#123 - Reclaiming The Past Through Alex Rivera’s Sleep Dealer

2025-06-17

In this episode of The Reality Dysfunction, Dr. Ernesto Mireles is joined by Scott Russell Duncan, Colton Campbell and Alex Garcia fellow thinkers and insurgent storytellers to dive deep into Alex Rivera’s prophetic 2008 film Sleep Dealer. What begins as a conversation about drones, borders, and labor quickly becomes a powerful indictment of settler colonialism, digital commodification, and the war on memory. We explore the film’s dystopian vision of disconnected laborers—plugged into machi...

In this episode of The Reality Dysfunction, Dr. Ernesto Mireles is joined by Scott Russell Duncan, Colton Campbell and Alex Garcia fellow thinkers and insurgent storytellers to dive deep into Alex Rivera’s prophetic 2008 film Sleep Dealer. What begins as a conversation about drones, borders, and labor quickly becomes a powerful indictment of settler colonialism, digital commodification, and the war on memory.

We explore the film’s dystopian vision of disconnected laborers—plugged into machines across borders—as a mirror of today’s racialized gig economy. Through Xicanx Gothic, racialized horror, and speculative fiction, the panel traces how Sleep Dealer flips the narrative from assimilation to ancestral return. From the sacred milpa to neural implants, from water theft to resistance, this episode asks: What happens when we name the machine—and choose to plant instead of plug in?

If you’ve ever questioned the cost of survival in a system built to erase you, or wondered what decolonial science fiction might sound like in Spanglish, this one’s for you.

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