(credit: Health and Human Services)
High tech companies have disrupted the way we get our food, transit, and friends—and now they want to disrupt the way we sleep. To help them along, branding group K-Hole has released a report designed to help corporations cash in on the public's new obsession with getting rest. K-Hole is a gang of coolhunters, just like something out of a William Gibson or Jim Munroe novel, who are paid to spot trends. A couple of years ago, they got famous for popularizing the idea of "normcore," a clean-cut hipster style that emphasized simplicity and unobtrusiveness.
In this new report, Slowave: An Exploration on Sleep and Society, K-Hole member Sean Monahan makes a series of interesting observations about the sleep market, paid for mattress-maker Casper. On its website, Casper bills itself as a company trying to "innovate sleep research" with "engineering." In reality, it sells mattresses, pillows, and sheets to people online. Monahan told Ars by phone that Casper commissioned this report so it would "know what the future of sleep is." Of course, he conceded, that's "inherently hard to answer because sleep hasn’t changed all that much over past couple thousand years." But that didn't stop him from trying, and the result is a tour of sleep-related products, plus recommendations about how to market to consumers who are not currently "leaning into the pleasure of sleep."
Though written in a language that is a mashup of marketing speak and academic critical theory, the Slowave report does identify some intriguing trends. Monahan argues that sleep has been a commodity for a long time, though often in a negative sense. Starting in the 1950s, companies started marketing drugs to prevent people from sleeping. As we moved into the modern era, apps and self-help books tutored people in lifehacks like "polyphasic sleep" designed to help people do more on less sleep.
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