Alison Stewart: You are listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. In the latest novel from celebrated author Laila Lalami, a woman is held in a retention center all because of her dreams. Sara is a new mom to twins. She is exhausted, so she signs up for a device that would help her feel more rested on a few hours of sleep, but she didn't read the fine print.

Now, an AI algorithm has analyzed her dreams and determined that she is at risk of harming her husband, a man she loves dearly. She's stopped at an LA airport and sent to a retention center called Madison. The women in Madison are there to prove that they aren't likely to commit crimes in the future. As weeks stretch into months, Sara and her fellow retainees begin to wonder if there is really any way to prove they are innocent of crimes that haven't even happened yet.

The novel is titled The Dream Hotel. It's a timely examination of surveillance capitalism, our flawed justice system, the effectiveness of protest, and the future of artificial intelligence. It was our April Get Lit with All Of It book club selection. Author Laila Lalami joined us in front of a sold-out crowd at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library. Here's part of that conversation.

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Alison Stewart: I read that, originally, the protagonist was a man. Is that true?

Laila Lalami: Yes.

Alison Stewart: When did it change to a woman?

Laila Lalami: It changed after the first draft. What happened was I had written about this, I had created this world, I had sent this character into this in-between space that functions like a prison, but it's not really a prison because you haven't committed any crime. You're not actually being held. You're just being kept under observation for a period that seems to get extended with every minor infraction.

After I finished that initial draft, I sat back and I looked and I thought, "This is interesting because, obviously, I'm taking the world of technological surveillance to its absurd limit. What if it could penetrate the subconscious?" I'm not looking at surveillance with a broad enough lens. If I were to look at it with the-- like what is the role that it plays in various systems of control? Not just technological control, but other systems. I thought, "Well, what am I thinking?"

One of the most basic forms of control that we have in our society is this gender-based form of control, aka the patriarchy. That really kind of makes women feel constantly under surveillance. We're constantly self-disciplining things like our looks and our weights and our behaviors in society, and how loud our voices are, or how quiet, or how we behave. We're constantly policing ourselves, and that's because we've internalized a lot of these behaviors that are expected of us. I thought, "Obviously, I have to go back to square one and rewrite the whole thing as with a woman character." That's how it started.

Alison Stewart: The book is set in the near future. I made a joke because you refer to the aging playwright Lynn Nottage. We're the same age.

Laila Lalami: [laughs]

Alison Stewart: It's in the future.

Laila Lalami: We're all aging. It's a lot of fun. Everyone's doing it. She's going to continue producing plays in this future. I'm a big fan, that's why.

Alison Stewart: About what year did you consider it to be?

Laila Lalami: Probably about 20 years into the future.

Alison Stewart: Why did you pick 20 years? What was it about that period of time?

Laila Lalami: That's a really great question. When I was thinking about writing this idea of dream surveillance, I wasn't imagining that it would be in a future of flying cars or intergalactic travel or something like that. I wanted it to read like horror, to read as something that could actually happen to us. 20 years into the future is just about far enough that none of us know what kind of technology will exist.

The entire world that we now live in, all the phones that we have in our pockets, we've learned to live with them over the last 20 years. It felt to me that picking a time that is about 20 years in the future would give me the ability to create a world that felt extremely real and plausible and frightening, and that it would actually be enough room to explore this world of surveillance to its limit.

Alison Stewart: That's what was so scary about it. I was thinking as I was walking over here, if someone had said to me 10 years ago, "I'm going to slack you about a Zoom," I'd be like, "What are you talking about?" How prevalent it is in our lives now.

Laila Lalami: Yes. I think if you even told somebody 20 years ago that we're going to live in a world where a bunch of corporations and potentially the government could have access to your location, to every single text that you write, to every picture that you take, to every email that you write, you'd be like, "What is this sort of totalitarian system that you're talking about?" Because it happened incrementally and because the information is in different hands in different companies' hands, we are not seeing the broader danger there that it could very easily be integrated and fall into less than democratic hands.

Alison Stewart: What kind of technology did you want to explore in this book?

