The Dream Hotel

While there are many societal issues presented in The Dream Hotel, the primary issue at the crux of Sara’s problems is whether surveillance is justified as a method of preventing harm. The novel draws a clear parallel between dystopian mechanisms and real-world national security overreach, questioning the moral cost of sacrificing privacy for safety. The novel rests the entire system of surveillance—and the very existence of the RAA as an organization—on a single tragedy, the horrific slaughter at a Super Bowl, and creates arguments from there. Notably, the novel presents very few people as outright dissenters to the need for surveillance, and even Sara must grow to understand the ethical complications and her personal need for privacy in a world bent on analyzing her regardless of her wishes. Her journey reveals how quickly consent becomes irrelevant when the infrastructure of surveillance is so deeply embedded in everyday life. Surveillance is also an economic concern for the government; by placing surveillance and a biased algorithm in power, the government/Safe-X/et cetera saves money, since people will always behave under the belief they are being watched and dissected. Ultimately the novel concludes that surveillance can never be truly ethical, since human biases will always present themselves, and people have a right to privacy to allow themselves to be human beings without judgment.

Many areas in the novel argue that surveillance and “precrime” always cause more harm than they prevent. Sara repeatedly witnesses people in retention harming others; women get into fights, not because they are inclined to do so, but because the harshness of their situation brings out the worst in them. One small example is of the woman stealing a hot dog from Victoria’s plate. While perhaps not against the rules, the woman is not doing this out of personal spite or hatred; she is doing it because she is underfed and hungry and the opportunity presented itself. Surveillance, however, creates an automatic bias against these harmful but inescapable behaviors. These systems rely on static interpretation, unable to account for desperation, trauma, or context. The system of surveillance and assessing people for “risk” naturally must interpret all behavior as potentially dangerous, thus confirming existing biases. This creates a horrible cycle—people are accused of a crime, try to control themselves to look innocent, are put in a situation where they cannot control themselves (i.e., treated as less than human for being a “criminal”), behave accordingly, and get accused of a crime again, or perhaps have actually committed the crime this time. Under a system of surveillance, everyone has already committed a crime against the powers that be—surveillance is just waiting to catch you, not waiting to prove you innocent. Innocence is something only individuals can believe about themselves, not a system that exists to assert guilt.

Ultimately, the book argues that the principle at the heart of surveillance, the idea that someone with nothing to hide has nothing to hear, is a contradiction that strips human beings of their dignity, rights, and ability to behave like people. People are full of complexities and secrets even to themselves; attempting to remove the right to have a secret, whether innocent or not, just damages humanity itself, since everyone has something to hide and therefore has something to fear. Sara’s exasperation with her husband and exhaustion from her children is not something she can make fully public because she herself does not know the extent of it—but she knows it is not something that puts them at risk. A surveillance state can never know that; they only can take the surface aspects of her emotions and assume the worst about them. The damage this wreaks on Sara’s psyche and personal life is extensive, ultimately proving that while surveillance states may appear to benefit society at large, they destroy the individuals making up that society one by one.