of time zones around the world. In turn, within one geographic area, the “time zone” of the body dependent on sleep-wake rhythms at least marginally tethered to the night-day cycle is likewise annihilated. Under 24/7 capitalism, selling one’s sleeping hours is the norm. What Galarza diagnosed is now not only the condition of the bracero but the consumer, the gig worker, the sleepless drone pilot—and, in far less brutal but equally insidious ways, the manager up all night monitoring the outsourced system, the jet-setting entrepreneur speeding across time zones.6

In the movie, dealing sleep takes a clear toll on Memo’s body. His eyesight quickly deteriorates. A group of grizzled sleep-dealer workers who Memo meets around a hillside fire have gone completely blind. It’s as if their eyes couldn’t even register light if they had the chance. And it’s as if, by spending his life confined to remote vision, Memo’s eyes will become unable to adjust back to the “reality” in which he lives—as if the disjuncture is too great for the mind to bear, as if his body becomes just another worn-out machine in need of spare parts. 

Sleep Dealer, dir. Alex Rivera, 2008, film still.

The sleep-dealer workers are essentially using virtual reality setups (perhaps futuristic in 2008 but entirely plausible in 2026), but instead of immediately recognizable accoutrements like goggles, their mouths are covered with breathing masks and their eyes are clouded by milky-blue contact lenses. Rivera says he chose to outfit them this way to avoid the “trap” of clichéd VR.7 Goggles of any type tend not to age well (and in their inevitable anachronism they seem like a holdover from an earlier era of steampunk aesthetics), but Memo’s lenses also suggest that he is not simply donning a uniform but altering his body and identity. The lenses sometimes look like cataracts, indicating his deteriorating vision; at other times they give his eyes a blue cast, as if he were momentarily passing as someone of another race. 

In a 2009 essay on labor in sci-fi cinema, Joshua Clover writes that Sleep Dealer has particular “purchase on our moment” because it shows how “divergent interests of nationalism and open markets, fixed borders and mobile armies of workers, are neatly resolved technologically.” He continues: “This is the very nature of dystopia: the sealing over of contradictions, the infinite intensification of exploitation.”8 The technologies of disembodiment that many in the early to mid-nineties fantasized as being liberatory have been recuperated to intensify exploitation. With the privatization and enclosure of digital infrastructure (what used to be referred to as the digital commons) for profit, disembodiment became a perverted kind of reembodiment under worse conditions.

Memo’s diminishing eyesight signifies his increasing estrangement from his body and its context via virtual labor. By now, it’s well documented that physiological responses to virtual experiences can be indistinguishable from “real” ones. Drone pilots develop post-traumatic stress from the violence they are tasked with committing at a distance.9 Virtual labor need not even be particularly immersive to cause damage. So-called content moderators—humans tasked with filtering violent images that algorithms aren’t yet trained to catch—report severe mental health outcomes.10

Of course, the verisimilitude of VR is why so many people are drawn to immersive gaming systems in the first place. Several games produce scenarios strangely familiar to that of Memo’s jobsite for entertainment. In Richie’s Plank Experience (first developed for Vive in 2016), the user dons a headset and is prompted to step off a simulated wooden plank jutting from the eightieth floor of a skyscraper. Despite the user’s secure knowledge of where they stand in physical space, most people experience surges of adrenaline and feelings of vertigo, struggling to take the step off the “plank.” VR researchers sometimes call this strange vacillation “duality of presence.”11 Not presence-absence, not real-virtual, but two kinds of presence at once. 

Eventually, Memo gets a glimpse of his cybracero in a mirror. Virtual and physical collide, throwing him off balance and nearly sending his bot off the skyscraper ledge. In this mirror-stage moment, we, the viewers, see the robot reflected in the glass from Memo’s point of view, and also suffer the shock of recognition.

The Other Side of the Wall

Memo falls in love with Luz, who is a writer. What “writer” means in Sleep Dealer’s world is that she wires herself into her home computer, then uploads her visual memories and audio narration to a platform called TruNode. Users from “the other side of the wall” can pay a fee to access her VR stories. Although she has some poetic license, the software sends an alert when she strays from verifiable facts. From today’s vantage, she’s a recognizable flex-working creative, a proto-influencer attempting to create relatable content in a flooded market (Rivera cites early YouTubers as an inspiration). And her stories must accord with an algorithmically approved “truth.”

