On the Dream Hotel

This book would have been incomprehensible in the twentieth century. Science fiction has long dealt with surveillance and government overreach, but those abuses were the sole prerogative of states; we’re in a different predicament now, and Laila Lalami’s novel points to a world of privatized surveillance and data collection, of “prisons” that generate revenue, of botched evacuations after climate catastrophes and racial profiling in airports. In other words, the book is hardly science fiction at all — it hits too close to home, it’s too real. Science fiction is never really about the future, though that’s how we usually think of it; it’s about the present, and especially about humanity’s relationship with science and technology, reflecting our anxieties and fears.

The Dream Hotel is no exception. It tells the story of a young mother stopped at an airport and taken to a “temporary retention center” because an algorithm that predicts the likelihood of future crimes has labeled her high-risk. In theory the “retained” stay three weeks and are released, but bureaucratic inefficiency, force majeure, and petty abuses of power ensure that most stay far longer; our protagonist stays eleven months. You could swap the fictional names for real ones and the book wouldn’t read any differently: the company mining people’s dreams (and trying to insert ads into them) may as well be Google, the one running the retention centers might be CoreCivic, and it’s easy to see Facebook as the one managing communications. The world Lalami depicts is the logical conclusion of surveillance capitalism: it doesn’t matter whether we’ve committed any crime, doesn’t matter whether we keep our thoughts private, because any individuality we have can be reduced to a few thousand data points with predictive power, our private drives and disputes turned against us, the data looking only for what confirms the conclusions it has already reached. Is this reality? I suspect not — but it’s the vision of tech bros everywhere, and that realization, more than anything, is chilling.