Writer: Varun Venkatesh
Editor: Sean Lu
Every single night, millions of people worldwide upload their dreams. The soft hums of sensor-filled rings, watches, and even mattresses can be heard in the darkness. Heartbeats tracked, breathing patterns drawn, and micro-movements mapped from the start of dusk to dawn. Once known as the universal action of rest, sleep has now been rediscovered as another field of scientific study—one that can be heavily monetized. And in the modern global economy, metrics on rest are highly valuable.
In 2024 alone, the global “Wellness and Data” economy was valued at over $6 trillion. This includes anything from supplements and pharmaceutical sleep assistance devices to digital diagnostics and smart mattresses. The sleep-tech segment of the wellness sector is rapidly expanding, seeing an annual growth of almost 20%. But across the recently discovered industry of sleep technology, the boundaries of what can and will be commercialized are visibly fading, and companies and consumers alike may be too eager to accept these new developments.
What lies at the crux of the sleep-tech industry is a simple but incredibly important economic principle that mirrors various other success stories of data-driven technologies: the more private the data, the higher its value. Indeed, the global biometric data industry, which was valued at $37 billion in 2024, is projected to quintuple by 2030. As such, it makes complete sense why venture capitalists have funneled more than $1.2 billion over the past three years into sleep-focused startups.
The entire notion of personal wellness has been collected and repackaged as a platform economy. The company Oura, which makes the data-tracking rings worn by athletes and commonfolk alike, and is advertised by celebrities, has raised a ridiculous $900 million to date. Eight Sleep, whose “smart mattress” does everything from adjusting the temperature throughout the night to tracking the variability of heart rates, secured $162 million. Even traditional, long-standing bedding manufacturers like Mumbai’s The Sleep Co. and Boston’s Embr Labs have pivoted over to data collection and tracking.
The evolution is clear: sleep has become another instrument of surveillance capitalism. That is, the systematic extraction and monetization of data from what has historically been the most private and unmonitored time of a human’s day. American author and professor Shoshana Zuboff once famously argued that surveillance capitalism thrives on “behavioral surplus,” which she defined as the data generated as a byproduct of doing the most basic human activity—living. Her argument reveals the dichotomy between where capitalism once lay and where it will be in the future. It is no longer enough for financial markets to know what we do in public—where we go or what we do, what we purchase or what we sell. The most profitable venture is what is not already known.
Economist Jathan Sadowski labeled the process “data commodification,” the creation of value via interactions with digital platforms. But Philosopher Tiziana Terranova went one step further, arguing that internet users perform “free labor” whenever they set foot into internet terrain. Sleep-tracking grounds Terranova’s concept into reality.
What is uniquely modern about sleep-commodification is the ownership hierarchy that structures the market. Companies like Oura and Whoop operate on subscriptions, charging anywhere from $6 to $30 a month for “premium insights” derived from the user’s very own biometric signals. But the users never actually own their raw data. That remains encrypted behind lines of code and entirely proprietary, locked within the databases that the corporations repackage, resell to the user, and profit from.
However, that is the problem. Via access rights, researchers and insurers are legally permitted to purchase anonymized access to said raw data through application programming interfaces (API), completely unknown to the human from whom the data was taken. This is a model of inversion: individuals pay to interpret the data they generate, while the firms retain the right to infinitely profit from it. The reality is that one is forced to rent back their very own biology.
An interesting remark is the behavioral dependence these technologies develop in users. To foster recurring engagement, sleep-tech platforms use the same reward strategies that drive the addiction of social media platforms. Users awake to a dashboard of performance, one that grades their sleep and offers an index comparing them to others, essentially labeling them as either successes or failures. This is a gamified discipline that breeds obsession. A “poor” score triggers guilt, while a “high” score obtains relief. Either way, dopamine receptors are triggered and affected. And humans pine for that feeling.
In a survey conducted by the company itself, users of Oura reported that they check their scores multiple times in a day, a frequency that rivals the engagement of Instagram and TikTok. Users are trained to internalize the metrics they receive as truth and view their own bodies as an instrument that they can not understand or play themselves. As a result, the very anxiety that pushes one to track their own sleep becomes the primary obstacle in achieving it.
Furthermore, the data-driven rationalization of sleep has even entered the infrastructure of risk and employment determination. In 2024, insurance company AIA Vitality started to offer clients up to 20% premium discounts if they shared their sleep data with it. Wellness programs within companies have started to integrate rest metrics into their own productivity assessments of employees, attempting to calculate possible burnout and preemptively address it. The point is, sleep scores have started to function similarly to a credit rating for the body, one that quantifies the reliability of performance from the person. This is potentially problematic: just as financial markets justify their assignment of higher interest rates to borrowers that they deem risky, insurance and labor markets may soon penalize workers depending on their sleep statistics.
The implications are endless. Sleep deprivation already costs the American economy $411 billion annually, which is over 2.3% of GDP, in lost productivity. If employers and insurers can make up even a fraction of that loss by adjusting premiums and incentive structures, they have every right to do so, and they will. But an actuary’s perspective is not one that many share. And thus, the very restlessness that sleep-tech companies claim to cure may be on the brink of skyrocketing.
Sleep is surveillance capitalism’s current conquest. The pivotal question to ask is what this means for people’s autonomy. Lines are being blurred every night, and it is becoming more and more difficult to tell what should be permissibly commodified.
Graphic By: Noam Tal
For most of human history, sleep was understood as the most private of places. Sleep-tech is threatening that very concept, giving even the resting self an audience. Indeed, the device beneath or even attached to us is capable of whispering data through the dark. And as long as our dreams are measured and monetized, the most disturbing truth persists: even in rest, surveillance never sleeps.
Featured Image by Etienne Girardet on Unsplash