While Luz’s aim is to share what she sees in order to bridge a divide and forge empathy—to humanize people like Memo—more often her audience consists of misery tourists or, as it turns out, law enforcement officers seeking clues. Her stories become data for a surveillance apparatus. In San Diego, the drone pilot trainee responsible for killing Memo’s father is tasked with eliminating the other Oaxacan water terrorists. Rudy, a first-generation Mexican-American, finds an image of Memo in one of Luz’s TruNode uploads and commissions more footage from her. She continues to spend time with Memo to gather his backstory (and naturally she falls for him—cue the VR sex). 

Much has been said about the supposed potential of VR to function as an “empathy machine,” but research does not entirely support the hope that “walking in someone else’s shoes” via VR can reliably change hearts and minds.12 Its capacity for provoking empathy seems in many cases outweighed by the risk that it will make people entirely passive consumers or traumatize them.13 And where it's successful in shifting beliefs and biases, the question remains of who has the power to harness VR’s manipulative potential and toward what ends. For-profit companies simply see compassion as a moneymaker—a way to sway hearts and minds to extract donations. In 2016, David Darg, cofounder of interactive-media agency Ryot, perfectly expressed this attitude: “VR can create empathy like never before. It’s the ultimate fundraising tool.” Perhaps this is why VR remains, so far into its technological development, so intensely cheesy. It is the embodiment of the least exciting kind of science fiction: the moralizing kind. In comparison, Rivera’s VR setups in Sleep Dealer are strange and ambivalent, as compelling as they are sinister. The sleep-dealer machines turn people into both storytellers and marionettes. Rivera, who has also made other artworks using VR, is keenly aware of the technology’s embeddedness in the power structures it might be used to critique.

Luz’s work does eventually succeed in exposing the truth and instilling empathy. When Rudy becomes more compelled by Luz’s stories and discovers who he murdered, his ideological structure crumbles. Most crucially, he identifies with Memo’s labor conditions. As a drone pilot, Rudy realizes: “I am a node worker too.” It is through recognition of their shared working conditions that Rudy changes the plot, compelling him to a radical act of solidarity.

In a remarkably neat and happy ending, Rudy drives south across the border, and together the three characters hack into the sleep-dealer system to hijack a US drone and bomb the dam in Oaxaca. Finally, the river flows freely again in Santa Ana del Rio, and Memo is able to return to his homeland and resuscitate the family farm. Rudy, who can never recross the border to go home, disappears into Mexico.

Clover writes:

If the film is disappointing, this is only because its victory is nostalgic. The dam destroyed, Memo and the others plant a symbolic milpa, community agriculture standing both for a better world and for The Real. This is common enough for science fiction, the full formula for which is too often images of the future, history of the present, ideology of the past.14

It’s true that Sleep Dealer bends toward nostalgia; its utopian glimpse appears to be a straightforward reversal of the dystopia it sets up. The movie’s use of nostalgia comes into focus when juxtaposed with a movie it clearly knows well, The Matrix from 1999. Compared to Neo, Memo’s name emphasizes the significance of the return to place-bound history rather than a coming realignment. While Neo’s “awakening” consists of the newfound awareness of his biological dependence on the machine—his meat-suit has been farmed and incarcerated in fetal goo while his mind inhabits a virtually constructed world, which may be false but is by all accounts a nicer life than the Real one—Memo awakens to his biological interdependence on the land. Both commit revolutionary hacktivist acts by re-infiltrating the virtual world and attacking the mainframe, yet Memo’s goal is a return to something that, for Neo, no longer exists. (One wonders whether Memo will really be happy to give up his hacktivism, Luz her node writing, or either of them their node sex.)

Neo does not start his movie awake in his ancestral lands of the Oaxacan desert; he starts the movie comatose, with his mind role-playing the life of a white-collar worker in a simulated US city. You could easily imagine that a cybracero operated by Memo has built the skyscraper where Neo is sequestered at his computer terminal in a cubicle. It’s not like The Matrix’s simulated capitalism is any less exploitative than the real version—its familiarity is the reason it’s so effective. The crucial border for Memo and his comrades is not the dividing line between the virtual and the real—it’s the geographical border across which capital flows but people do not.

Sleep Dealer is squarely a genre movie; it delights and indulges in well-trodden cyberpunk tropes, sometimes seemingly exaggerating them to near-comedic effect. It came out a decade after The Matrix, which itself was the apex of previous decades of genre development. Rivera would have produced it sooner had he been able to gather the funding, and that lag itself is indicative of the kinds of narratives that are deemed palatable and backed by entertainment media. By the time the movie came out, cyberpunk itself had been recuperated and assimilated into mainstream aesthetics and cultural discourse. Its relative late arrival to the party is as telling as its nostalgia.

