The View from Here

A character in the novel is “unable to distract himself with the [teleputer] because he was unable to stay with any one entertainment cartridge for more than a few seconds.”

David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest —which turns 30 this month—foresaw a near-future America pleasuring itself to death. We’re living in it

By Jason Guriel

Last fall, Harper’s magazine published a much-discussed dispatch about an online cult of porn obsessives. These self-described “gooners” fashion elaborate “gooncaves”—lined with screens and stocked with every convenience—so that they can withdraw from the world in their pursuit of perpetual stimulation.

“What are these gooners actually doing?” the writer, Daniel Kolitz, asked. “Wasting hours each day consuming short-form video content. Chasing intensities of sensation across platforms … abjuring connective, other-directed pleasures for the comfort of staring at screens alone. Does any of this sound familiar?”

It would have to David Foster Wallace, the late Gen X novelist. Wallace often worried about the pull (and perils) of entertainment. His great, prescient 1996 novel, READ ON