Laila Lalami: Mostly surveillance technology, like the idea that we are willingly trading things like our freedoms and even our free will, our ability to make decisions entirely based on our good judgment, and we're trading that for the convenience of being able to-- For wonderful conveniences. Let's face it. The ability to make a phone call with a loved one who's like 3,000 miles away and to be able to see their face and to be able to see how well they are. It's just an incredible level of convenience and connection that these devices are delivering to us. Of course, there is a great danger also to our freedom.

Alison Stewart: In the book, we're told that some of the technologies to prevent crime, and you point to a fatal shooting at a Super Bowl. It reminded me a little bit of the Patriot Act after 9/11. What did you want to examine in the book about our concerns about crime?

Laila Lalami: I think part of the reason that I chose to do it this way is that I feel that one of the biggest indicators of what will happen in the future is what has happened in the past. The past is really only a collection of futures that did happen. Human beings don't change. We have the same instincts, the same emotions, generation after generation. It seemed plausible to me that if we had an event of the kind that I describe in the book, that we would go into this world of pre-crime. I'm already going off on a tangent and I forgot what your question was.

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: You were answering it.

Laila Lalami: Okay, good. That's one of the ideas behind it, is that it wouldn't take much for a government to then put forward a piece of legislation that would take us into pre-crime territory. Everything is already set for it. In fact, pre-crime is not something that happens in the future. It's something that is existing already. Policies like stop and frisk could very easily be considered policies of pre-crime, and we tolerate them. Why would we not tolerate something that would take us even further and deprive more people of their privacy for the sake of safety? That just seemed very plausible to me.

Alison Stewart: What did Sara think about the Risk Assessment Administration before she's retained? What did she think about it?

Laila Lalami: Here's the thing. It's very hard to notice the electricity when it's on. When everything is working in your home, you don't think, "Oh, how wonderful that I have electricity in my home." If one day you go without it, then you notice, you can't run the laundry. Everything is breaking. Your food is rotting. When you have failures of government, you see them only when they're-- When things stop working, that's when you notice it.

With the Risk Assessment Administration, I would say this isn't an agency that my character has given much thought to. It is an agency that is just part of the world that she lives in, just as Homeland Security is part of the world that we live in, and it wasn't there 25 years ago. It's just an agency that exists and is basically looking to prevent as much crime as possible and to keep people feeling safe in their homes. She doesn't think about it. Then when she gets pulled aside and gets through this whole experience, then she realizes, "Wait a minute, I'm innocent. What is going on here?" It's really this sort of journey of exploration with the consequences of that administration.

Alison Stewart: It's interesting. As I was typing up questions, every time I put in retention center, it changed it to detention center, and I had to go back and change it. I was like, "Oh, it's coming for me. The spell check is coming for me." Why did you choose to call them retention centers? How often do people make that mistake and say to you, "Oh, your detention center is in your books?"

Laila Lalami: As a writer, I feel like language is one of the primary sites of our arguments about politics and our arguments about what is right and what is wrong. One of the ways in which we are made to accept things that are unacceptable is by corrupting language. For example, to go back, since we just brought up the Patriot Act, I might as well travel back to the early 2000s, when we had detainees in Guantanamo Bay and we were told that they were undergoing enhanced interrogation.

That just became the phrase that was used in the news media rather than using the accurate descriptor of torture. There is this constant fight. You see it continually in the news. For example, when I was growing up, you heard constantly "the occupied Palestinian territories" was the phrase that the United Nations used, and that was used in news media. Then it became the West Bank and Gaza, or now it's become the disputed territory. Bit by bit, we see that language gets changed, and it changes our perception.

It seemed to me in this future, if I was going to make this world of pre-crime feel inevitable, it seemed to me that language had to be a part of it. To get people to accept that people are being detained for no crime, that people are being detained because they might commit crimes, then even the language around it had to change. Instead of detention, it had to be something else. I thought, "Retention is close enough and something that I could play with." That's when I decided--

Alison Stewart: Sara is retained at the airport. She's stopped by these officers. It looks like she's going to get off, but she suggests to them that they have racially profiled her through her last name, Hussein. How does her Arab Americanness, her Arab American identity, factor into this interaction at the airport?

Laila Lalami: Well, it's one of the inciting reasons for her to be pulled into retention. One of the things about technological surveillance that I think is really unique is that it is universal, almost or near universal. In order to function in our society today, you pretty much need to have a device of some kind, like to ride the subway, everything. To communicate with others, you need these devices.

