Final Post: A CRT and Ecocritical analysis of Sleep Dealers

Sleep Dealers is a SciFi thriller that addresses themes of artificial intelligence technology, racial inequality through exploitation of labor, and ecological impacts on farming. This bilingual hour-and-a-half long film was released in 2008 by Alex Rivera. It begins with a young hacker, Memo, living on his father’s milpa in Oaxaca, Mexico. The futuristic setting is placed in a society where people are connected to AI technology. People with “nodes” can hook into various technology to provide real-world labor through machinery. For more on the plot, watch the film for yourself on Youtube or read a basic summary here.

Through the various connections to farming, technology, and representation of labor, Sleep Dealers covers many themes that overlap between ideas of ecocriticism and Critical Race Theory. In the movie, it becomes clear that Memo’s father has a close relationship with the land. It becomes known to the audience that he has owned and been farming on his land for many years. In those times, there was plenty of water provided by a river in the city; however, before Memo was born, the government took away water rights from the citizens by building a dam and forcing locals to pay for water. This scenario provides a believable scenario for the way water might be restricted to people in the future, as many countries currently suffer from water scarcity and are currently facing water restrictions within their communities.

After a series of events that lead to the murder of Memo’s father, Memo finds himself in a position where he needs to find work to support his family, so he goes into the city to become a Sleep Dealer, a person who works through AI technology. Memo enters into a facility, where people connect to their nodes and perform a variety of jobs. Memo himself works as construction builder. As he walks into the factory, a worker tells him, “This is the American Dream. We give the United States everything they’ve always wanted– all the work, without the workers.”

In today’s culture, this kind of mentality is unfortunately very believable. It makes sense that in this type society, where workers are connected to AI, the work itself is being outsourced to other countries, where low-income people are being exploited for their labor. The United States already does this in countries like Mexico today. Throughout the movie, we watch as Memo becomes increasingly fatigued by the technology, and we see that older workers have actually gone blind from the technology. Similar to today, the hardworking lower-class Mexicans are being overworked by elitist Americans to the point where it severely affects their physical health. I think this movie does a really good job of depicting a type of future that is both believable as is compares to our current standards, and well as terrifying in the way is enlightens us to the structural injustice we have in the way we currently run our society.

In edition to the exploitation of peoples, this movie also depicts the exploitation of land. We see this in the dam that has been built in Memo’s home town in the way the people are forced to pay for a basic necessity like water. We also see, through Memo’s father, resistance to this exploitation, as there is still memory of a time when such things were not restricted by the government. In his death, we also see how much the land is easily destroyed by drones in this world, as the government seems to find no problem in completely blowing up any person or space that objects to their values.

Overall, this movie is a great film for many reasons. Not only does it engage the audience with important issues related to how we treat individuals and the world around us, but it also presents these ideas in a chilling way, that represents a possible future for our world if we aren’t careful. If you don’t think AI technology is feasible in our life time, you might want to check out this most recent podcast with Joe Rogan and Elon Musk, where Musk relays the work he has already been doing to make AI technology integrated into the lives of individuals sooner than we think. In a world where these kinds of technological advances seem inevitable, I think movies like Sleep Dealer are a great way to remind people of the many injustices to freedom and the dangers that going down such a path could lead.