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The problem with Montezuma’s Revenge is that it doesn’t provide regular rewards for the AI agent. It’s a puzzle-platformer where players have to explore an underground pyramid, dodging traps and enemies while collecting keys that unlock doors and special items. If you were training an AI agent to beat the game, you could reward it for staying alive and collecting keys, but how do you teach it to save certain keys for certain items, and use those items to overcome traps and complete the level? The answer: curiosity.

Today, states grapple with decarceration and deinstitutionalization, not necessarily because of an ethical recognition of the continuing harm of confinement and segregation, or because of an understanding of the intertwined histories of capitalism, white supremacy, ableism, and punishment in the United States, but because of a desire to curb public spending on social services. These include the very services that people need as alternatives to more oppressive edifices and as preventive measures to winding up in such places. While public neighborhood urban schools, public housing, and mental health clinics are shuttered, private companies and “not for profit” services partially fill the void.

Alternatives emerge when facilities shut their doors. Closures, as prison justice organizer Angela Davis suggests, provide an opportunity for not only a “radical imagining” of the kind of social landscape desperately needed—but also the moment to build it. As people move between different forms and scales of cages, and as patterns of surveillance and punishment morph, new forms of capture do emerge and yet resistance is also possible. The state often refuses to offer services in place of the ones that were shuttered, leaving the responsibility to the individual (or her family and the market). This is a moment to collectively demand, fund, and build public infrastructure that will move everyone closer towards a world that does not rely on segregation and confinement, or access to private capital, as its mode of dealing with structural inequities.

As Foucault said of Bachelard a few years later, his characteristic approach was to avoid all defined hierarchies, any universal judgments: ‘He plays against his own culture with his own culture.’ He stood apart, separating himself from the mainstream, finding cracks, dissonances, minor phenomena that he could make his own. Poetry of every description was his raw material.

Indoors, in The Poetics of Space, the journey into intimacy is neatly evoked by drawers, cupboards, wardrobes and above all locks, although he warns, somewhat testily, against their use as gratuitous metaphors (and he is strongly averse to the idea of habit).

The wellbeing of the warm animal (or human) protected in its nest or cocoon or cottage from the bad weather raging outside is a primitive sense of refuge that we can all share, adult or child. The appeal of a safe haven translates into domestic architecture with such features as the accommodating Arts and Crafts inglenook, seats close by the fire, Frank Lloyd Wright’s enduring penchant for an immense fireplace buried at the core of a house, or even, a favourite 1960s touch, the conversation pit – with or without its trademark shagpile carpet.

What happens once Saeed and Nadia arrive at these promised lands makes up the second half of the novel, in which it seems that “the whole planet was on the move, much of the global South headed to the global North, but also Southerners moving to other Southern places and Northerners moving to other Northern places.” Here Hamid’s novel reveals itself to be a story not only of the present but of the future, where migration will be the norm. Depending on one’s point of view, this is either terrifying or hopeful. When everyone is moving, then mobility becomes normal rather than disturbing. While these movements cause unrest on the part of the “natives” — what Hamid, in a postcolonial reverse, calls the inhabitants of the host countries — the vision that he ultimately offers is peaceful.