There is a sense in which technological surveillance is universal, but universal does not mean neutral. We, all of us, can be subject to technological surveillance, but the discipline that comes from that surveillance and the control that follows from that discipline is something that is not applied equally to everybody. Some people, by virtue of their appearance, with the signs that their bodies emit, are going to be more "noticeable" to law enforcement.

If you're in an airport and your last name is Hussein, you are getting looked at a little bit more carefully. I can attest to you that that happens to me on almost every trip. They look at you a little bit more carefully. I think my character felt because she's in an airport, that that was something that played a role in her being asked all of these questions. It was her refusal and her pointing out the lack of neutrality that brought all this trouble upon her. It's because she dared to name that thing. She dared to say, "You're pulling me aside. You're putting me through this because of that." Because she said that, then it shifts the atmosphere and everything starts to go wrong.

Alison Stewart: Dream saver. It sounds like an amazing thing. If you're the mother of twins, you sign up for it, it can help you get extra sleep. Sara doesn't quite fully look at the terms and conditions of signing up for it. It seems like an okay deal. How did you decide dreams, like the unconscious mind, would be the final frontier of privacy?

Laila Lalami: Well, it was because of personal experience. I'm an insomniac. I oftentimes don't fall asleep until the early hours of the morning. One day about 10 years ago, I had overslept and I reached for my phone and I saw a notification that said if you-- Because I reached for my phone to look at the time, and I saw a Google notification that said, "If you leave right now, you will make it to the name of my yoga studio at 7:28."

Of course, I had never told Google what day of the week or what time of day or even that I went to yoga, but of course, the company was following my movement and had learned that every Tuesday and every Thursday, at the same time, I went to that location that it's mapping software said was a yoga studio. I was understandably disturbed by this. I turned to my husband and I said, "Pretty soon the only privacy we're going to have is going to be in our dreams." It was kind of like as a joke.

Then I thought, "Wait a minute, what if someday we continue developing technologies that collect--" Because we already have technologies that are collecting data about our movements, your gait, and how long each step is. We have, as I mentioned, texts and emails and pictures, medical data, periods. All of this data is being collected by these apps. Why not imagine that that data collection might penetrate the world of the subconscious?

I can tell you that scientists are already imagining ways to study the subconscious, and they are seeing data from that. There's nothing wrong with that. Human curiosity is a good thing, and scientific innovation is a wonderful thing. Even technological innovation is a wonderful thing. It's really a question about rights. Do you own your body and do you own the rights to all of the data that it emits? To my mind, the question is a very simple yes, like this is my body and the data that it emits is mine.

The devices that we use, what's really happened is that these tech companies have laid claim to that data because of the fact that they're giving us that convenience and that connection. They have laid claim to that data and claim it as their own. That really is the question for me. It's not really about whether technology is good or bad. [unintelligible 00:17:22] technology.

Alison Stewart: It was interesting because Sara becomes obsessed with this woman who's gone off the grid.

Laila Lalami: Yes. It is a fantasy that I have, too. [laughs]

Alison Stewart: Well, I was going to ask you, how long did it take you to figure out how to get her off the grid? How many things did she have to give up?

Laila Lalami: It's so often I'm doomscrolling. During the writing of this book, I would be doomscrolling and I would be thinking, "How wonderful would it be to just be in a cabin and no technology and I can finally be free." Then of course, I know who the Unabomber is and I know how well that turned out. I just have no illusions about that. Also, I think that survival is not something that can happen to an individual by themselves.

We are a social species. We are meant to survive by helping one another and working in community. No single person has all of the skills and the tools and the creativity and everything that is necessary to survive on their own. Even if they did, they're going to want companionship. The fantasy remains. I still have that fantasy at the back of my mind because I get so tired of the technology. I get so frightened about where it might be going. That is a fantasy that I still like to entertain from time to time.

Alison Stewart: I hope you write a book about that moment. I hope that's the next one.

Laila Lalami: [laughs] Maybe.

Alison Stewart: Sara is retained to a retention center.

Laila Lalami: Yes. [laughs]

Alison Stewart: Madison. How did you decide what Madison would be like?

