Jacob R Bumgarner and Randy J. Nelson, “Light at Night and Disrupted Circadian Rhythms Alter Physiology and Behavior,” Integrative and Comparative Biology 61, no. 3 (March 2021) →.
Ernesto Galarza, Merchants of Labor: The Mexican Bracero Story (McNally & Loftin, 1964).
Javier Ramirez, “Sci-Fi-ing Immigration and the US–Mexico Border: An Interview with Filmmaker Alex Rivera,” Chiricú Journal: Latina/o Literatures, Arts, and Cultures 1, no. 1 (Fall 2016).
Jon Reed, “AI and Data Centers Could Use as Much Energy as Japan by 2030,” CNET, April 11, 2025 →.
“Before the Making of Sleep Dealer,” posted October 22, 2012, by Alex Rivera, YouTube →.
For a decade, the pharma company Vanda has been pushing for FDA approval for its potential blockbuster drug Hetlioz, a melatonin receptor agonist that promises to make international travel across time zones easy by rejiggering the circadian rhythm immediately and reducing the time needed to adjust. Vanda hopes to market Hetlioz as the first consumer jet-lag drug. While jet-lag sufferers may be the primary market, it’s easy to imagine its underlying goal: to allow workers to change the internal “time zones” (circadian rhythms) of their bodies and machinically adjust to any shift required.
“Before the Making of Sleep Dealer.”
Joshua Clover, “The Future in Labor,” Film Quarterly 63, no. 1 (Fall 2009) →.
Wayne Chappelle et al., “Combat and Operational Risk Factors for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Symptom Criteria among United States Air Force Remotely Piloted Aircraft ‘Drone’ Warfighters.” Psychiatry Research, no. 273 (2019).
Ruth Spence et al., “Content Moderator Mental Health and Associations with Coping Styles: Replication and Extension of Previous Studies,” Behavioral Sciences 15, no. 4 (2025): 487.
Kent Bye, host, Voices of VR, podcast, episode 298, “Nonny de la Pena on Empathy in VR,” February 12, 2016 →.
Elvia Wilk, “Trauma Machine,” Popula, July 9, 2018 →.
Perhaps the power of VR is best proven by the post-facto use of VR to successfully treat traumatic recollection.
Clover, “The Future in Labor,” emphasis in original.
William Gibson, “The Art of Fiction No. 211,” interviewed by David Wallace-Wells, The Paris Review, no. 197 (Summer 2011).
Fredric Jameson, “Progress Versus Utopia; or, Can We Imagine the Future?” Science Fiction Studies 9, no. 2 (July 1982), 152.
Luis Martín-Cabrera, “The Potentiality of the Commons: A Materialist Critique of Cognitive Capitalism from the Cyberbracer@s to the Ley Sinde,” Hispanic Review 80, no. 4 (2012).
For spoof corporate projects, see Elvia Wilk, “The Art of Decolonization,” Broadcast, February 13, 2024 →.
For this reason, many have argued that science fictions have a “responsibility” to imagine better futures due partly to the fact that capitalist enterprise has no sense of irony and simply absorbs its critiques. See Elvia Wilk, “Future Looks,” in Death by Landscape (Soft Skull Press, 2022).
A hyperstitional model of fiction’s feedback loop with reality would not see this as unidirectional or one to one.
Jason Koebler, “‘AI Is African Intelligence’: The Workers Who Train AI Are Fighting Back,” 404, March 12, 2026 →.
Cory Doctorow, a science fiction writer, has provided a model for thinking about the way humans and AI might realistically relate when it comes to labor. According to his “reverse centaur theory,” while the utopian hope may have been that humans would be the “head” atop a machinic “body” doing the painful dehumanized labor, the reality is that humans will likely still be the bodies carrying out the work that AI seems to do—and that the human ultimately takes culpability for.
Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (Verso, 2013).
Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant, Health Communism (Verso, 2022).
Crary, 24/7, 3.
Crary, 24/7, 124.
Lee Scrivner, Becoming Insomniac: How Sleeplessness Alarmed Modernity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
Joe Vennare, host, Fitt/Insider, podcast, episode 138, “Alexandra Zatarain, Co-founder and VP of Brand & Marketing at Eight Sleep,” June 7, 2022 →.
Scrivner, Becoming Insomniac, 11.
Karen Russell, Sleep Donation (Atavist Books, 2014), EPUB.
Crary, 24/7, 124.
Haytham El Wardany. The Book of Sleep, trans. Robin Moger (Seagull Books, 2020). Originally published in Arabic in 2017.
In spring of 1971, hundreds of Vietnam veterans arrived at the Washington Mall and petitioned the Supreme Court to allow them to sleep there, outside, as an anti-war demonstration. The court refused; they slept outside anyway.
El Wardany, Book of Sleep, 94.
El Wardany, Book of Sleep, 119.
