Book Review: The Dream Hotel

This is a thought-provoking, chillingly plausible dystopia about a near-future in which technology, AI and data surveillance combine to strangle individuality, freedom, and justice. It's also a critique of profiling as a policing strategy, and a trenchant attack on the incarceration industrial complex where for-profit detention encourages the treatment of prisoners as money-making resources, and incentivises imprisonment rather than tries to avoid it. At times I found it slightly heavy-handed, but overall, it was compelling. I had to take a couple of breaks in reading it because it was so convincingly Kafkaesque and oppressive, but it was well worth persisting.

It is the story of Sara Hussein, an archivist, wife and mother of infant twins, who is detained at LAX on her return from a business trip to London. Sara's "risk score" has risen to what is deemed an unacceptable level, and she is told she will be subject to a 21-day period of detention for "assessment", despite neither having committed nor been accused of any crime.

It quickly emerges that the risk score is generated by "the algorithm" - an all-powerful but alarmingly inept programmatic analysis of factors in a person's life that is allegedly able to detect people who are about to be a risk in some way to others or to society at large. Despite some civil rights discomfort with this, it's accepted by the majority of the populace as a necessity to curb growing crime rates (strong shades of Minority Report); and, perhaps more importantly, it comes about in a world already desensitised to data violation:

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, as natural as leaves growing on trees.

The algo gathers up data that we would probably concede even today is relevant and useful - weapons purchases, criminal charges, online or real-world hate speech or threats, involvement in known terrorist groups - but the net is far, far wider. It looks at family connections, however remote. It looks at incidents where a person was involved tangentially (as a witness / bystander) or not at all but happened to be in the same location. It looks at employment history and union activity. It uses unfounded and malicious complaints made about you.  And, perhaps worst of all - it uses data mined from revolutionary sleep-inducing devices, which are worn by many to most people, to extract and make assertions about risks revealed in people's dreams. Sara's risk score, like many of her fellow incarcerees, has pushed over the acceptable threshold by dreams she has had in which some frustration with her husband has been manifest. 

What follows is a descent into straight horror, as Sara struggles to clear her name and be released. The detention facility, it quickly emerges, is a money-making exercise for the corporation that runs it in more ways than one - not only are they being paid by the government for the "assessment", they "encourage" detainees to work in various parts of the facility that are fulfilling lucrative contracts with third-party companies. Guards are instructed to issue infractions for tiny (or invented) violations to justify extending retention periods, hence ensuring detainees can be worked harder and longer. The system of review and hearings is broken, slow, and skewed to keeping people inside. And Sara, trapped in this nightmare, away from her husband, her job, her babies, goes slowly around the bend.

The layering of the analysis at the heart of this book is what really elevated it for me. Lalami is making a point not just about the risks of universal surveillance to physical liberty, but the effect it has on psychological and emotional liberty as well. The algo will find, and beat down, any nail that sticks up from the rest; to be safe, you have to comply, to fade, to be generic, to be flat, to be affectless. Sara comes to realise, through the claustrophobia and depression of her incarceration, exactly what a cost this is, and how much value it sucks out of a life.

Moreover, Lalami doesn't hold back from making the point that some cohorts of people - the same ones that have been the targets of discrimination in the past - are likely to be disproportionately harmed by data surveillance. Basically, the less rich, male and white you are, the more you move into the crosshairs, regardless of what you actually do or don't do. As a Muslim woman born to immigrant parents, Sara is already suspect, before she makes a single move, and her actions already scrutinisable in a way that simply doesn't happen to people of other demographics.

In the end, Sara's release is facilitated not by trying harder and harder to comply, but rather by passively resisting, and, crucially, by organising. Collective action is is one thing that the powers that be have not controlled for, and Sara ends up gaining her freedom by becoming too big of a nuisance to keep inside - an irony that is not lost on her.

Returning home, Sara is thrown by the lavishness of her (fairly ordinary) life, but determined to hold on to, and build upon, the insights she gained so painfully in her 10 months in the detention centre. Thinking about what she wants to communicate, to those in her own world and beyond, she muses:

Freedom isn’t a blank slate, she wants to tell them. Freedom is teeming and complicated and, yes, risky, and it can only be written in the company of others.

And that is the last and most important message of this book - We can't do it alone, and we can't cede ourselves and our lives to machines. Not if we want to live in a world worth living in. Not if we want to be free.