It occurred to me recently that David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest almost perfectly predicted the razor's edge we find ourselves walking these days. The story takes place in a future US on the brink of societal collapse. The series of events that take place over the course of its sprawling 1,000+ page saga must have seemed fantastical and borderline-outlandish in 1996. The real meanings of course, as with much postmodern fiction, lie beneath the surface; the actual storylines themselves can be a fun ride, but I always felt that Wallace's plot points in particular were purely vehicles for the larger ideas they represent. Deriving direct and depthful meaning strictly from a storyline standpoint is not something I’d ordinarily look for in a Wallace novel.
So it's possibly by complete happenstance that some of the crazier storylines in Infinite Jest seem more like actual predictions than existential plot devices. Of course, who are we kidding, this is 2025: even the most bombastic sci-fi fiction of the past likely contains some sort of near-plausible element in today's world. Wallace's thematics are very much in line with the longstanding dystopian symbolism of DeLillo and Bradbury that we're all familiar with. But a good number of occurrences in Jest are so uncanny, so oddly specific, that I think it warrants some uniquely uneasy praise. Let's take a walk, shall we?
Alright, we find ourselves in the good old US at an unspecified future point in time, an America dangerously walking the line between innovation and collapse. A lethal pandemic of unknown origin has swept the nation. Suspecting the culprit to be human-caused climate change, emergency government directives instruct the population to wear masks and stay at home whenever possible, in the interest of public safety. In fact, President Johnny Gentle's obsessive hygiene and germaphobia is so intrinsically tied to his public image that he remains masked throughout the entirety of the novel, to the point where even his constituents can barely understand him through the thick surgical fabric. The ensuing isolation leads to nationwide withdrawal. The lack of face-to-face interaction leads to increased social discomfort and impaired communication throughout the country. The sudden availability of video chat technology, excitedly embraced at first, quickly becomes obsolete from the growing stress and self-consciousness of impaired communication ability.
After much investigation, the cause of the deadly virus sweeping the world is finally discovered, and it's an inscrutable one: a video. No one knows how it was made or who is disseminating it, but watching the thing essentially provides something so alluring, so impossible to resist, that it puts the viewer into a catatonic state: they lose their mental faculties, stop taking care of themselves, stop moving entirely. Their heart rate slows and their immune systems weaken. They die of thirst, starvation, or bradycardia. Their eyes don't leave the screen.
In spite of the global threat this new technology presents, the prospect of working to isolate and eliminate it for the public good is not how the leadership sees it. Instead, it becomes a race among the nations to gain control of it first. To the elites, this is an inevitable and invaluable force to be wielded...against the rest of the world, and perhaps to the detriment of the general public as whole.
Rather than working with its allies to restrain the threat, the US administration seeks to clothesline them. In the face of protest from all sides, the situation is instead capitalized upon to instill a sense of fear amongst the population and justify a bold move under the guise of self-preservation: In an act of political absurdity and territorial aggression, the Gentle administration exerts its economic power to forcibly merge the US, Canada, and Mexico into a single superstate. Propagandized as a transcontinental alliance, both adjacent countries, ultimately powerless, resign themselves to forfeiture and agree to join.
There's a reason this deadly video (dubbed simply “the Entertainment") is so hard to track down and understand. The rise of technology and social isolation has created a perfect storm, producing what will later be revealed as the true threat to the developed world: unending, low-grade entertainment enjoyed in seclusion. This newly preferred method of consumption is now commonplace in every first-world home: an endless supply of movies, TV shows, pornography—all suddenly available on your laptop or living room television at a moment's notice, purposefully individual, without any outside moral influence or opposing societal norms to deter it. Cultural and psychological decay ensue. People now sit alone in front of their screens, resigned to a state of empty pleasure and distraction...and simply, similarly, rot away.
There's of course tons of other stuff going on in this book exploring more timeless existential themes than the ones I’ve chosen to extrapolate here; I've simply summarized the surface-level storyline to its pinnacle points. Complex characters, relationships, and experiences abound in this thing. The book bleeds red with questions and answers about existence and the meaning of life. Its depthful exploration of depression and happiness, addiction and recovery, and other beautifully human struggles are where Infinite Jest truly hits its stride. Coincidentally, I realize in retrospect that these more obvious resemblances to modern-day America that Wallace, whether intentionally or inadvertently, predicted in his plot, link inextricably with the finer points the book always sought to make. So where am I going with this?
I suppose my eventual takeaway from what was initially an “oh shit” moment is not just the fact that Wallace's predictions were wildly on-point, but that I've been looking at these modern-day struggles all wrong. We've adopted a position of otiose bleakness in the face of current events, seeing ourselves as powerless, looking on helplessly at a world we believe has reached a hopelessly insoluble state, when in reality these challenges are simply an extension of commonplace experiences we've seen throughout history; that this supposedly “uniquely” dark and interesting point in human history we find ourselves in is worth examining from an aerial view of timelessness. Specific dystopian parallels do overlap and yeah, that's crazy. COVID created human distance. Automation endangered the job market. Streaming services replaced going out. The rise in activities we used to engage in as a group, we now engage in as a self: entertainment as an individual experience, AI as a replacement to thought, social media as a primary means of communication, and nationalism as the new unity. But history repeats itself and takes on different forms, and our situation may not be the irradicable human endpoint we’ve agreed to accept.
I've always read between the lines when it comes to postmodernist fiction. Its ability to get to the nuts and bolts of what it truly means to be human is what sets it apart from other genres. Infinite Jest in my younger years revealed so much about myself; this time it's informing my view of our world. I don't think I need to unpack everything I've described above: the relationship to society's dilemmas and experiences is self-evident. In some oddly reassuring way, seeing our society painted so vividly and with such pinpoint accuracy almost 30 years ago leads me to believe that these struggles are not unique—they're timeless. The modern challenges we face in 2025 are more intrinsically human and historical than we realize. If we choose to, we can see them with the same objectivity, respond with the same level of clarity, and arrive at the same conclusions as those before us did. They aren't unique to our generation and they aren't distinguishable from our long-lasting values as people: the answers that we'd ordinarily assume lie beneath, and now mistakenly view as beyond our reach or obscured, are actually discernably clear from a purely and nakedly surface-level view.