Latest news with #TheDreamHotel
The Age
25-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
In The Dream Hotel, even thinking about murder is enough to send you to jail
FICTION The Dream Hotel Laila Lalami Bloomsbury, $26.69 Prison is a place beyond shame, writes Laila Lalami in her gripping new novel, The Dream Hotel. Lalami's main character, Sara Hussein, is imprisoned yet has not committed any crime; she is being detained because she dreams of murder. And every murder starts with a fantasy, officials say. The Dream Hotel is set in a future when people's thoughts, actions and dreams are monitored, monetised and weaponised by tech companies and authorities in the name of convenience and public safety. Each person has a risk score, based on hundreds of data sources including their family, spending, health, education, criminal history and reputation. Hussein, an archivist and mother of baby twins, is detained at Los Angeles Airport after flying home from a conference in London. First, she is annoyed by the delay; then she is mystified as there'd been no major change in her life since the last time she'd seen her risk report. 'She didn't lose her job, didn't get evicted, didn't default on a loan, didn't receive public assistance, didn't owe child support, didn't abuse drugs, didn't suffer a mental health crisis, any of which might have ticked up her score,' writes Lalami. 'And she didn't have a criminal record – wasn't that the biggest factor in calculating the likelihood of a future crime?' But Hussein had chosen to install an implant in her brain to improve her sleep quality. The product manufacturer had then harvested that data and trained artificial intelligence to look for patterns and make predictions. The device revealed that Hussein had dreamed of killing her husband, with whom she was juggling the care of young children. 'The algorithm knows what you're thinking of doing, before even you know it,' a warden explains. Labelled a 'questionable person', Hussein is sent to a women's 'retention' centre for an observation period of 21 days. But three weeks come and go: Hussein can only leave when her risk score falls below the legal limit. Prisoners are told if they are compliant and work hard – doing mind-numbing jobs to boost income for the prison's sharemarket-listed owner – they will eventually be released. But the prison's rules are capricious, and Hussein struggles with compliance. Readers are left wondering whether Hussein will ever escape. The Dream Hotel contemplates the nature of freedom for people who have never lived without internet surveillance, and bear the brunt of its most brutal applications. The novel's imagined crime-prevention prison program is popular among the broader population.
Hindustan Times
14-05-2025
- Entertainment
- 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.
Sydney Morning Herald
13-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
The dystopian novel that might make you consider the current reality
FICTION The Dream Hotel Laila Lalami Bloomsbury, $26.69 Prison is a place beyond shame, writes Laila Lalami in her gripping new novel, The Dream Hotel. Lalami's main character, Sara Hussein, is imprisoned yet has not committed any crime; she is being detained because she dreams of murder. And every murder starts with a fantasy, officials say. The Dream Hotel is set in a future when people's thoughts, actions and dreams are monitored, monetised and weaponised by tech companies and authorities in the name of convenience and public safety. Each person has a risk score, based on hundreds of data sources including their family, spending, health, education, criminal history and reputation. Hussein, an archivist and mother of baby twins, is detained at Los Angeles Airport after flying home from a conference in London. First, she is annoyed by the delay; then she is mystified as there'd been no major change in her life since the last time she'd seen her risk report. 'She didn't lose her job, didn't get evicted, didn't default on a loan, didn't receive public assistance, didn't owe child support, didn't abuse drugs, didn't suffer a mental health crisis, any of which might have ticked up her score,' writes Lalami. 'And she didn't have a criminal record – wasn't that the biggest factor in calculating the likelihood of a future crime?' But Hussein had chosen to install an implant in her brain to improve her sleep quality. The product manufacturer had then harvested that data and trained artificial intelligence to look for patterns and make predictions. The device revealed that Hussein had dreamed of killing her husband, with whom she was juggling the care of young children. 'The algorithm knows what you're thinking of doing, before even you know it,' a warden explains. Labelled a 'questionable person', Hussein is sent to a women's 'retention' centre for an observation period of 21 days. But three weeks come and go: Hussein can only leave when her risk score falls below the legal limit. Prisoners are told if they are compliant and work hard - doing mind-numbing jobs to boost income for the prison's sharemarket-listed owner - they will eventually be released. But the prison's rules are capricious, and Hussein struggles with compliance. Readers are left wondering whether Hussein will ever escape. The Dream Hotel contemplates the nature of freedom for people who have never lived without internet surveillance, and bear the brunt of its most brutal applications. The novel's imagined crime-prevention prison program is popular among the broader population. But how can anyone survive imprisonment when they are judged not by their actions, but by their darkest thoughts and uncontrollable dreams? And when prisoners make money for their jailers, do they stand a fair chance of being released?
