Dark Mode’s Shadowy Promises

Around 2016, “Night mode” or “night shift”—a screen display option that features a light-on-dark color scheme—began cropping up all over our devices. That year, Apple and Twitter released their own versions of the feature. Google and others soon followed, all of them promising to mitigate the harms of blue light exposure. They aimed to address new concerns about the impact of screens on circadian rhythms and preempt a full-blown movement against late-night screen use. Eventually, the setting promised a much vaguer set of around-the-clock benefits, including improved focus, energy savings, and reduced eye strain. Accordingly, “night mode” became “dark mode.” 

There’s no empirical explanation for dark mode’s rise. For the majority of users, dark text on a light background is harder to read, presumably because the human eye has largely evolved to spot dark figures against the bright background of the sky. Ironically, the reason the light-on-dark color scheme of traditional CRT monitors was phased out in the first place was because most people were used to reading ink on paper and therefore experienced a dark-on-light computer screen as more natural. There’s little evidence that dark mode improves focus. What’s more, unless the mode is set to true black and people use certain types of screens, such as OLEDs, the amount of light emitted in light and dark mode is practically the same, which means that the promise of energy savings is void, too.

Where sleep is concerned, there are very real signs that bright light at night is harmful, but the impact of screen light in particular is likely overstated. According to Russell Foster, a professor of circadian neuroscience, the degree to which light exposure impacts sleep depends on the wavelengths, duration, and intensity of the light and the age and sensitivity of the person, plus the precise makeup of their eye. He added that there is “practically nonexistent” evidence to support the efficacy of turning a blue-hued screen red in the hours before bed (as sunset shift applications like F.lux do). It seems that what one is actually doing with a screen late at night will affect how one sleeps afterward far more than the brightness or color of the screen light. 

And yet bright screen light has become almost superstitiously linked to technology’s ills. When circadian rhythm science began to enter popular discourse in the mid-2010s, it seemed to corroborate the fear that digital devices were somehow making our lives less natural, impacting sleep, mood, and concentration. The strength of our attachment to dark mode lies in a deep conviction that our world is overilluminated and overstimulated, and that by approximating natural rhythms, darkness might help us reverse the influence of the digital age on our bodies and minds.

On the internet, the sun never rises and never sets. (It is 11 pm in the Southern Hemisphere, where I am now reading a tweet that wishes New Yorkers good morning.) Like the inside of an airplane, it glows an unnatural blue and straddles time zones, throwing its inhabitants into a kind of perpetual digital jet lag. Its apparent timelessness was once framed as a source of liberation. “The internet is absent of both night and day,” boasted MIT Media Lab cofounder (and former WIRED columnist) Nicholas Negroponte in 1999. He was speaking at the launch of “Internet Time,” a new universal time measurement that accompanied a range of Swatch Beat watches. Now, however, this estrangement from natural patterns is seen as a problem to be fixed—perhaps with a new set of technical interventions. 

Given that our social interactions tend to shape our experience of time, perhaps it makes sense that devices would mess with our sense of rhythm and place. But pundits who go on about night mode, SAD lamps (for seasonal affective disorder), and the impact of technology use on the body tend to dwell more on biological factors than social or cultural ones. Usually, they invoke the relatively recent science of the body clock, the idea that time is lodged in our bodies on a cellular level. In doing so, they tie the issue of digital light to an emerging body of ecological research on the effect of light pollution on animals: migratory birds that are lured to their deaths by the bright lights of the city, turtles drawn away from the safety of the ocean by fake LED moonlight emanating from beachside resorts, flowers opening to a false sun. 

Whether they concern human or nonhuman subjects, stories about artificial light often traffic in the same tropes. As far back as the 19th century, when gaslight was expanding across cities, artificial light has been bound up with what the historian Chris Otter calls the “phenomenology of modernity”: a vague sense that things are getting faster, brighter, and less natural. As I’ve written elsewhere, today light is often framed as an agent of trickery and artifice, something that overloads the senses and corrupts the mind and body, disrupting our ability to distinguish between biological and technological signals. While there is certainly real evidence of light’s impact on ecosystems, it can be misleading to link this to the human response to blue light when screen use can impact a person in any number of ways. Such parallels also offer tech companies a handy narrative: If we can be tricked out of natural rhythms, some argue, we might just as easily be tricked back into them. 