The Matrix, dir. Lana and Lilly Wachowski, 1999, film still.

A decade post-Matrix, the topics and visuals of corporate conspiracy, asymmetric warfare, and repurposing tech for revolutionary aims had been repeatedly packaged for easy consumption, contrary to any “punk” ethos they may have begun with. As William Gibson has put it, “That label enabled mainstream science fiction to safely assimilate our dissident influence, such as it was. Cyberpunk could then be embraced and given prizes and patted on the head, and genre science fiction could continue unchanged.”15 The mainstreaming of cyberpunk sapped its countercultural potential, and sealed it off as an artifact of a now-historical era. 

But via the writer-character of Luz—whom the platform mandates to deliver machine-ratified truths—Rivera explores the willingness of mainstream audiences to absorb certain narratives, questioning the expectations of viewers like Luz’s, “on the other side” of the wall. If Sleep Dealer delivers on a hopeful nostalgic story for consumption, it also pokes fun at the condescension bound up in that expectation. On one hand, Rivera is Matrix-ifying the Global South, showing how cleanly narratives of resistance could be transposed onto real-world oppressive systems; on the other, he highlights the limits of any movie to transcend its genre—because the genre is fun. It’s not like this movie should be excluded from the fantasy of victory.

Reading Clover, I think of Fredric Jameson’s account of science fiction’s evolving relationship to futurity. In his 1982 “Progress versus Utopia,” Jameson describes how first-generation (late nineteenth-century) science fiction entailed empire projecting its own expansionist ideas of progress onto the world. Per Jameson, by the early twentieth century, science fiction produced in the Global North shifted from proposing future utopias to indulging in dystopias, showing the limits of the paltry “imagination of a dying class—in this case the canceled future of a vanished colonial and imperial destiny.” He argues that Western writers and audiences desire to see miserable futures and apprehend their own demise, in a culture that “seeks to intoxicate itself with images of death.”16 If they can’t have their future, there isn’t any future to be had.

Rivera’s invocation of the milpa and the free-flowing river draws on something else—situated lives and symbiotic interdependencies, the revival of dying ecosystems rather than dying empires. If Sleep Dealer is nostalgic, perhaps it is strategically so. Using the grammar of science fiction’s mock futures, it suggests that what capital frames as obsolete—communal land, ungoverned water, the body’s need for rest—are not relics but preconditions. I’m inclined to think that in 2026 the movie’s nostalgia hits differently, maybe just because a left-future imaginary is so hard to conjure right now; that scene of Memo’s father throwing a rock at Del Rio Water Inc.’s dam resembles so many images from the news. Whether or not nostalgia is a sin, I do want to play the bombing of the dam on repeat. The Real that Neo discovers upon being red-pilled is a miserable, dim underworld. The Real that Memo discovers and cocreates is, even if momentarily, a nice place under the sun. 

Cybracero Systems

In 1994, the same year NAFTA came into effect, Rivera launched a website advertising a company called Cybracero Systems. The spoof corporate site (cybracero.com) pretended to offer exactly the service that Rivera elaborated in the coming years with Why Cybraceros? and eventually Sleep Dealer. The website, still accessible today, parodies the corporate aesthetic language of the nineties (a still recognizable if slightly quaint version of today’s corporate visual style) and offers job listings, a node technology explainer, and client testimonials. A blog provides updates direct from CEO “Roger Buck.” A mission statement on the site explains: “Cybracero Systems was created with one objective in mind: to get all the work our society needs done, while eliminating the actual workers and all the difficulties that workers imply: health benefits, housing, IRS, INS, union conflicts, cultural and language differences.”

Rivera reportedly received inquiries from several US companies curious about buying the tech.17 The LA-based newspaper La Opinión published an article featuring quotes from Roger Buck himself—speaking via “spokesperson” Alex Rivera. The seemingly earnest reportage detailed the potential plausibility of the program and compared the technology to that used in the US war in Iraq.

