“This place is a prison/ And these people aren’t your friends” – The Postal Service
One of the most noxious dog whistles of our times is the label “freedom”, which some Americans use to defend their right to do damn near anything and weaponize against anyone who disagrees. Sean Illing notes in Vox, “America is uniquely obsessed with ‘freedom.’ You can see it in our politics. You can hear it in our discourse. But we’re also, strangely, a country full of fortunate people who are constantly fretting about their lack of freedom.”
How much freedom are such Americans willing to sacrifice to remain safe? What if that includes voluntarily giving up the right to their privacy? These are just a couple of the ethical questions posed by Laila Lalami in her intriguing new novel The Dream Hotel. The author’s Arab American positionality was the foundation of two previous novels: Secret Son (2009) and The Other Americans (2019). The trend continues in The Dream Hotel, which forces the reader to contend with the abuse of technology as an allegory to post-9/11 Muslim and Arab discrimination in America.
The protagonist is Sara Hussein, an educated Arab American archivist, who is detained at LAX by the Risk Assessment Administration (RAA), a fictional federal agency charged with determining if Americans might commit crimes in the future. Despite protesting her innocence, Sara is subsequently placed in a “forensic hold” based on a data-driven predictive algorithm – that “knows what you’re thinking of doing, before even you know it.” Wouldn’t any responsible government feel it was its obligation to preempt lawbreaking if that technology was available? Such is the twisted logic that is the setting of The Dream Hotel, which comes at a particularly important moment in our current debates about AI and its biases.
Sara’s anger during her detention affirms the Smashing Pumpkins’ “Bullets with Butterfly Wings” – “Despite all my rage, I am still just a rat in a cage.” She has not broken any laws but is housed in a facility run by a private corporation contracted out by the government. Sara is reminded that she is not under arrest but is legally being detained. “The attendants never call the women prisoners,” writes Lalami. “They say retainees, residents, enrollees, and sometimes program participants.” This should remind the reader of anti-immigration rhetoric: undocumented, illegal, alien, irregulars, etc.
Further, the slightest disagreement with the attendants can manifest in possible write-ups, extending the detention/retention. Sara’s lawyer and husband plead with her to follow all the rules, but she cannot stay silent when she sees the abuses around her, including the machinations of cruel attendants (guards) who are not physically violent but play psychological and emotional mind games with the retainees. Indeed, monitoring every aspect of Sara – even her periods – is reminiscent of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon.
The reference to Bentham is fitting because The Dream Hotel also evokes Michel Foucault’s analysis that governments create “docile bodies” – “prisoners, soldiers, workers and schoolchildren were subjected to disciplinary power in order to make them more useful and at the same time easier to control. The human body became a machine the functioning of which could be optimized, calculated, and improved.”
Laila Lailami’s keen insight into our less-than-free society is also reflected in The Dream Hotel’s discussion and engagement with data. We willingly share so much of our lives with everyone with poor knowledge of how corporations cull that data for behavioral and consumer data without our consent (or at least a hazy understanding of informed consent). In one instance, Sara notices a particularly mean attendant watching her, almost waiting for her to screw up: “As if the neuroprosthetics, the temperature sensors, and the cameras equipped with Guardian emotion-tracking software aren’t enough. The system is never satisfied with the data it already has. It always seeks more, in new formats or from new sources, including human collectors.”
Much of Sara’s experience in detention and Laila Lalami’s thoughts on the conscious versus unconscious reminded me of the dialogue on dreams versus implants in Ridley Scott’s 1982 dystopian sci-fi film Blade Runner.
It is impossible to read The Dream Hotel without reflecting on Nineteen Eighty-Four, the mother of all dystopian texts. Just as French diplomat Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé famously quipped, “We all came out from under Gogol’s Overcoat,” so too do all of us, Laila Lalami includes, come out from under Orwell’s overcoat. His novel, first published in 1949, is so ridiculously prescient about a time when privacy does not exist because the government has convinced everyone that sacrificing individual freedom is best for public safety. As Winston reflects in Nineteen Eighty-Four, “This was not illegal (nothing was illegal since there were no longer laws).”
The Dream Hotel does not feel like science fiction but rather a commentary on a near future that seems frighteningly close, just out of view. Laila Lalami says, “Entire generations have never known life without surveillance. Watched from the womb to the grave, they take corporate ownership of their personal data to be a fact of life.” The Dream Hotel also brings to mind the Jodie Foster-directed episode of Black Mirror, “ArkAngel“, with its obsession of easy access to information and entertainment. The future we sought in the past has arrived. As The Dream Hotel suggests, we are now so far down the rabbit hole of social control that escape – let alone realization – may be impossible.