BookLife Review: The Dream Hotel (Laila Lalami, author) by Carol O’Day
Science fiction, near future, dystopia, corporate device surveillance, data mining, collection, government risk assessment, detention for possible future crimes, violation of due process and privacy
BookLife Review: The Dream Hotel (Laila Lalami, author)
by Carol O’Day
The Dream Hotel, A Read with Jenna pick by Laila Lalami, is a near-future dystopian story that probes our willing acceptance of data collection and electronic surveillance. It is a haunting novel about the consequences we could face as a direct result of our dependence on the ubiquitous seductive smart devices on which we rely on to run our lives when the data it generates farmed from our devices and sold to the highest bidder. Our personal data quickly becomes an unregulated profit-making tool that can be weaponized against us for corporate profit.
The nightmare stage is set in The Dream Hotel when Sara, a thirty-something archivist married mother of infant twins, is stopped for secondary screening at LAX on her return from a professional conference in London. In this future society, data from smart devices is collected, monitored and analyzed by the Risk Assessment Administration (RAA) using an undisclosed algorithm to create an individual risk score for each individual citizen’s potential to commit future crimes. A device known as the Dreamer, almost as popular as a smartphone, is “wearable” smart technology implanted in a user’s brain to regulate brain activity and sleep cycles, with a stated goal of optimizing a user’s sleep and correcting insomnia. It also collects data on users’ dreams. Adopters of the technology sign a fifteen-page user agreement permitting collection of their data, permitting its sale to third parties and waiving all rights and claims to it. Severely sleep deprived after the birth of her twins, and buoyed by her husband’s positive experience with the device, Sara opts to have a Dreamer implanted. With the Dreamer, she overcomes her post-partum fatigue, begins to sleep well and dreams vividly. The corporate owner of the Dreamer collects all of her dream data and sells it to the RAA for its use in assessing citizens’ risk of committing future crimes.
The RAA’s mission is to prevent future crimes; it is empowered to “retain” and “house” detainees whose risk of committing future crimes exceed an accepted norm. Former school buildings are converted into “retention centers” where retainees are held and “kept under observation” for a statutory minimum 21 days where they are kept under observation. During Sara’s absence from the country, the RAA’s algorithm for the data, including that culled from her Dreamer device, suddenly tipped Sara’s risk score over the accepted level. It deemed her to be a future threat to her husband’s safety. Sara is detained, interrogated at the airport and immediately transported to a risk assessment facility for a 21-day hold. At the facility, conduct and rule violations trigger reports and “extensions” of the retainee’s stay period. As a result, retainees are rarely released after the statutory 21 day period. Governing law does not require due process to allow retainees to challenge the algorithm, the calculation of the assessment score or the terms of the “retention.”
Government messaging touts the RAA as the administrator of a system that keeps citizens safe and prevents crime. However, information is closely held. News system abuses, flaws and wrongful detentions is suppressed. The devil is in the details, however. The RAA housing facilities are for-profit organizations which benefit from longer stays by retainees. While held, retainees are encouraged to work, especially on answering surveys about dream data videos. Though work assignments are ostensibly “voluntary,” facility operators profit from the virtually compulsory labor of the detainees. Facilities staff are vigilant and motivated to identify rule violations and increase retainees’ risk scores, which in turn, extend their stays and enhance the availability of virtually free labor to the jailor. Access to attorneys, family visits, commissary privileges and daily schedules are all strictly regulated. Those held are prisoners in everything but nomenclature.
The first several chapters of this book are intensely and increasingly disturbing. The author pulls back the curtain on the incremental, escalating and almost inescapable infringement on retainees’ freedoms and privacy. The reader squirms as it becomes clear that retainees are powerless to control the outcome or duration of their stay, as arbitrary identification of infractions and violations mount and almost every inmate’s stay is extended. Days become weeks and then months. Sara is separated from her husband, her infant twins and her job. With almost no wilful misconduct, other than those that arise naturally from her frustration over the unfairness of the situation, Sara’s term grows from 21 days to almost 300. All the while her husband is struggling to operate as a single parent of toddling twins and hold a job. Sara’s attorney and family visits are arbitrarily cancelled or postponed, cutting her off from her lines of support. Just when the readers discomfort becomes almost unbearable, the author provides a glimpse of the corporation behind the curtain in the form of an undercover employee of Dreamer Inc. who does a stint in the facility. She is among the only detainee released after 21 days, triggering suspicion of those remaining behind.
A wildfire erupts near the facility and the operators’ complete failure of preparation becomes glaringly apparent. Retainees are evacuated to another facility and held incommunicado in squalid conditions. Several inmates contract a norovirus there which spreads rapidly when they ureturn to their facility. A huge segment of the workforce lands in the infirmary, cutting the free labor force almost in half. Sara realizes that the facility depends upon the inmates’ labor and their power is in their refusal to work. Together with a few others, Sara organizes work resignations. Coupled with the rampant virus that continues to spread, the profit-engine of the facility (reviewing dream data for the corporate owner of the Dreamer device) is hobbled. After months, Sara at last holds leverage to gain her release.
A work of science fiction, The Dream Hotel hovers at the near edge of possible. As a society we embrace smart technologies largely without hesitation or regulation. (See The Anxious Generation reviewed on BookLife previously). Smart devices collect data on our health, sleep, habits, purchases, communications, device usage, geographic locations, website visits, keystrokes and more. We readily and blindly check boxes and sign off on the use of cookies, data collection and tracking and sharing of our information with third-parties and marketing companies. We ignore reminders to renew or change our privacy settings because they are buried deep in the multi-page Terms & Conditions of every agreement, every website and every translation in tiny print. Our lives are busy and the burden of parsing the language and giving thought to the implications, real or imagined, of so many portals and devices is overwhelming. Moreover, we view those who opt out of so-called technologies as un-savvy, anachronistic Luddites. Perhaps they are smarter by untethering themselves than we lemmings realize.
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