“We understand that not everyone will grasp this concept completely, as we are a decade ahead of our time,” Roger Buck said to the reporter. But, he argued, it would inevitably come to pass, because NAFTA “failed to achieve its objective, as many workers in Latin America are still forced to emigrate.” He argued that Cybracero Systems offered not only a cost-efficient but a humane solution to this setback—this way workers could remain with their families. The reporter also interviewed a representative of the United Farmworkers, who expressed doubts—not because this was wrong, but because previous private enterprises with similar ambitions have failed due to technological incapacity.

The website was periodically updated, and upon the 2008 release of Sleep Dealer, it adopted a disclaimer about the film as a sly advertisement: “PLEASE NOTE: Cybracero warns people that the movie Sleep Dealer opening this weekend is an inaccurate and undeservedly critical portrait of our pioneering business model and is not representational of our business.”

Gouache painting by Syd Mead for Blade Runner, 1982.

Cybracero Systems exists in a lineage of spoof projects, beginning with the Yes-Men style culture-jamming of the nineties, extending through much net-based and post-internet artwork, and reaching up to today.18 One could say the success of many such projects hinges on passing as real: pulling a gotcha on audiences. The gotcha has always had limited effects, because the subjects of critique are rarely concerned with being had. That is, private enterprise is not concerned with whether a prototype is intended as critical parody—enterprise is concerned with patent proposals. Entrepreneurs simply pave over dystopian irony if they encounter an idea that could turn a profit.19 Rivera reports several other instances over the years where “making critical science fiction … becomes the inspiration for these kinds of business models.”20 The owner of a company that makes remote controlled robots for assisting the elderly told Rivera, with gratitude, that the idea was directly inspired by Sleep Dealer.

In 2025, an anonymous spoof project wryly promoted a cybracero-style future without human labor at all. Via a website, social media channels, and billboards, Replacement AI advertised a campaign to “stop hiring humans.” From the replacement.ai website: “Humans no longer necessary. Stupid. Smelly. Squishy. It’s time for a machine solution.” A billboard reads: “AI does your daughter’s homework. Reads her bedtime stories. Romances her. Deepfakes her. Don’t worry. It’s totally legal.”

Replacement AI, which could be seen as a descendant of Cybracero Systems, points to what’s next. Remote laborers face the risk of total automation—the perfect, sleepless laborer is a laborer without a body at all. But we’re at an awkward moment, where for the time being, much outsourced work still depends on a substrate of human work or human oversight—there’s a reason AI has been called “African intelligence” or “artificial Indian.”21 For many companies, it’s still far cheaper to employ outsourced humans than to implement AI to comprehensively do the work.22

Rivera has referred to the kind of remote labor that Memo performs as “undead labor.” It’s work so divorced from the physically instantiated body, of such a rote quality, that it’s practically zombified. The zombie, of course, is frightening not because it’s asleep—but because it needs no sleep. The zombie never rests and never achieves full consciousness either. Its inhumanity is in its lack of physical needs, its open but unseeing eyes.

Zoning Time

A century of military and commercial initiatives have spent untold resources on experiments to render the body sleepless yet functioning. Functioning means being able to work. And yet, as far as is publicly known, the living human organism still cannot survive without sleep. In his landmark book 24/7: Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, from 2013, Jonathan Crary explains that

sleep poses the idea of a human need and interval of time that cannot be colonized or harnessed to a massive engine of profitability … In spite of all the scientific research in this area, it frustrates and confounds any strategies to exploit or reshape it. The stunning, inconceivable reality is that nothing of value can be extracted from it.23

Sleep continues to represent the limit of extraction—of physical labor and of interior life. Under a regime of non-circadian time, sleep itself—crucial, ungovernable, universal—represents a limit to extraction. Capitalism can reduce, surveil, and disturb sleep, but sleep cannot (yet) be eliminated, for the simple reason that people need to sleep to work.

Of course, we are always searching for the limit. The more contradictions are sealed over and the more exploitation is intensified (per Clover), the more we want to identify one aspect of embodied life that capitalism can’t reach—the piece of existence that is irreducibly human. What can’t be monetized. What can’t be made irrelevant. What can’t be outsourced. What can’t be replicated by machines. We often look for this human core in cognition, in creativity, in embodiment. I find myself looking for it in sleep. There are many possible limits, all of which invite argument. The limit itself changes; the thing we identify as the final bastion says as much about where extraction stops as about what we fear losing—and what we should demand not to lose.

