It’s overwhelming to think of how carefully tracked we are by private interests at this point in time: what we buy, what we watch, what we search online, what we want to know about other people — and who we know and how well. Shoshana Zuboff’s “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism” describes the perfect storm of extractive profit-seeking and privacy erosion that drives so much of contemporary life. When it comes to today’s corporations, she explains, our lives are the product, and the power that’s accrued to surveillance capitalism abrogates our basic rights in ways that we have not yet figured out how to fight through collaborative action. Our ability to mobilize, she suggests, “will define a key battleground upon which the fight for a human future unfolds.”
You can feel the influence of these concerns in Laila Lalami’s powerful, richly conceived fifth novel about pre-crime, “The Dream Hotel” — out March 4. Set in the near future, the book’s corporatized reality is slightly more twisted than ours but entirely plausible, a place where private greed has resulted in a disturbing bureaucracy with no true due process. As the novel opens, Moroccan American mother and archivist Sara Hussein is in Madison, a 120-bed “retention” center near Los Angeles, run by a private company, where, in the interests of crime prevention, people whose dreams have marked them as high-risk for committing crimes are kept under steady, intrusive observation. According to the powers that be, Sara is being held because she dreamed of killing her husband. And while she refuses to believe this means something bigger, she also worries about all the holes in her knowledge; throughout the novel, Lalami plays out the shiftiness and uncertainty of reality when dreams are given more predictive weight than facts to stunning effect.
Sara has been inside so long — at the start of the book, 281 days — that communication from her husband has slowed, and she fears that he has started to believe she is guilty. When a new woman is admitted to the facility, her naive assumptions about how the system works — the result of ignorance that seems at first to mirror our own — counter Sara’s experience-driven awareness of problems.
After having twins, and struggling to get enough sleep, Sara had agreed to surgery that outfitted her with a neuroprosthetic — the private company’s promise was that you could feel rested after shorter periods of sleep, but under the principles of surveillance capitalism, its reach has since expanded into people’s private, inner lives and become a basis for what amounts to incarceration, though it’s not labeled such. “Once dreams became a commodity, a new market opened — and markets are designed to grow. Sales must be increased, initiatives developed, channels broadened.” We’ll later discover that, in line with surveillance-capitalist impulses, the company is not only watching but also cultivating product placement in dreams.
Here, rendering this edge-of-nightmare world, Lalami skates along at the height of her powers as a writer of intelligent, complex characters. By training, Sara is a historian of postcolonial Africa, and her career has been spent as a digital archivist at the Getty Museum. She maps what she knows of archives to the operation of algorithms, understanding that the latter work according to search terms provided by a human with limited knowledge, and that, therefore, its method for seeking out pre-crime is profoundly fallible.
The book kicks off with Lalami’s clever marketing language for the dream surveillance device: “You’re a good person; if you were in a position to stop disaster, you probably would.” By flattering people’s sense of themselves as good, as wanting to stop crimes against women and children — not so different from the curtailment of civil liberties after 9/11, where the risks of terrorism were treated on balance as drastically more significant than preserving individual freedoms — the device has become normalized. What makes use of the device so insidious is not simply the monitoring, of course, but that trivial actions, and even non-actions, mere thoughts, lead inexorably to nightmarish scenarios. The retention center has procedures that purportedly adhere to due process, but as in Franz Kafka’s “The Trial” or Vladimir Sorokin’s “The Queue,” where bureaucracy stands in the way of getting anywhere, every time it seems like Sara’s time in the facility is about to be over, something trivial occurs to push her hearing date back, or to otherwise deny her release.
Unlike those atmospheric novels in which the central authority in the bureaucracy remains inaccessible, Lalami not only renders Sara relatable through mentions of mundane things like hiking with her husband or caring for babies but also builds the perspectives of some of the villains of the piece with nuance. It’s not only the claustrophobia of an enclosed space with strangers or control-seeking authorities but time itself that creates the feeling of dread. Lalami writes, “Each day resembles the one that came before it, the monotony adding to the women’s apprehension and leading them to make decisions that damage their cases.”
The novel takes a fascinating turn, one that calls up Zuboff’s insights that we haven’t yet developed forms of collaborative action to counter surveillance capitalism, when Sara realizes that she and other retained people do have a tool to fight back, namely the work they do while incarcerated. It’s a clever progressive pivot that tamps down the dystopian vibes that support the original premise of the book. At one point, Sara looks at a mural and notices that the laborers depicted are watched by a painted foreman, “and later by the artist in his studio, and later yet by her, the process transforming them from people into objects.”
But, even in its awareness that subjectivity is stripped away when people are treated as data points, the novel refuses a grim understanding of how people might become damaged in their behavior toward one another while under surveillance (changes to behavior seen in East Berlin, North Korea, the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region and other places in the world that have fallen to totalitarianism). Rather, as with her other novels, there’s a softhearted universalism to Lalami’s treatment of surveillance capitalism. Hers is one in which humans retain the ability to trust one another enough to forge working solidarities and authentic collaborations.
Although it relies on a speculative technology for its plot, “The Dream Hotel” is astounding, elegantly constructed, character-driven fiction. Lalami’s realistic approach to Sara and others, inflected with leftist politics and history, elides any sharp division we might imagine about where we’ve been and what we face ahead. “Maybe past and present aren’t all that different,” Sara thinks at a critical moment. “The strange thing — the amazing thing, really — is that we’ve managed to find workarounds to surveillance.” Within the latter part of the novel, it’s not the stuff of tragedy or alarm about the human condition we encounter, but surprising, unadulterated hope.
Felicelli is a novelist and critic who served on the board of the National Book Critics Circle from 2021-24.
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