Sitting on a tram, on my way to who knows where, my gaze settles on a strange pattern stamped into the window glass. At first it resembles the imprint of an octopus tentacle. Looking closer, however, it reveals itself as nothing more than the residue of a silicone phone suction pad—one of those plastic accessories that allows a smartphone to cling to almost any smooth surface. One of those accessories that quietly reduced the number of TikTok videos interrupted by a phone tumbling from a ledge halfway through an outfit check, one of those plastic accessories that totally feels like an instant of disorientation when one's immediate surroundings … seem both vague and oppressive in their time-worn materiality. (Crary, description of tv).

This condition is not new. In 1669, the first organised street-lighting system was introduced in Amsterdam by the Golden Age painter Jan van der Heyden. What began as a technological innovation for safety and navigation has become something far more pervasive. Today, artificial illumination symbolises the gradual erosion of any meaningful distinction between day and night. The city no longer sleeps. It is organised around the assumption that we are always available—always commuting, consuming, producing. No longer citizens, but participants in an uninterrupted economic cycle. 

A similar transformation is captured in Arkwright's Cotton Mills by Night by Joseph Wright. Against a dark, almost primordial moonlit landscape stands an five-storey mill, every window brightly illuminated. For Crary, the significance of the painting extends beyond industrialisation itself. It marks a historical rupture: the emergence of a world in which production continues regardless of natural rhythms. The workers inside the mill were organised into two twelve-hour shifts; the machinery never stopped. The painting foreshadows the logic of contemporary capitalism, where activity is continuous and downtime increasingly appears as inefficiency. (Nicholas Lezard, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep by Jonathan Crary)

Today, this logic permeates the built environment. Bus stops equipped with USB charging ports, self-checkout machines, delivery platforms, and smartphones ensure that consumption can occur anywhere and at any moment. Our screens function as prostheses—extensions of ourselves that blur the boundaries between work, leisure, public space, and private life. Within this framework, individuals are valued primarily as units of circulation: consumers, data producers, commuters, and workers. The infrastructures that shape this behaviour are not accidental. They are designed into the architecture of everyday life.

This condition is often described through the aesthetic lens of cyberpunk: a world of advanced technology coupled with declining social mobility. The latest gadgets are affordable; secure housing is not. What once appeared as speculative fiction increasingly resembles the present. Walking through the city, it is common to encounter people living on the street while simultaneously owning smartphones. Resting in doorways or on staircases, their attention fixed on an endless stream of short-form videos, they remain connected to the same digital networks as everyone else, despite being excluded from many of the material securities those networks promise.

In cyberpunk narratives, the body itself becomes a form of currency—a site of extraction, optimisation, and commodification. Increasingly, this too feels familiar. Attention, biometric data, behaviour, and even identity are transformed into assets to be measured and monetised. The future imagined by cyberpunk was never simply about technology; it was about the social consequences of technology deployed within systems of consumption. Looking around today, it becomes difficult to determine whether we are witnessing a warning about the future or a description of the present.