Sleep itself may not be mined, but value is extracted in every possible way from the need to sleep, and from the body while it sleeps. Being asleep locates everyone, even if temporarily, in a group akin to what health-justice advocates call “surplus populations.” The writers Beatrice Adler Bolton and Artie Vierkant have repurposed this term to describe how people deemed incapable of work, therefore unproductive and disposable, are criminalized, wrung for profit, and sent into debt.24 While surplus populations like the sick, disabled, and unemployed are constantly framed as a drain on the system, their management turns out to be essential for the production of value through systems like privatized facilities and for-profit healthcare. Surplus populations, in the health-justice context, provide a framework for understanding the ways that capitalism recuperates value from those it maligns as worthless. Across US cities, sleep is criminalized: Public rest is an arrestable offense. Cops are paid, tickets are issued, bodies are moved.

And in less overt ways, exhaustion is exploited when it is sold back to consumers as wellness products and drugs so that they can sleep enough in order to be productive, and stay productive enough to afford to sleep. Those “north of the border” willingly self-surveil in the interest of ideologies of productivity, subjecting themselves to apps that measure breaths, heartbeats, and REM cycles that are stored, insecurely, in that disembodied cloud. Where rest cannot be diminished, it can be tracked and mined for biodata.

Populations rendered marginal, such as those at the borderlands, are the experimental subjects for techniques of surveillance, extraction, and productivity that are reproduced and eventually naturalized more broadly. In order to police the sleepless laborer, the soldier, such as Rudy, must too be rendered sleepless. It’s no coincidence that most advances in stay-awake technology and pharmacology have been invented in the military context (also where experiments in sleep deprivation as torture method are performed.) As Crary puts it, “The sleepless soldier would be the forerunner of the sleepless worker or consumer. Non-sleep products, when aggressively promoted by pharmaceutical companies, would become first a lifestyle option, and eventually, for many, a necessity.”25

Crary argues that the permanently exhausted yet overstimulated person has no patience or mental capacity to imagine alternate futures—futures in which you might not have to exhaust yourself working so hard to survive. He writes that a 24/7 life “has produced an atrophy of the individual patience and deference that are essential to any form of direct democracy.”26 The implications of 24/7 go beyond so-called quality of life, attention spans, and physical exploitation, to become the precondition of oppressive regimes. 

The economic imperative for round-the-clock production, enforced by round-the-clock surveillance, both depends on and forges a pervasive culture of self-imposed nonstop work (or what is glorified as “the grind.”) In a hustle culture, rest is the counterpart of productivity, its evil twin. It must be optimized and it must be managed. Sleep, in its ever-diminished form, is only valuable insofar as it allows the maximization of working time. As historian Lee Scrivner puts it, sleep becomes a “nightly reward” comparable to “monetary compensation for hard work.”27 What was once a biological necessity must now be earned. 

The brief emergence of “rest is revolution” campaigns tried to reframe unproductivity as a tactic of resistance to capitalist demands. But capital coopted the movement almost immediately, packaging self-care itself as a product category. Wellness is a fantastically successful paradigm for recuperating profit. Alexandra Zatarain, CEO of the company Eightsleep, which markets itself as “the first sleep fitness company” producing “smart mattresses,” says in a 2022 interview: “People don’t want to have a great night’s sleep for the sake of it. You want to sleep great because of how you feel in the morning, because of what it propels you to do during the day, the energy, the productivity, the mind, the clarity, and the mood.”28 Rest’s regulation becomes another item on the to-do list, another process to manage, as if the body were a denigrated employee. And what is an individual’s two-hour nap in a collective population of profoundly sleepless workers?

Sleep Donation

Just as it is impossible to do away with sleep completely, its onset is hard to govern. Night-shift workers often have as hard a time falling asleep during the day as they do staying up at night. Sleep resists control, no matter how many drugs or gadgets a person buys to beat it into submission. In his 2014 book Becoming Insomniac: How Sleeplessness Alarmed Modernity, Scrivner describes the desperate chase for sleep in a 24/7 world as a “volitional paradox,” whereby the more one tries to force or control it, the more it evades one’s grasp.

