The 5 impressive ways David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest predicted the future

David Foster Wallace, who foresaw Netflix and the rise of Donald Trump
David Foster Wallace, who foresaw Netflix and the rise of Donald Trump Credit: Wesley Merritt

The publication of Infinite Jest on Feb 1, 1996 turned David Foster Wallace, 34, into a literary rock star. The reviews were adulatory and even the caveats (“too long” “too playful” “too smart”) were flecked with praise. One review dubbed it the Grunge American Novel and fans queued around the block to hear Wallace read from it in Manhattan bookstores.

There was a self-consciously modish launch party at the Tenth Street Lounge in the East Village followed by a book tour weaving across the United States. By the end of the following month, Infinite Jest had already been through six printings. The wildly hubristic claims on postcards sent by the publishers Little, Brown before the novel's release had not been lies; Wallace truly had written a book that changed American fiction.

So, on its 20th birthday, how does Infinite Jest hold up? Does it have relevance to a generation to whom the early Nineties must seem impossibly remote? 

Wallace wrote his novel when mobile phones were a rarity and when the internet – at least in the way we use it now - was in its infancy. It was a novel written amid the economic abundance of the Clinton years, with the Cold War won and nothing to do but watch MTV.

It is not just that Wallace predicted certain technologies but that he predicted how these would usher in new anxieties

But Infinite Jest was more than just a novel of its time. Wallace set it in the near future, turning it into a riotous satire of where he thought America was headed. 

The bulk of the action takes place in what seems to be 2009; it is not entirely clear because calendar years have been sold off to the highest bidder so they can advertise their products (“revenue-enhancing subsidized Time”). So we have the Year of the Whopper, the Year of the Trial Size Dove Bar and the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment.

Wallace gleefully trades in this kind of excess. The United States has forced Canada and Mexico to join it in forming a new superstate (acronym: ONAN); the northern half of New England has been turned into a giant dump into which toxic waste is catapulted; feral hamsters roam the land; commercialism is rampant and even the Statue of Liberty is a kind of hoarding, holding up a burger instead of her torch. 

David Foster Wallace in 1997 
David Foster Wallace in 1997  Credit: GETTY

 

The plot centres on a missing film so entertaining that it is impossible to tear yourself away from it. To watch it is a death sentence. One group trying to find the film are wheelchair-bound Quebecois separatists who want to use it as a terrorist weapon. Much of the novel takes place between a tennis academy and a halfway house. It is not a novel that lends itself to summary.

Wallace’s near future is now our near past and amid the deliberate absurdity there are moments of uncanny prescience on his part. Even some of the absurd stuff isn’t that far off the money. 

  1. The Rise of Donald Trump
    In the world of Infinite Jest, Rush Limbaugh, the preposterous radio host, becomes President (although, satisfyingly, he is assassinated). There’s no way an aggressive, narcissistic populist, drunk on his own bombast, could get anywhere near the presidency, right?
     
  2. Smartphones
    What Wallace anticipated most acutely was the way in which technology would change the way we consume entertainment. With the “teleputer” he envisioned the way computers, tvs and phones would merge, even if he did not realise that this device would eventually fit into the palm of your hand as a Smartphone.
     
  3. Netflix
    He also predicted the way technology would allow consumers to start taking greater control of what they watch and the InterLace system, which allows you to download tv shows and movies, is a forerunner of streaming services like Netflix. In Infinite Jest this precipitates the extinction of TV advertising; in reality, no such luck.
     
  4. Skype
    The other major technological advance he anticipated was video calling through apps like Skype. In the novel, however, “videophony” ends up being a transitory fad because it turns out to be too stressful: “Callers now found they had to compose the same sort of earnest, slightly overintense listener’s expression they had to compose for in-person exchanges. Those callers who out of unconscious habit succumbed to fuguelike doodling or pants-crease-adjustment now came off looking rude, absentminded, or childishly self- absorbed. Callers who even more unconsciously blemish-scanned or nostril-explored looked up to find horrified expressions on the video-faces at the other end. All of which resulted in videophonic stress.”
     
  5. Selfies
    Furthermore, people are vain and video calling makes them self-conscious so in the world of the novel people start speaking through digitally-enhanced avatars of themselves or, more simply, through masks. We are not too far away from the world of Instagram filters and those scary apps designed to beautify your selfies.

 

This is the stuff that makes Wallace so insistently interesting: it is not just that he predicted certain technologies but that he predicted how these would usher in new anxieties. He was rightly sceptical about digital utopianism. In that lies Wallace’s boldest prediction: that, in a time when so much discourse is distilled into 140 characters, some still reach for the company of a 1000-page book.

License this content