http://radioopensource.org/dfw-and-the-internet/#

“His masterpiece novel, Infinite Jest, what we took to be manic imagination now looks like prophesy: it was hung up on lethally good amusement long before screen addiction became a national anxiety and people dropped dead at their keyboards in Asian arcades. Wallace foresaw about the paralyzing strangeness of watching yourself in HD; now we have the selfie stick. He thought virtual-reality porn could destroy civilization as we know it — and now that’s available in prototype ”

So Infinite Jest wasn’t a masterpiece (DFW reminds me of Douglas Coupland trying to write like Pynchon) but I appreciated his sense that no matter how clever we might be we can’t think our ways out of the tangles of modern life and that we can’t stop thinking about them no matter how alienating (even as they may be attractive/addictive) this proves to be. Not a martyr just a fellow suffering soul.