Scrivner historicizes the relationship between the volitional paradox of sleep and novel technologies that, since modernity, have produced a bind of dependence and exploitation. He argues that insomnia (as both a lived experience and an invented pathology) was produced by and constitutive of turn-of-the-century technological modernity. He shows how the technologies of “connectivity,” from the telegraph to the railway to the electrical grid, became technologies of estrangement that naturalized sleep loss as a function of progress. Once the malady of insomnia was produced and named, it could be subject to an entire industry of remedies to control it. “Insomnia is not,” Scrivner writes, 

a mere lack of sleep, but rather a fundamental paradox of being and willing, where, in willing to sleep, we express a will to be without will. This fundamental disconnect between the perceived empowerment of willing and the powerlessness of failing to will oneself to cease willing mirrors technology’s oft-cited “double logic,” in which technologies enhance our lives and facilitate our wills, but also secretly subject us to new regimes of servitude.29

This is how the node system in Rivera’s film functions: an immersive, addictive VR world offering seemingly limitless forms of entertainment, freeing and even empathy inducing, which openly, if gradually, subjects workers to new regimes of servitude. As Luz says: “Sometimes you control the machine, sometimes it controls you.”

In her 2014 speculative novel Sleep Donation, author Karen Russell portrays the twisted models of extraction and compliance that arise to compensate for sleep deficits under such regimes. The book is a darkly comic parable for the coercive logic of philanthropy, whereby the distinction between “dealing” and “donating” is shown to be unstable and unclear. In the story, a shocking epidemic of insomnia has swept the US and tens of thousands of people have died from lack of sleep. The biological cause of this reverse-narcolepsy is a deficiency in Orexin, a (real) hormone that promotes sedation. Yet the reasons for this sudden deficiency, whether genetic predisposition or environmental factor, are undetermined. 

At first people downplay the disease because exhaustion hardly seems like a novelty or threat. When it is first identified, “many people dismissed the disorder as an exaggeration of a universal American condition. Who was sleeping enough? Nobody! The ‘crisis’ seemed like more TV hyperbole designed to keep us glued to our screens, watching mattress commercials.”30 Yet as the crisis becomes more acute, a compensatory medical technology is invented to transfer surplus sleep. Volunteers can donate their sleeping hours, and soon, sleep centers operate like blood banks. An ad campaign appeals to a kind of effective altruism: “18 Insomniacs Will Dream Tonight, Thanks to Your Gift. Less than 1% of donors experience any kind of adverse reaction.” Despite the promo material, it is largely unknown what the long-term health toll might be.

The novella’s narrator is a young woman named Trish who works as a campaigner, traveling the country imploring good sleepers to “draw down” their resting hours. She has been personally driven to her vocation: Her sister succumbed to death-by-insomnia. Trish has an uncanny capacity to dredge up her grief when soliciting donations—a manipulative power whose ethics she wrestles with. She knows she’s converting the memory of her sister into a functional tool, heartache into persuasion. “This is how you turn a gift into extortion,” she says. Trish’s work represents the coercive packaging of an ostensibly humane or empathetic narrative for consumption. Yet, akin to the stories Luz uploads to TruNode in the hopes of inviting compassion—or, to make a broader connection, akin to spoofs like Cybracero Systems that become inspiration for entrepreneurship—here storytelling can be used for extraction rather than solidarity building.

Like blood, sleep comes in types and must be compatible with its recipient. Trish’s ethics are put to the test upon the discovery of a “universal donor,” a six-month-old baby. Stealing sleep from a baby is hard to stomach, and when the infant’s parents naturally balk at the request, the narrator resorts to increasingly shrewd tactics. “We will never overdraw your daughter,” she says, and yet she thinks to herself: “I make this promise at a moment when people are plunging their straws into any available centimeter of shale and water, every crude oil and uranium and mineral well on earth, with an indiscriminate and borderless appetite.” Like Rivera, Russell likens earthly resource extraction to the wearing out of the human body.

The implication is that US Americans’ energies have been mined to the point that their bodies rebel. A model that attempts to compensate for a shortage by asking individuals to give even more of themselves, making each person responsible for what is clearly a systemwide problem, can only run for so long. Each time the adults agree to tap into the baby’s “fleshy aquifer” they sense an impending imbalance, a long-term bargain, that will lead toward doom. “Bummer news, everyone,” Trish states sardonically. “The clock stops for humanity. Time itself will soon become an anachronism. Time, as our species has lived it on this planet, will cease to exist. No more dark/light binary … Sleep will go extinct. And eventually, unless we can find some way to synthesize it, so will we.”

As opposed to the stigmatized act of “dealing,” donating is typically figured as voluntary and altruistic. But Russell shows that dealing and donating exist on the same continuum, and in fact are mutually dependent: one openly extortionist, the other coercive. In Sleep Donation, the nonprofit that collects and distributes sleep donations turns out, of course, to be siphoning profit through the private sale of sleep. And it is also importing sleep from abroad to make up the deficit. As in Sleep Dealer, the remote laborer is tapped to maintain an economy that produces the very deficit it purports to remedy.

