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Hindustan Times

Review: The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami

Big Brother was just the beginning. When surveillance shakes hands with capitalism, as Shoshana Zuboff points out in her 2018 book on the subject, the system claims human experience 'as free raw material for translation into behavioural data'. This data is then used for everything from control to profit. Sara, the protagonist of The Dream Hotel, Laila Lalami's new novel set in the near future, experiences the consequences of such a system firsthand. Entire generations, she acknowledges, have been watched and recorded 'from the womb to the grave'. The result: they accept 'corporate ownership of their personal data to be a fact of life, as natural as leaves growing on trees'. The Dream Hotel is set in a United States where pervasive surveillance is the norm. Citizens are constantly monitored through facial recognition, biometrics, public cameras, social media, and other forms of digital scrutiny. The latest among these is the so-called DreamSaver, an implant to help you sleep better, but which also records your dreams. Armed with these sources, the government's crime-prediction algorithm assigns risk scores to individuals. Those who exceed a certain threshold are deemed potential future threats and held in 'retention centres' until their scores drop to acceptable levels. The novel's premise, then, echoes the one found in Philip K Dick's 1956 science fiction novella Minority Report, filtered through what could well be an episode of Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror. It also brings to mind Ismail Kadare's 1981 novel The Palace of Dreams in which the functionaries of an autocratic state transcribe the dreams of compliant subjects in the belief that 'all that is murky and harmful, or that will become so in a few years or centuries, makes its first appearance in men's dreams'. In this future scenario, some things have stayed the same. As Sara thinks, 'It was impossible to be on social media these days without encountering trolls, bots, cyborgs, scammers, sock puppets, reply guys, or conspiracy theorists -- people who were best avoided, ignored, or blocked.' No surprises there. A 38-year-old museum archivist and historian of post-colonial Africa, Sara is flagged by the all-seeing algorithm upon returning to Los Angeles from an overseas museum trip. Her mind races through the possibilities: had she run a red light, neglected to pay for a parking violation, or left a grocery store without scanning all her items? Had her phone pinged near a political protest or some kind of public disturbance? All of these would have been 'recorded on smartphones, documented in screenshots, or watched from hidden security cameras, then stored in online databases'. She is transported to a nearby town and held in the precincts of a public school that has been converted to a holding centre. Unhelpful officials and bureaucratic errors crush her hopes of a quick release, and she remains stuck in detention indefinitely. The novel swirls around Sara's suffocating present: a period of time filled with her dreams, memories of the past with her husband and their twins, and relationships with fellow detainees and supervisors. She and the other inmates are given a series of monotonous tasks and have to deal with issues of privacy, food, and hygiene. In an overt nod to fictional parallels, Sara also checks out books by Octavia Butler, Kafka, and Borges from the centre's library. The narrative also includes news articles, audio transcripts, medical reports, emails, and other documents, which are set apart from the main narrative rather than integrated into it. These insertions not only shed light on the mechanics of the story's futuristic world but also reveal how bureaucratic glitches impact the lives of the incarcerated. The Dream Hotel doesn't progress in the manner of most dystopian fiction. Gone are the usual tropes of swelling rebellions or dramatic clashes with authority; instead, the conflict stays confined to Sara's immediate circumstances. Much of the novel's middle section unfolds quietly – perhaps too quietly – dwelling on the holding centre's monotonous rhythms and the women trapped within them. Lalami's observations about corporate control over this surveillance society are sharp and spot-on. When Sara learns of plans to use the DreamSaver for more than just surveillance, she realises: 'The only way to increase profit continually is to extract more from the same resources.' At another time, she rues 'the parasitic logic' which has made its way so deeply into the collective mind that 'to defy lucre is to mark oneself as a radical, or a criminal, or a lunatic'. In this world of algorithmic policing, Sara has to remind herself that a crime isn't the same as a moral transgression. 'It's only that the line of legality has moved, and now I'm on the wrong side of it.' We blame the algorithm for our predicament, she thinks, 'but the algorithm was written by people, not machines'. Freedom, then, with all its complications and risks, 'can only be written in the company of others'. Lalami's measured approach makes The Dream Hotel a critique that lingers on the mundane horrors of compliance and the erosion of autonomy. Sanjay Sipahimalani is a Mumbai-based writer and reviewer.