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Bait for the middle-aged: Patricia Lockwood on David Foster Wallace.
Sure, yeah, Infinite Jest predicted Instagram filters and Zoom fatigue. But Wallace also anticipated something else:
What now seems most prescient is that he anticipated a time when reading would be accomplished more by a kind of hive-like activity rather than individual effort. This benefited him for a while, as he was the Great Group Read.
Infinite Jest contains a samizdat video called The Entertainment that is so compelling people who view it never want to do anything else, including eat or sleep. The only thing it got wrong about social media was that The Entertainment wasn’t portable.
Patricia Lockwood · Where be your jibes now? David Foster Wallace · LRB 13 July 2023
[London Review of Books]
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