At some point, the body gives up. You cannot sell your sleep forever and stay alive. Sleep cannot be completely eliminated or simulated. And perhaps this means that circadian time is a place for labor struggles to stake themselves. Sleep reminds us of what kind of labor only people can do, and conversely, what type of labor people should never have to do.

Solar Revolutions

Sleep Dealer’s narrative resolution is in a hopeful back-to-the-land fantasy of an agrarian life where, ostensibly, day is for non-alienated labor and night is for undisturbed rest. The point may not be that emancipation lies in a retreat from technology or a restoration of the past, but that the conditions under which any future is lived are first articulated, tested, and normalized at the border. What looks like nostalgia is also regrounding: a reminder that the abstractions of the global economy are always anchored somewhere, in land and in bodies. The borderland is not peripheral but central—a laboratory where the “input factor” of the future worker is defined and refined. 

In a scene halfway through the movie, Memo and Luz travel to the seaside, where they confront the notorious and bizarre “wall” that delineates Mexico and the US via a series of closely spaced poles that lead out into the water and become stumps. It’s a classic image of the farce of territoriality—how do you divide an ocean?—and reiterates the metaphor of water as ungovernable space and medium, which begins with the damming of the Oaxacan river.

Territorial limits are both violently enforced and fundamentally unstable; they require constant maintenance even as they fail to contain the flows they purport to regulate. Rivera’s cybracero is a response to NAFTA, which marked a decisive era in which goods and capital could circulate with increasing ease, while people were immobilized, surveilled, or made to move only under conditions of extreme vulnerability. He leaves open the question of whether more technological infrastructure—however radically repurposed—can carry this fugitive potential.

The hacked drone, the destroyed dam, the restored river: These are narrative closures that gesture toward repair but cannot contain the system they momentarily disrupt. Sleep, also, emerges as a stubborn remainder—something that cannot be fully abstracted, outsourced, or optimized without consequence. It marks a threshold where the logic of continuous production falters, even as that logic seeks to capture and instrumentalize it. The sleepless worker represents an ideal for capital because it is impossible: a body without limits, without needs, without refusal.

Controlling wakefulness is necessary and constitutive of capitalist production mechanisms, creating subjects that are more easily governable. As Crary writes, lack of rest degrades not only labor but attentional conditions, causing the “atrophy of the individual patience” and driving populations to a point of distraction that disallow individuals to be meaningful political actors.31 After all, although it is a universal experience, nothing could feel more individual than the struggle to stay awake—or the struggle to sleep. Could it be collectivized?

In the Egyptian writer Haytham El Wardany’s cross-genre book The Book of Sleep (2020), written in the wake of the Arab Spring, short meditations on the nature of sleep and insomnia are interspersed with oblique reflections on the uprisings of 2011.32 Several scenes reveal themselves to be dream sequences—often including characters who are no longer among the living. Uprisings and occupations, he suggests, require a constant vacillation between forceful action and active refusal, between being awake to repression and asleep to its power over life. The book coalesces into a proposal for the act of occupying public space and refusing to leave when the sun goes down—sleeping in public.33

The vulnerable act of defenseless bodies gathered together is brave and transformational. “The dividing line between sleep and waking is the inner border of the state,” El Wardany writes. “There, power is disrupted and laws dissolve. In sleep, we are no longer law-abiding citizens but members of a clandestine society, a group that maintains an outer semblance of citizenship while within it flees underground.”34 The sleepers become unlikely figures for collective refusal. Not a solution, but a remainder: proof that the total economic body has not yet been achieved, that something in the organism still will not comply.

For El Wardany, sleep is not productive. It is politically essential because it’s a form of refusal, neither passive nor active but resisting that distinction altogether. What happens in sleep is another kind of verb: dreaming. And dreams are irreducible. They are not coherent messages that can be transliterated to produce determinate meaning. “A dream,” he writes, “is not a story in a book or a scene from a film but a perpetually evasive transformative energy.”35 Yet some fictions, I believe, are able to induce a sort of dreaming. Not a program or a plan, but a possibility. Utopias themselves are dreams, and they tend to become dystopias when one attempts to actualize them. We need their transformative energy. I’ve had dreams about Sleep Dealer. I won’t say what they are.