Laila Lalami: Yes, that's a great question. The image that I had when I first started with that first draft was just a room and this person going out and having their device checked. That's the first scene in the book that hasn't changed during all of the different drafts. I then started to think more broadly, like, what kind of a facility is it and where might it-- What is the memory that exists within the walls of that building?

If you think about buildings as a form of physical archive, because the book is really concerned with data and collection and archiving, but buildings themselves are a form of archive. They themselves hold information. What kind of information might I be able to impart to the reader and to convey about what the history of this building was? It seemed to me, given the continual disinvestment that we are engaging in vis-a-vis education, it would make sense that it-- What if I use the school and I know already where I live, there have been schools that are closing because there's a certain number of students that can keep the school operating, and if they fall below that, then it starts getting into trouble.

I thought, "Okay, school, I could work with that." Then from there, thinking, "This school, how old is it?" Then I started thinking it'd be really interesting if I made it fairly old, so about 100 years old, which is quite a lot for California. Then where would that take me? Then the idea of the 1930s and what was happening in the world at that time, the kind of challenges that the world was facing.

We like to think of ourselves as modern people, detached and forward-looking, and we forget that almost nothing that we are facing has been faced by generations before us. I wanted to really echo that in the form of this building and the artwork that is in there, the architectural design of it. All of that I thought I could use in creating this world.

Alison Stewart: Everything that's going on at Madison, over time, you start to wonder, is Sara a reliable narrator? Is she in your book?

Laila Lalami: It's really perceptive observation. I think what happens when you are continually observed and you feel like you have no room for freedom or to maintain any kind of privacy, you start to doubt yourself, like, "Did this really happen or did I imagine it?" That is the effect of continual surveillance on people. I think she starts to think, "Did I actually do this, or is this happening?"

There is a certain kind of destabilizing effect on the narrative and you start to wonder, "Maybe she's not really telling me everything," because, according to the archival records in the book, there's other things about her that she's not revealing, like, "Who do I trust? Do I trust this subjective narrative that I've been given about her, or do I trust this objective data that has been collected about her that is presented in the form of these documents in the book?" It's really kind of challenging you to think about the nature of the self and how we form it and which one you should trust, whether it's the archive or the subjective narrative of the person.

Alison Stewart: You're listening to my conversation with author Laila Lalami from our April Get Lit with All Of It book club event. We spent the month reading her novel The Dream Hotel. We'll have more with Laila and hear some questions from our sold-out crowd after a quick break. This is All Of It.

[MUSIC - Luscious Jackson: Citysong]

Alison Stewart: You're listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. We continue my conversation with author Laila Lalami. Her new novel, The Dream Hotel, was our April Get Lit with All Of It book club selection. It's about a woman who is held in a retention center after an AI algorithm analyzes her dreams and determines she might be at risk of committing a crime. We had a sold-out crowd this week at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library, and as usual, our audience had some great questions for our author. You'll hear some of those in a minute. First, here's more of my conversation with author Laila Lalami.

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Alison Stewart: Who wants to work at Madison?

Laila Lalami: Well, people who need jobs. [laughs] It's quite a number of people, it turns out. People do need jobs and they tell themselves that this is a-- Don't forget that this is set in a small town.

Alison Stewart: That's true.

Laila Lalami: Again, this is a place where the local school could be hiring teachers, could be educating students, could be hiring lunch matrons, and all kinds of things. Instead, it is this retention center, and the jobs are attendants and nurse and all these other different jobs. It's really about this continual and just ever-increasing investment in punishment that we engage in as a country rather than in nurturing people and educating and taking care of them.

Alison Stewart: Let's go to the audience for questions.

Speaker 3: Hi. This might be wishful thinking because I enjoyed the book so much, but I felt a little bit that the ending might be setting us up for a sequel. Do you have any plans on writing a sequel?

Laila Lalami: People have been asking me this a lot. Normally, if the outcome of the presidential election had been a little bit different, I might have been tempted to write a sequel immediately. Now that we have a Department of Government Efficiency, where the person who's running it is quite busy trying to figure out a way to integrate various government databases into one, which in the book, if you've read the book, there is an Omni cloud. It's like this big database that has all this information and it just feels a little close.