The Age
13-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
The dystopian novel that might make you consider the current reality
FICTION The Dream Hotel Laila Lalami Bloomsbury, $26.69 Prison is a place beyond shame, writes Laila Lalami in her gripping new novel, The Dream Hotel. Lalami's main character, Sara Hussein, is imprisoned yet has not committed any crime; she is being detained because she dreams of murder. And every murder starts with a fantasy, officials say. The Dream Hotel is set in a future when people's thoughts, actions and dreams are monitored, monetised and weaponised by tech companies and authorities in the name of convenience and public safety. Each person has a risk score, based on hundreds of data sources including their family, spending, health, education, criminal history and reputation. Hussein, an archivist and mother of baby twins, is detained at Los Angeles Airport after flying home from a conference in London. First, she is annoyed by the delay; then she is mystified as there'd been no major change in her life since the last time she'd seen her risk report. 'She didn't lose her job, didn't get evicted, didn't default on a loan, didn't receive public assistance, didn't owe child support, didn't abuse drugs, didn't suffer a mental health crisis, any of which might have ticked up her score,' writes Lalami. 'And she didn't have a criminal record – wasn't that the biggest factor in calculating the likelihood of a future crime?' But Hussein had chosen to install an implant in her brain to improve her sleep quality. The product manufacturer had then harvested that data and trained artificial intelligence to look for patterns and make predictions. The device revealed that Hussein had dreamed of killing her husband, with whom she was juggling the care of young children. 'The algorithm knows what you're thinking of doing, before even you know it,' a warden explains. Labelled a 'questionable person', Hussein is sent to a women's 'retention' centre for an observation period of 21 days. But three weeks come and go: Hussein can only leave when her risk score falls below the legal limit. Prisoners are told if they are compliant and work hard - doing mind-numbing jobs to boost income for the prison's sharemarket-listed owner - they will eventually be released. But the prison's rules are capricious, and Hussein struggles with compliance. Readers are left wondering whether Hussein will ever escape. The Dream Hotel contemplates the nature of freedom for people who have never lived without internet surveillance, and bear the brunt of its most brutal applications. The novel's imagined crime-prevention prison program is popular among the broader population. But how can anyone survive imprisonment when they are judged not by their actions, but by their darkest thoughts and uncontrollable dreams? And when prisoners make money for their jailers, do they stand a fair chance of being released?
CBC
25-04-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
Laila Lalami's novel imagines a world where dreams can land you in jail
After oversleeping one morning, writer Laila Lalami noticed a notification on her phone telling her the exact time she'd arrive at her yoga studio. "I had never told Google what day of the week or what time of day or even that I went to yoga," she said on Bookends with Mattea Roach. "But of course, over time, the company had picked up my habits and followed my movements and it had decided, perhaps helpfully, to remind me that I was running late and I had better leave." In that moment, the somewhat invisible data collection of our technological devices became apparent to Lalami — and led her to ask questions that sparked the idea of her book, The Dream Hotel. "I turned to my husband and I said, pretty soon the only privacy any of us will have left will be in our dreams. And of course, being a novelist, I thought, 'Well, what if someday this data collection penetrates the world of dreams?'" In her novel The Dream Hotel, a device that's supposed to help people sleep also harvests data about their dreams. This becomes one way that the government decides if someone's likely to commit a crime. When Sara, the novel's protagonist, is flagged as high risk, she's sent to a retention centre with other women trying to prove their innocence — and fight for their freedom. Lalami joined Roach on Bookends to examine the intimacy of dreams and the invisible power of surveillance technology. Mattea Roach: What is your relationship with your own dreams? Laila Lalami: I am a very active dreamer. I tend to remember my dreams and they are often one of the things that I discuss first thing over breakfast when I'm having coffee with my husband. When talking about how we slept, oftentimes a dream that I've had will come up and then we talk about it and I've always found them to be an interesting window into the kinds of things that preoccupy me — and sometimes that can be extremely banal. I am a very active dreamer. - Laila Lalami So for example, every single semester for the last 18 years that I've been teaching, the night before the first day of classes, I dreamed that I forgot my lecture notes. I know it's an expression of anxiety. It's not particularly interesting, but then every once in a while I have a dream that can be very revealing or very affecting or terrifying or exciting or humorous and those I enjoy remembering and discussing. The dream data in your story is harvested from this device that's a commercial product that was bought and installed by people who wanted to sleep better. This is something that people voluntarily chose to have implanted, with some knowledge that their data could be used and shared with third parties. What did you want to explore in that territory? I'm one of those people — and I'm sure many of your listeners are as well — if you're in a rush, you're trying to download something and it shows you the terms and conditions, you just click accept and you move on. Convenience trumps our concerns about privacy. We know that data is being collected, but because that collection is made invisible and because the convenience that these phones deliver to our lives is so large, then we just accept it. The problem is that incrementally, that data collection has increased to a level that is unprecedented in human experience. The problem is that incrementally, that data collection has increased to a level that is unprecedented in human experience. If you traveled back in time and said, "I have a device that can tell you what every citizen in your country, their location at any one time, every letter that they write, every picture that they take — I have a way of accessing all of this for you." If it happened overnight, you'd be like, "Whoa, what is this totalitarian system? What is this system that we have?" But because it happened very slowly over the course of 25 years, and because these phones deliver so much convenience to our lives we just let it happen. My mother lives in Morocco, and I can talk to her and I can see her face while I'm talking to her, which is very important. She's hard of hearing so there's just a lot of convenience. I think that the amount of data that is being collected right now is truly unprecedented. I don't think we have reckoned with it. How do you see technology playing a role in all of the various crises that we have to contend with in the world right now? Is there hope that technology can be part of a solution to any of it, do you think? I think yes, because technology is essentially an expression of human creativity and we're never going to stop being creative. It is what makes us human. When we think of solutions, oftentimes, it's possible that those solutions are going to include technology. Engineers are not going to stop innovating, just as writers aren't going to stop writing and artists aren't going to stop painting and making songs. Innovation is going to continue. The problem is when we present a particular technological situation as the solution, when we say that AI is going to be able to do X and then that's it. The real danger is to trust systems that turn people into data with the caretaking of people. People are not data. When we automate a lot of these systems, for example, education, and think that you can just have ChatGPT teach creative writing or English or history. It's possible that technology can help in those tasks. But I don't think that it can replace people in those tasks. That's where the real danger is.