Apple’s Night Shift, for instance, originally came with a setting that used the device’s clock and geolocation to synchronize its shifts to actual sunset. The night mode’s rise in popularity coincided with that of the SAD lamp and the wake-up light, both of which claim to boost productivity and mood by using light to “hack” the body’s inbuilt rhythms. The narrative underpinning these technologies goes something like this: In the contemporary world, the natural distribution of night and day has been messed up by the proliferation of artificial light. Now, one’s relationship to light (and therefore to time) needs to be managed by yet another set of technological interventions.  

However, the health panic around blue light alone doesn’t fully account for the emotional charge that seems to simmer beneath dark mode’s lasting popularity. The threat of digital light is less medical than it is moral. Behind the bogeyman of blue light exposure is an almost gothic fear of mutation: Inundated by digital light and severed from the movements of the sun and moon, who, or what, are we becoming? If you look at cartoon depictions of the digital zombie, they’re often blasted with light from a tiny screen in a dark room. Light stands in for all the evils more widely attributed to technology use: It renders us more distractible, it makes us shallower, it disrupts our ability to rest and to think deeply, and—most of all—it severs our connection to the earth. Dark mode hits on our deepest fears about technology as a force that corrupts our humanity and distances us from our true nature. 

Dark modes are not the only services tapping into these narratives. Apple’s claims that its night mode boosts productivity can be seen as part of a wider cultural belief that distractibility is a kind of moral failing and that darkness might help us recover the elusive experience of pure focus. In addition to sensory deprivation tanks, some spas and wellness resorts now offer “dark retreats,” an idea loosely adapted from a form of Taoist meditation in which the practitioner is deprived of all light and noise. Experiences like Dining in the Dark and Pitchblack Playback—which coordinate pitch-dark restaurant experiences and album-listening parties, respectively—also play on the idea that darkness might allow us to stop eyeballing our screens and reawaken our other, more wholesome senses. “In today’s stressful modern world,” states the Pitchblack Playback website, “we all need spaces where we can cut ourselves off from the noise and distraction of daily life.” Darkness is posited over and over as a kind of healing counterforce in modern culture.

The “darkness” of dark mode seems to offer a kind of purifying restraint and focus, a moment of silence amid the noise. But this metaphor offers little insight into what we are trying to restore ourselves to, or what kinds of distractions we are trying to filter out. What is the stuff that makes up the “noise and distraction” of daily life? Is it screen light? The news cycle? Content in general? Other people? It is easier to imagine that our devices might be emitting toxic photons than to reckon with why we continue to use them in ways we think of as bad for us.

Making minor adjustments to the appearance of our screens might feel like we’re minimizing our exposure to technology’s corrupting influence. But these tweaks could actually be distracting us from asking systemic questions about the role such screens play in our lives. Media historian Dylan Mulvin describes dark mode as a “media prophylactic”—an action taken to reduce or mitigate a perceived harm inflicted by media. Dark modes, for Mulvin, individualize responsibility for harm reduction. Their inbuilt emphasis on screen light places the solution in the hands of the user, who “is responsible for judiciously transforming their screen into a more healthful artifact.” While Apple’s night mode, for example, is eager to stress the potential health impacts of blue light exposure, Mulvin points out that “it is never suggested that the search for greater productivity might itself be a source of friction between people and their environments.”

Dark mode’s promise is an empty one. We won’t recover a lost relationship to “nature” by changing the colors of our screens to mimic the setting of the sun. Reducing the light emitted by a phone screen is not the same as simply putting it away for a while. 

Still, dark mode’s popularity is an expression of our desire for a relationship with technology that is not draining and exploitative, and of our longing to feel present in our bodies. It points to much bigger questions about rest, leisure, and what it really means to manage one’s own time. As the theorist Sarah Sharma points out in her work on chronopolitics, we often ask how we can “reclaim” time for ourselves under capitalism when we should be asking why leisure time is positioned as a scarcity and is so unevenly distributed in the first place. More often than not, the failure to get a good night’s sleep has as much to do with social factors as it does with personal ones. It’s time we looked for social solutions too.