At risk of marking myself a "lit-bro" I think the book is proving solidly prophetic.
I think this reality is something many folks are still in denial about. Like, how many times do you see an add depicting some translucent person's distorted cervical spine, referencing 'devices' in all their various forms as the cause. The entertainment / devices we use every day are literally causing morphological changes in our bodies. That's so dark, and I think loads of people simply choose not to think about it. Is ignorance bliss? Maybe for those hypnotized by the various 'entertainments' in their lives. But for people like yourself, who actually witness it, I'd say Infinite Jest is a useful, cautionary tale.
If you're on page 600 though, there's no spoilers.
Edit: and yes, DFW presaged a lot with this book! Especially around how entertainment has evolved and the negative impact it has. The 'doom scroll' feature is literally called 'infinite scroll' in the software industry. Scary stuff :-/
It's pure coincidence too as I read TPK in January and knew I had to read more DFW fiction as soon as I could.
Er, it kind of predicts the internet, but everything else?
Quebec separatism? Corporate sponsored calendar? All of North America under the same flag? Dumping toxic waste in/on Québec instead of Africa ?
none of things actually happened
A more solid prophecy would be InterLace and the teleputer (analogous to streaming and smartphones, respectively).
I do think the Entertainment is a solid prophecy of doom scroll / infinite scroll, which is now showing up in basically every application.
The videophony chapter is also especially prophetic when you consider the prevalence of things like filters. I actually noticed the other day on a Google Meet that there is a 'touch up my appearance' feature. Wild.
This one is a lark, but one funny thing, although very different from ONAN (Mexico + USA + Canada), is that we're kind of witnessing an 'ONAN' world cup (all the matches are in these exact three countries). Again, obviously different from ONAN in Infinite Jest, but I thought that was funny.
I'm not sure he predicted the internet, as you mentioned, as the internet was invented in the 60s. If you meant the world wide web, that was created in 1989, popularized in 1990. IJ came out in 1996, so my instinct is that DFW knew about the internet/www when he wrote the book.
Two of these things were already on the go. Or kind of...
The Québec independence movement has been mainstream for a long while and is fairly successful despite attempts to scupper it, such as installing completely bilingual prime ministers etc. Maybe one day it will reach its ultimate goal.
The "sponsored calendar" is probably Wallace's parody of various dedicated years, days and months we have. We do have World Mental Health Day, Black History Month, Gay Pride Month, the International Year of Whatever. We had a "Year of Gaelic" in Scotland which I only heard about half way in. The difference being that these are not generally purely advertising initiatives, although many corporations have tried to hijack them.
The internet long precedes the publishing of Infinite Jest.
There’s a book written by David Lipsky where he followed and interviewed David Foster Wallace (author of Infinite Jest) upon the release of Infinite Jest.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Although_of_Course_You_End_Up_...
There is also a movie which is faithful to the book.
A key part of how to see if someone is just parotting acceptable opinions vrs is actually having an opinion, is to make them explain it. If its a generic "oh you need to read it, its great" or parotting of popular talking points, that person is not serious about their taste. They use the art as an ornament to make their personalities more interesting than actually engaging with the art in any meaningful way.
The only reaction that matters should be your personal one and what resonates with you.
The only AI piece is the banner image, because I can't draw. All other images are attributed (Wikipedia, YouTube).
I got the idea for this post after listening to Wallace's interview with bookworm (linked in the post), and subsequently researching Sierpinski Gaskets on YouTube (where I saw the Numberphile and ViralHog videos).
Anyway, the text of the article doesn't feel LLM to me and on first scan, neither the structure. They don't care about minutiae in this way nor do they follow threads. Theirs is a bunch of oh-so-pompously-and-fake-eruditely dispensed rehashes with little pounce.
I don't think I would say Infinite Jest has three plots, it feels like it does because the plot never happens, we get the setup and then it is dropped right when it actually starts. We can view it as three plots but those plots don't provide anything useful towards understanding. They would be more accurately viewed as triangles, they are containers for information.
Edit: I also don't think we can fully interpret Infinite Jest through the Sierpinski structure, that was the structure of the first draft which was something like 500 pages longer and had the bulk of the novel in the end notes. It has been too long since I last read it to say what the structure of the final form of the novel is but I think he may have just made the gasket more linear; he keeps repeating the full triangle but each time he goes a bit deeper with the iterations.
But I like your vertices (family, education, and society).
You're making me think that there's something to the fact that you could 'seed' the Gasket with different vertices as well. Something I learn when re-reading is that you can bring so many interpretations and perspectives to this novel and still come out with an entertaining and valid experience of it. In that respect, I like the idea that you can use different triplets to seed the Gasket!
You're correct that we can't lean fully on the Sierpinski idea. Wallace mentions in his interview that after those edits, the book became more like a 'lopsided' Sierpinski Gasket "it looks basically like a pyramid on acid" (https://www.kcrw.com/shows/bookworm/stories/david-foster-wal...).
Separate from the Gasket thing, but I like your point about the footnotes. I wish people spent more time on those. I've heard commentary on the structure of those. Some folks talk about the 'self referentiality', as text (obviously) references footnotes, and there are even instances of footnotes referencing the main text! I've also heard that the back-and-forth emulates the back-and-forth in a tennis match, although that one seems less interesting.
Edits: fixed spelling mistakes Edit: I added your 3 vertices idea and the fact you can invert the 3 vertices to the post, thank you! I attributed back to this thread.
Would it make more sense to just dive into the middle and see what converges out then?
What put me off it is it just kind of reads like a rambling stoner conversation.
Any thoughts appreciated!
I don't think substance is right: I think it's about freedom from it, or maybe a "higher power" of some sorts, mysticism maybe.
I think it makes more sense, also in the context of what Wallace said elsewhere ("This Is Water"): "Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship—be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles—is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.(...)"
Also: do you know https://samizdat.co/digest/? Looks like an interesting project which ties nicely into your idea
Love this piece!
I will surely blog about it on davidfosterwallace.nl in the coming weeks (it'll be in Dutch though).
Even still, I strongly recommend reading it sequentially. But my first read through, I did skip ahead to some interesting passages other folks had written about, and that re-invigorated my interest in the novel. DFW's voice is so idiosyncratic and interesting. That's what kept me coming back.
