"Sharing videos, binge-watching Netflix, the resultant neuro-pudding at the end of an epic gaming marathon, the perverse seduction of recording and devouring our most ordinary human thoughts on Facebook and Instagram -- Wallace somehow knew all this was coming, and (as the man himself might have put it) it gave him the howling fantods."
— Bissell, Tom (b. 1974)
Author
Date
February 1, 2016
Metaphor
"Sharing videos, binge-watching Netflix, the resultant neuro-pudding at the end of an epic gaming marathon, the perverse seduction of recording and devouring our most ordinary human thoughts on Facebook and Instagram -- Wallace somehow knew all this was coming, and (as the man himself might have put it) it gave him the howling fantods."
Metaphor in Context
How is it, then, that "Infinite Jest" still feels so transcendentally, electrically alive? Theory 1: As a novel about an "entertainment" weaponized to enslave and destroy all who look upon it, "Infinite Jest" is the first great Internet novel. Yes, William Gibson and Neal Stephenson may have gotten there first with "Neuromancer" and "Snow Crash," whose Matrix and Metaverse, respectively, more accurately surmised what the Internet would look and feel like. (Wallace, among other things, failed to anticipate the break from cartridge- and disc-based entertainment.) But "Infinite Jest" warned against the insidious virality of popular entertainment long before anyone but the most Delphic philosophers of technology. Sharing videos, binge-watching Netflix, the resultant neuro-pudding at the end of an epic gaming marathon, the perverse seduction of recording and devouring our most ordinary human thoughts on Facebook and Instagram -- Wallace somehow knew all this was coming, and (as the man himself might have put it) it gave him the howling fantods.
(p. 16)
(p. 16)
Categories
Provenance
Reading
Citation
Tom Bissell, "Everything about Everything," The New York Times Book Review (February 1, 2016). <Link to NYTimes.com>
Date of Entry
02/10/2016
