This article offers the first surveillance studies analysis of Laila Lalami's The Dream Hotel (2025), a speculative novel in which the Crime Prevention Act authorizes the indefinite detention of individuals flagged by predictive algorithms as imminent risks. Drawing on Shoshana Zuboff's surveillance capitalism, Ruha Benjamin's New Jim Code, and Achille Mbembe's necropolitics as its primary frameworks, and supplemented by Kevin Haggerty and Richard Ericson's surveillant assemblage, Giorgio Agamben's state of exception, and Simone Browne's racializing surveillance, the article argues that the novel's central concern is the gap between the person and the data double: the statistical surrogate that governs its subject while remaining inaccessible to her challenge or self-knowledge. Six close readings trace how this gap is retroactively authorized by the terms of service, institutionalized as carceral governance, technically produced by Madison retention center's assemblage, and racially constructed through coded inequity. The same gap then becomes the space of resistance: in individual tactics of evasion, in coded speech, in collective labor refusal, and in a final act of solidarity, the risk score cannot prevent. A parallel argument tracks Sara Hussein's archival consciousness as the critical framework through which she recognizes the data double as a selection rather than a portrait, and her dream journal as a counter-archive reclaiming the interior life the algorithm treats as behavioral surplus.
Brahim Barhoun (Sun,) studied this question.