Dream crime, surveillance capitalism impregnates “The Dream Hotel”: Review

It is overwhelming to think how carefully we are followed by private interests at this stage: what we buy, what we look at, what we are looking for online, what we want to know about others – and who we know and to what extent. “The age of surveillance capitalism of Shoshana Zuboff describes the perfect storm of the search for profit and the erosion of extractive private life which leads to so much contemporary life. Regarding today's societies, she explains, our lives are the product, and the power accumulated to monitor capitalism repeals our fundamental rights in a way that we have not yet understood how to fight by collaborative action. Our ability to mobilize, she suggests, “will define a key battlefield on which the struggle takes place for a human future”.

You may feel the influence of these concerns in the powerful fifth novel by Laila Lalami, richly designed on pre -crime, “The Dream Hotel” – March 4. Located in the near future, the corporate reality of the book is slightly more twisted than ours, but without real regular procedure. While the novel opens, the American mother and archivist Sara Hussein is in Madison, a “detention” center of 120 beds near Los Angeles, managed by a private enterprise, where, in the interest of crime prevention, people whose dreams have marked them as at high risk for having committed crimes are held under an intrusive and intrusive observation. According to the powers in place, Sara is detained because she dreamed of killing her husband. And although she refuses to believe that it means something bigger, she also worries about all the holes to her knowledge; Throughout the novel, Lalami plays the dissatisfaction and uncertainty of reality when dreams receive a more predictive weight than facts with an astonishing effect.

Sara is inside so long – at the start of the book, 281 days – this communication from her husband slowed down, and she fears that he began to believe that she is guilty. When a new woman is accepted in the establishment, her naive hypotheses on the functioning of the system – the result of ignorance which seems to reflect ours first – contraindnes the experience of Sara to problems.

After having twins and had trouble sleeping sufficiently, Sara had accepted surgery that equipped her with a neuroprosthetic – the promise of the private enterprise was that you could feel rested after periods of shorter sleep, but under the principles of surveillance capitalism, its scope has since expanded to the private life of people and to inner life and to become a basis for the quantity of incarceration been qualified as such people. “Once dreams have become a commodity, a new market open – and the markets are designed to grow. Sales must be increased, the initiatives developed, the enlarged channels. ” We will discover later that, in accordance with the impulses of capital surveillance, the company is not only concerned but also the culture of the placement of products in dreams.

Here, making this world of night, Lalami patina at the height of his powers as a writer of intelligent and complex characters. In training, Sara is a historian from postcolonial Africa, and her career has been spent as a digital archivist at Getty Museum. She maps what she knows from the archives to the functioning of algorithms, understanding that the latter is based on the terms of research provided by a human with limited knowledge, and that, consequently, her method of searching for pre-crime is deeply fallible.

The book starts with Lalami's intelligent marketing language for the dream surveillance system: “You are a good person; if you were able to stop the disaster, you would probably do it.” By flattering the meaning of people of themselves as goods to want to stop crimes against women and children – not so different from the reduction of civil freedoms after September 11, where the risks of terrorism were treated as radically more important than preserving individual freedoms – the apparatus has become standardized. What uses the device so insidious is not just surveillance, of course, but these trivial actions, and even non-action, simple thoughts, inexorably lead to nightmarish scenarios. The detention center has procedures that allegedly adhere to a regular procedure, but as in Franz Kafka's “The Trial” or “The Tail” by Vladimir Sorokin, where bureaucracy is on the way to end, each time it seems that Sara is going back to Sara in the end of her release.

Unlike atmospheric novels in which the central authority of bureaucracy remains inaccessible, the Lalami makes not only Sara relatable through mentions of banal things such as hiking with her husband or the care of babies, but also builds the perspectives of some of the bad guys in nuance. It is not only the claustrophobia of a closed space with foreigners or research authorities, but a time itself which creates the feeling of terror. Lalami writes: “Every day looks like the one who preceded it, the monotony adding to the apprehension of women and leading them to make decisions that damage their cases.”

The novel takes a fascinating turn, which calls for Zuboff's ideas that we have not yet developed forms of collaborative action to counter surveillance capitalism, when Sara realizes that she and other held people have a tool to retaliate, namely the work they do when imprisoned. It is an intelligent progressive pivot that draws dystopian vibrations that support the original premise of the book. At one point, Sara looks at a wall painting and notices that the workers represented are watched by a painted foreman, “and later by the artist in her studio, and later by her, the process transforming them from people into objects”.

But, even in his consciousness that subjectivity is deleted when people are treated as data points, the novel refuses a dark understanding of the way people could be damaged in their behavior towards each other while being under surveillance (behavior changes observed in East Berlin, North Korea, Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region and other places of the world). On the contrary, as with his other novels, there is a heartless universalism for the treatment by Lalami of surveillance capitalism. His is the one in which humans retain the ability to trust themselves enough to forge work solidities and authentic collaborations.

Although it is based on speculative technology for its intrigue, “The Dream Hotel” is an amazing fiction, elegantly built and focused on the characters. Lalami's realistic approach to Sara and others, informed with leftist politics and history, elected any clear division that we could imagine where we were and what we are confronted with. “Maybe the past and the present are not so different,” said Sara at a critical moment. “The strange thing – the incredible thing, really – is that we have managed to find surveillance bypass.” In the last part of the novel, it is not a matter of tragedy or alarm in the human condition that we encounter, but a surprising and undeveloped hope.

Felinelli is a novelist and critic who sat on the board of directors of the National Book Critics Circle of 2021-24.