“The neural distillate of, say, orgasm, religious enlightenment, ecstatic drugs, shiatsu, a crackling fire on a winter night — the sum of all possible pleasures refined into pure current and deliverable at the flip of a hand-held lever. Thousands of times an hour, at will.”
“…always thought of this anhedonic state as a kind of radical abstracting of everything, a hollowing out of stuff that used to have affective content. Terms the undepressed toss around and take for granted as full and fleshy—happiness, joie de vivre, preference, love—are stripped to their skeletons and reduced to abstract ideas. They have, as it were, denotation but not connotation. The anhedonic can still speak about happiness and meaning et al., but she has become incapable of feeling anything in them, of understanding anything about them, of hoping anything about them, or of believing them to exist as anything more than concepts. Everything becomes an outline of the thing. Objects become schemata. The world becomes a map of the world.”
These two paragraphs, while widely contradictory on the surface, are both key to understanding David Foster Wallace’s idiosyncratic imagining of the future. Both passages are taken from ‘Infinite Jest’, his magnum opus written in 1995, set in, what was then, the near future. The first extract is Wallace’s description of the effects of viewing the titular central plot device, ‘Infinite Jest’. The second, his account of the state of Kate Gompert, a suicidal marijuana addict, whose emotions mirror those of the drug-addled, giant feral hamster strewn hellscape that was Wallace’s USA. To Wallace, this dystopia was the logical culmination of all that defined America in the 1990s, basking in the triumph of the post Cold War years and at the same time its abundance of wealth and resources leaving the populace with existence devoid of struggle, and therefore, meaning.
At this point it would be prudent to mention the technological advances Wallace predicted. Jobs’ monumental keynote was more than a decade away, and yet with the ‘teleputer’ the essence of the iPhone was captured, albeit in a rather unwieldy name. The rise of streaming services, à la Netflix, was predicted using Interlace TelEntertainment, a glorified video-on-demand service. Perhaps his most startling conjecture was that he envisioned a future which lacked video calling as a replacement for voice calls. His full argument as to why he chose not to include a staple of futuristic visions of human communication cannot be reproduced here due to spatial constraints, suffice to say it’s worth a read in full.[1]
While his technological predictions were impressively accurate, to solely comment upon the material changes in American society would be doing the book a great disservice. Wallace was at his most incisive when speaking about human struggle with depression, especially coupled with addiction.[2] While conventional forms of drug abuse, their associated addiction and withdrawal symptoms are well documented, the most potent form of addiction described is the viewing of the erstwhile mentioned ‘Infinite Jest’ movie. It left its viewers in a ‘catatonic state of bliss’, with no other interest in life but the continued re-watching of the movie. As absurd as this might sound, this is a frighteningly fitting analogue to the hyper connected world we live in today. Our lives similarly rendered meaningless if we are not online; our desire for the instant gratification internet provides us, identical. Wallace wrote at a time the term ‘google’ still vaguely referred to a very large number, yet his book achieved the greatest feat any retro futuristic art form can hope for, and made the future its own.
- The relevant excerpt, in full: http://declineofscarcity.com/?page_id=2527
- Wallace’s own struggle and eventual defeat to depression has been well documented. Indeed, it is worth re-reading his vivid illustrations of what it means to be depressed in light of the fact that he committed suicide a little over a decade after completing ‘Infinite Jest’.