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 for corporations who want to 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 by 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 the 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.

Now, however, we're in a backlash phase. All this sleep denial has led to a pendulum swing in the other direction, and everybody is obsessed with getting more sleep. Sleep has become desirable, and the consumer electronics industry helps people obsessively monitor their shuteye with fitness trackers and wellness apps. Digital media entrepreneur Arianna Huffington has just come out with a book, The Sleep Revolution, about reclaiming sleep as part of the creative process in the world of innovation. Business Insider, taking its cue from Huffington's book, offers readers tips on "how to be productive while you're sleeping." Sleep has practically become a luxury good. Indeed, a recent Gallup poll suggests that the richer you are, the better you sleep.

Monahan has some words of wisdom for tech entrepreneurs who want to get into sleep. In Slowave, he writes:

A bed is no longer furniture—it’s a content platform. A connected mattress is generating an abstract user portrait by monitoring your nightly movements, and modulating its temperature and firmness to improve sleep. It’s a content platform on an informational and experiential level. If Buzzfeed’s modus operandi is OMG, a connected mattress’ is ZZZ ... The future of sleep won’t be its absence, it will be a new class of people leveraging its creative potential ... Writers and artists have always prized sleep’s latent potential, it’s [sic] ability to encourage imagistic nonlinear thinking. Hence the frequent preference to work as soon as one wakes up, when the hypnagogic effects are still coming on strong.

It sounds like something out of the most recent episode of Silicon Valley, but it's not. The K-Hole report even includes a little chart that tracks how different kinds of people engage with sleep.

You can just imagine marketing departments figuring out how to target apps and gadgets at "effective hedonists" vs. "slowave" types. Huffington's book is basically a slowave manifesto, and it's selling like hotcakes.

Though K-Hole has claimed in the past that its work is partly an art project or parody, Slowave suggests that it has gone full-bore into marketing. When I spoke with Monahan about this report, he talked very seriously about how companies can sell sleep-related items (like mattresses) as a productivity enhancer, because dreams help fuel innovation. There was no sarcastic edge to what he was saying.

Just for the sake of argument, one might claim that Slowave takes its cues from media jamming groups like the Yes Men, who have tricked companies and government organizations into inviting them to conferences—where they sneakily make fun of their unwitting victims. In one memorable Yes Men prank, the group pretended to represent the WTO at a corporate conference and explained to everyone that the Civil War in the US was a waste of time, because slavery is a great economic system, and thank goodness that now slave labor is being provided by the developing world.

So maybe K-Hole is about to pull a Yes Men and laugh at Casper for funding a ridiculous and meaningless document. I certainly didn't get that sense from Monahan. Even if K-Hole does suddenly reveal that this report was a prank, it isn't a very good one. Yes, it's terrible—but it's not downright nonsensical or parodically evil, like the Yes Men speeches were. It's simply too easy to use Slowave as an actual guide to product development.

Over the next several months, you might find yourself asking where somebody got the idea to sell you a "sleep product" to "enhance creativity." Now you know. It came from a mattress company that hired a marketing company to turn a fact of nature into a cultural trend.