I don't know is the answer. I would really have to think, because if I were to write a sequel, it would really be concerned about what happens outside of this retention center, what happens to people who've chosen to opt out, the 23rders, and what's happening in that world. I don't know that I'm comfortable enough right now to venture there.

Speaker 4: Hello. How has the writing of this book affected your personal relationship with technology? Have you chosen to opt out of any services?

Laila Lalami: [laughs] It's a great question. It comes up all the time, like, "Tell us, what are you doing?" I still have an iPhone is the short version of the answer. I am kind of cutting as many of my connections as I can to unnecessary technology. I take the trouble. I know it's really annoying, but every time it gives me the terms and conditions where you just click Agree. I always go through the several windows it takes to decline everything. I do this systematically. I use VPN when I can.

If you need an app for something and there is another way to do the thing, I will go do it the other way. If there is an app and there is no other way, then I delete it immediately after I've used it. I try to do things like that. Going forward, one of my dreams, once I'm done with promoting this book, is to quit social media altogether. Start there, because I just think that the information environment has gotten really, not just toxic, but dangerous. That's one of the places where I think I could easily cut. Also because I read the actual news. I actually subscribe to newspapers and read the actual news, so I don't need some rando telling me what they're thinking about it.

[laughter]

Speaker 5: Thank you so much. I really enjoy the narrative tension in the book. It kind of kept me in the edge of the seat. I was wondering if you knew how it was going to end or if it kind of came to you, because it kept me guessing and in the feeling of punishment.

Laila Lalami: When I started and I realized that my character was stuck there, I was writing, and I kept thinking, I've put myself in a corner, and I have to figure out a way out of it. I knew that it had to end one of two ways. Either she is-- I'm afraid to say something without spoiling the book for those who may not have read it. Basically, I knew that she had to find a way out, or else she was going to actually have to commit the thing that they said she was committing. It was one of those two things.

Speaker 6: Thank you. I was just talking the other day with a friend of mine just about how, back in the day, we have rotary phones, and when people walked around with the big old box, those were actually cell phones or they were more in the car. I haven't read your book, but I was just wondering about the part of what if dreams become taken over, because the reality of it is artificial intelligence is here, or it's been here, and it's been marketed. As much as you would think that quitting social media might be the best thing for people, but as an author, how do you get your book out there if you quit social media overall?

I'm just wondering, what would that world look like? Because movies depict that sometimes when dreams are taken over as well, and then we just become part of the matrix, which we're in right now.

[laughter]

Laila Lalami: No, I think that's true. Thank you for pointing that out. I have the luxury of saying I can quit social media for now. Probably it'll have to be suckered back in for the next book. I think this really just highlights how the book is really about systems of surveillance. It's not just about one person going through this journey. Yes, the novel focuses on the one character because you're the reader, you're attaching yourself to this character whose journey you are following across 350 pages, but it really is looking at this system of surveillance in toto, and the response cannot be purely individual.

There is some amount of individual power which you're free to each exercise in the best way that you can. You can choose to delete certain apps from your phone. If you don't need it, why use it? If you don't need social media, why not? Why use it? Then there is collective power. There's things that we can come together and do together as a group. It seems to me that what we really need is a digital bill of rights that makes it very clear that the data that our bodies emit belong to us.

This is the future. We're going to have to fight for this in the same way that we had to fight to have control over our reproductive systems. I know that we're still fighting that fight, and it's not over. Things sometimes can see one step forward and two steps back, but this is going to continue to happen, and this is going to be one of those things that we have to fight for, is our digital freedom.

Alison Stewart: People in Sara's life keep telling her, "Keep your head down, you'll get out of there, be agreeable, just do what they say." She doesn't seem able to do it. Why not?

Laila Lalami: Because she comes from a long line of difficult women. [laughs] I think you see from the moment that you meet this character and she's having that device checked, just that little instinct of not bending her head and not wanting to make it easier on the guy to check the device. That is what attracts me to her as a character. It's that refusal, it's that desire to say no, even if it's a small thing. That refusal to cede what little amount of power she has, that's what ties me to her as a character, and that's what makes me excited about reading about her and writing her and following her.

Alison Stewart: That was my conversation with author Laila Lalami from our April Get Lit with All Of It book club event.

[music]

Alison Stewart: Up next, a special live performance from the band Imal Gnawa. Stay with us.