“You’ve Already Agreed to the Terms of Service”: Surveillance Capitalism, the Data Double, and Resistance in Laila Lalami’s The Dream Hotel

Backup copy. This page is kept by the LLCIS Research Laboratory as a backup of Confluence Journal of Multidisciplinary Studies. The official version of record is published on the journal’s platform, hosted and indexed by IMIST-CNRST: https://journals.imist.ma/index.php/confluence/article/view/8670.

  • Brahim Barhoun ORCIDAbdelmalek Essaadi University, Tétouan, Morocco - LLCIS Research Lab
PDF (backup copy)Official version on IMISTDOI
Journal
Confluence Journal of Multidisciplinary Studies (e-ISSN 3085-5411)
Issue
Vol. 2 No. 2 (2026): Voices of Morocco: Perspectives on Contemporary Moroccan Literature
Section
Articles
Pages
1-15
Published
27 February 2026
DOI
https://doi.org/10.34874/PRSM.cjms-vol2iss2.8670
License
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
Copyright (c) 2026 Brahim Barhoun

Abstract

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.

Keywords

Surveillance CapitalismData DoubleAlgorithmic DetentionNew Jim CodeEveryday ResistanceArchival Consciousness

Works Cited (34)
  1. Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen, Stanford UP, 1998.
  2. Alami, Mohammed. “The Transatlantic Turn in Laila Lalami’s Migrant Writing.” The Routledge Companion to Gender and Belonging, edited by Gita Rajan and Shailja Sharma, Routledge, 2024, pp. 545–60.
  3. Barhoun, Brahim, and Laila Bourha. “Crossing the Mediterranean: Portraits of Human Desperation in Laila Lalami’s Fiction.” Oye: Journal of Language, Literature and Popular Culture, vol. 3, no. 1, 2023, pp. 11–25.
  4. Benjamin, Ruha. Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. Polity, 2019.
  5. Bigo, Didier. “Security, Surveillance, and Democracy.” Routledge Handbook of Surveillance Studies, edited by Kirstie Ball et al., Routledge, 2012, pp. 277–84.
  6. Brighenti, Andrea Mubi. “Artveillance: At the Crossroads of Art and Surveillance.” Surveillance & Society, vol. 7, no. 2, 2010, pp. 137–48.
  7. Browne, Simone. Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. Duke UP, 2015.
  8. Clarke, Roger. “Information Technology and Dataveillance.” Communications of the ACM, vol. 31, no. 5, 1988, pp. 498–512.
  9. de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Rendall, U of California P, 1984.
  10. El Boubekri, Abdellah. “New Ways of Belonging in Diaspora in Laila Lalami’s The Other Americans.” African Identities, vol. 22, no. 3, 2022, pp. 1–17.
  11. Farahani, Leila. “Identity Reclaimed: Re-narrating (Hi)story in Laila Lalami’s The Moor’s Account.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing, vol. 61, no. 1, 2025, pp. 1–14.
  12. Febrina, Fitri. “Islamic Tenets and Values in Laila Lalami’s The Other Americans.” Muslim English Literature, vol. 1, no. 1, 2022, pp. 1–15.
  13. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction. Translated by Robert Hurley, Vintage, 1990.
  14. Gandy, Oscar H., Jr. “Coming to Terms with Chance: Engaging Rational Discrimination and Cumulative Disadvantage.” Surveillance Studies: A Reader, edited by Torin Monahan and David Murakami Wood, Oxford UP, 2018, pp. 361–64.
  15. Gilliom, John, and Torin Monahan. “Everyday Resistance.” Routledge Handbook of Surveillance Studies, edited by Kirstie Ball et al., Routledge, 2012, pp. 405–11.
  16. Haggerty, Kevin D., and Richard V. Ericson. “The Surveillant Assemblage.” British Journal of Sociology, vol. 51, no. 4, 2000, pp. 605–22.
  17. Lalami, Laila. Conditional Citizens: On Belonging in America. Pantheon Books, 2020.
  18. ---. The Dream Hotel. Pantheon Books, 2025.
  19. ---. Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits. Algonquin, 2005.
  20. ---. The Moor’s Account. Pantheon Books, 2014.
  21. ---. The Other Americans. Pantheon Books, 2019.
  22. ---. Secret Son. Algonquin, 2010.
  23. Lyon, David. Surveillance After September 11. Polity Press in association with Blackwell Pub., 2003.
  24. Marx, Gary T. “What’s New About the ‘New Surveillance’?: Classifying for Change and Continuity.” Surveillance & Society, vol. 1, no. 1, 2002, pp. 9–29.
  25. Mbembe, Achille. “Necropolitics.” Public Culture, vol. 15, no. 1, 2003, pp. 11–40.
  26. Nellis, Mike. “Since Nineteen Eighty Four: Representations of Surveillance in Literary Fiction.” Surveillance Studies: A Reader, edited by Torin Monahan and David Murakami Wood, Oxford UP, 2018, pp. 394–97.
  27. Palladino, Mariangela. “(Im)mobility and Mediterranean Migrations: Journeys ‘Between the Pleasures of Wealth and the Desires of the Poor’.” The Journal of North African Studies, vol. 23, no. 5, 2018, pp. 749–67.
  28. Puar, Jasbir K. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Duke UP, 2007.
  29. Rosen, David, and Aaron Santesso. “The Watchman in Pieces: Surveillance, Literature, and Liberal Personhood.” Surveillance Studies: A Reader, edited by Torin Monahan and David Murakami Wood, Oxford UP, 2018, pp. 385–88.
  30. Salam, Jehan. “Locating Subaltern Resistance and Resilience in Laila Lalami’s The Moor’s Account.” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, vol. 21, no. 1, 2025, pp. 82–101.
  31. Segall, Kimberly Wedeven. “De-imperializing Gender: Religious Revivals, Shifting Beliefs, and the Unexpected Trajectory of Laila Lalami’s Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits.” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, vol. 15, no. 2, 2019, pp. 188–208.
  32. Sekula, Allan. “The Body and the Archive.” October, vol. 39, 1986, pp. 3–64.
  33. Stoddart, Eric. “A Surveillance of Care: Evaluating Surveillance Ethically.” Routledge Handbook of Surveillance Studies, edited by Kirstie Ball et al., Routledge, 2012, pp. 369–78.
  34. Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. Public Affairs, 2019.