Crossing the Border: Sleep Dealer and the Nature of Science Fiction

Like the best Sci-Fi, Sleep Dealer‘s exploration of de-located workers is eerily prescient.

by Tyler Peterson

It’s a well-worn but no less true maxim that science fiction isn’t about “the future” at all, but rather the present. The futuristic setting of the average sci-fi text is only a device, one that lets the author throw light on contemporary trends by extrapolating their progress. While this activity is meaningfully distinct from “predicting the future”, a lot of sci-fi still ends up doing just that. 

Most of these fulfilled prophecies can be marked down to educated guessing and a healthy dose of happy accident. What’s truly remarkable, though, is when an author has such a firm grasp of future historiography that they predict things they could have had no knowledge of at the time. It seems several ages of the Earth have passed since 2008, but Alex Rivera’s mold-breaking cult sci-fi film Sleep Dealer has just as much to say about our present as it did about its own.

Right off the bat, Sleep Dealer predicts a world where the border between the United States and Mexico has been totally shut down, immigration is all but halted, and, yes, there is a “big, beautiful wall” on the border. From our vantage point, this seems like an easy guess to make—but it’s important to remember that the politics of immigration looked very different when the film debuted in 2008. Just the year before, there was a bill before the Senate that would have granted amnesty to every single undocumented immigrant—and the Republican president supported it! At the time, of course, that was in line with the ruling neoconservative rationale, which viewed immigration as a sign of a healthy economy and wanted to expand guest worker programs to ensure American goods remained competitively priced. Events since 2008—the Tea Party, the recession, and the 2014 border crisis–caused a blowback that helped swing conventional conservative wisdom to their present, much less immigrant-friendly tone. How could Rivera have guessed? Did he know something we didn’t?

“Sleep dealers” are so named because they sap workers’ energy so quickly that exhaustion and collapse are rampant, something all to familiar as we grapple with the psychic dislocation of work. 

As a result of this shutdown, Mexicans looking for work, including protagonist Memo Cruz, go to specialized factories known as “sleep dealers” where they use implanted nodes in their wrists and shoulders tocontrol robot bodies thousands of miles away over the internet, doing everything from driving cabs and building houses to nannying babies. “We give America what they always wanted,” says one such sleep dealer, “all of the work and none of the workers.”This imagery of computer-mediated labor has taken on unintended significance in the age of the pandemic, where untold millions have found themselves doing their jobs remotely. But in an ironic twist, the e-workers of 2020 aren’t “cybraceros” (as the movie refers to them) doing manual and service labor, industries that in our own world have been dubbed “essential” and are expected to continue business as usual.Instead, the people who find themselves “wired in” are members of the knowledge economy—and instead of working in a specialized factory, they’re doing their work in their own homes. One major point of similarity, however: the  titular “sleep dealers” are so named because they sap workers’ energy so quickly that exhaustion and collapse are rampant, something all too familiar to those remote workers in the real world who have found that the psychic dislocation of their work, and its intrusion intodomestic spaces, has induced a similar effect. 

Manual labor is not the only use of the “node” technology. Warfare is another common application, and  the sleep dealers are also used to pilot drones that protect the assets of American corporations in Mexico, including huge reservoirs of water dammed off to sell to local farmers.

But drone warfare and water wars were already old hat in 2008, and there’s another use for nodes that’s more familiar and relevant to modern audiences. Memo’s love interest, Luz, is a struggling writer who uploads her own memories to a website to sell—and in fact, his is what originally attracts her to Memo. Luz primarily sells travelogue-type content, and she thinks that Memo, fleeing north from his hometown after his father was killed in a drone attack, would make a good human-interest story. Watching from 2020, there are striking parallels in Luz’s occupation to both the gig economy and the social media influencer, all the more amazing that both were in their respective infancies in 2008 (the year the iPhone app store first came online). Further, the fact that Luz is selling curated moments both intimate and “intimate” online, and occasionally takes personal requests for a larger fee, codes her occupation similarly to sex work—which certainly existed online in 2008, but which here has much more in common with platforms like OnlyFans. (At one point, Luz remarks “my parents freaked out—they think [nodes] are only for sex”.)

Instead of trying to guess the source of Sleep Dealer’s seemingly impossible power of foresight, we should treat its era and ours as two countries engaging in cultural exchange. 

The past, so goes another common saying, is like a foreign country. We even have borders drawn around parts of it (“the Internet Age”, “the Trump era”), but none more fundamental than that between past and future. Sleep Dealer has much to say about the paradoxical nature of borders: how borders stifle certain kinds of exchange between countries and stimulate others, and how technology can either strengthen or negate borders depending on its application.

Perhaps, instead of trying to guess the source of Sleep Dealer’s seemingly impossible power of foresight, we should instead take a cue from it and treat its era and ours as two countries engaging in cultural exchange. Alex Rivera put forward his vision of the future as a means of examining his present.  Watching it in 2020, we can use this vision to gain insights into his society, but we can also apply it to our own society. In doing so, we invest it with new context and new meaning that it didn’t have in 2008. The text is the technology that crosses the border, letting the past and future communicate and trade with each other.

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