Between finishing and starting a book I will have a palette cleanser in the form of opening any David Foster Wallace book to a random chapter or essay. I enjoy seeing how what I take from the writing changes as I grow older.
But one excerpt above all has stuck with me—and it’s not actually from one of his books. It comes from David Lipsky’s transcription of a conversation during a rainy car ride in 1996, part of an interview on Infinite Jest’s final book tour.
Every so often I rediscover it, and it hits me anew. Slowly, I stop living by it. Then I find it again. The cycle has grown tedious. I want the message loaded into my memory at all times, so I typed it out word for word below. But really what I need is to build that machinery in my gut.
Each year since my first reading in 2017 it has become more capital-t-True, but recently, the rate at which it is unfolding has gone exponential.
DFW: Oh—the reason why I think you oughta do a book about TV, is this problem is not gonna go away. I don’t know about you, but in ten or fifteen years, we’re gonna have virtual reality pornography. Now, if I don’t develop some machinery for being able to turn off pure unalloyed pleasure, and allow myself to go out and, you know, grocery shop and pay the rent? I don’t know about you, but I’m gonna have to leave the planet. Virtual. Reality. Pornography. I’m talking, you know what I mean? The technology’s gonna get better and better at doing what it does, which is seduce us into being incredibly dependent on it, so that advertisers can be more confident that we will watch their advertisements. And as a technology system, it’s amoral.
It doesn’t … it doesn’t have a responsibility to care about us one whit more than it does: It’s got a job to do. The moral job is ours. You know, Why am I watching five hours a day of this? I mean, why am I getting 75 percent of my calories from candy? I mean, that’s something that a little tiny child would do, and that would be all right. But we’re post-pubescent, right? Somewhere along the line, we’re supposed to have grown up.
DL: But if the most intelligent, promising, and educated people go into designing the candy, then it’s impossible to turn down.
DFW: Then we’re talking about Turkish delight and C. S. Lewis. If I can put it into a couple of sentences that you can quote: see, it’s more like, Yeah, this is the problem. Is that, is that entertainment lies on the addictive continuum. And we’re saved right now, because it’s just not all that good.
But if you notice that like—I’ll watch five or six, I’ll zone out in front of the TV for five or six hours, and then I feel depressed and empty. And I wonder why. Whereas if I eat candy for five or six hours, and then I feel sick, I know why.
DL: Reason I feel bad is guilt. My parents operated a very clear and effective NPR/PBS/New Yorker propaganda course: that TV is bad, it’s a waste of time, you don’t want to be somebody else’s audience. And home is the most convenient place to be an audience.
DFW: It’s not bad or a waste of your time. Any more than, you know, masturbation is bad or a waste of your time. It’s a pleasurable way to spend ten minutes. But if you’re doing it twenty times a day—or if your primary sexual relationship is with your own hand—then there’s something wrong. I mean, it’s a matter of degree.
DL: Yeah—whereas at least if you wank off, at least some action has been performed. That you can point to it and say: yes, I have been effective.
DFW: All right—you could make me look like a real dick if you wanted to print this and extend the analogy. But there is a similarity. Yes, you’re performing muscular movements with your hand as you’re jerking off. But what you’re doing is running a movie in your head, and having a fantasy relationship with somebody who isn’t real, in order to stimulate a purely neurological response.
I think one of the reasons that I feel empty after watching a lot of TV, and one of the things that makes TV seductive, is that it gives the illusion of relationships with people. It’s a way to have people in the room talking and being entertaining, but it doesn’t require anything of me. I mean, I can see them, they can’t see me. And, and, they’re there for me, and I can, I can receive from the TV, I can receive entertainment and stimulation. Without having to give anything back but the most tangential kind of attention. And that is very seductive.
The problem is it’s also very empty. Because one of the differences about having a real person there is that number one, I’ve gotta do some work. Like, he pays attention to me, I gotta pay attention to him. You know: I watch him, he watches me. The stress level goes up. But there’s also, there’s something nourishing about it, because I think like as creatures, we’ve all got to figure out how to be together in the same room
And so TV is like candy in that it’s more pleasurable and easier than the real food. But it also doesn’t have any of the nourishment of real food. And the thing, what the book is supposed to be about is, What has happened to us, that I’m now willing—and I do this too—that I’m willing to derive enormous amounts of my sense of community and awareness of other people, from television? But I’m not willing to undergo the stress and awkwardness and potential shit of dealing with real people.
And that as the Internet grows, and as our ability to be linked up, like—I mean, you and I coulda done this through e-mail, and I never woulda had to meet you, and that woulda been easier for me. Right? Like, at a certain point, we’re gonna have to build some machinery, inside our guts, to help us deal with this. Because the technology is just gonna get better and better and better. And it’s gonna get easier and easier, and more and more convenient and more and more pleasurable, to be alone with images on a screen, given to us by people who do not love us but want our money. Which is all right. In low doses, right? But if that’s the basic main staple of your diet, you’re gonna die. In a meaningful way, you’re going to die.
DL: But you developed some defenses?
DFW: No. This is the great thing about it, is that probably each generation has different things that force the generation to grow up. Maybe for our grandparents it was World War Two. You know? For us, it’s gonna be that at, at a certain point, that we’re either gonna have to put away childish things and discipline ourself about how much time do I spend being passively entertained? And how much time do I spend doing stuff that actually isn’t all that much fun minute by minute, but that builds certain muscles in me as a grown-up and a human being? And if we don’t do that, then (a) as individuals, we’re gonna die, and (b) the culture’s gonna grind to a halt. Because we’re gonna get so interested in entertainment that we’re not gonna want to do the work that generates the income that buys the products that pays for the advertising that disseminates the entertainment. It just seems to me like it’s gonna be this very cool thing. Where the country could very well shut down and die, and it won’t be anybody else doin’ it to us, we will have done it to yourselves.
DL: Actually come to that point?
DFW: No, again, we’re talking about a continuum, and I’m talking about the end point. I’m talking about the logical extension.
I’m talking about ingenious problems where advertisers begin suddenly to realize that they have to make the shows less entertaining because absenteeism from work and the GNP is declining, and it’s hurting their revenues. And that these corporations are going to perhaps run into very sort of ingenious double binds.
DL: Maybe it’s why daytime TV is so sloppy; they want to encourage you to be in your office.
DFW: No. Right now we have the least interesting double bind: the shows get less interesting so that the commercials seem more interesting by comparison. Or the shows seem more like commercials, so that the commercials seem like like intrusions than seamless parts of the shows. Those are all fairly easy to see, and they’re not very interesting double binds.
The real interesting double binds are going to be when cable comes, and the initial, the initial—the immediate advertising revenue motivation is lost. And it’s more done, now done through Pay-Per-View or subscription.
DL: Like the Web, the “Interlace” in the book—in fifteen years?
DFW: Yep. And the big thing, if you’re doin’ movies or packaging any sort of thing, is to get in on the Interlace grid. That interlace will be this enormous gatekeeper. It will be like sort of the one publishing house from hell. They decide what you get and what you don’t.
Because this idea that the Internet’s gonna become incredibly democratic? I mean, if you’ve spent any time on the Web, you know that it’s not gonna be, because that completely overwhelming. There are four trillion bits coming at you, 99 percent of them are shit, and it’s too much work to do triage to decide.
So it’s very clearly, very soon there’s gonna be an economic niche opening up for gatekeepers. You know? Or, what do you call them, Wells, or various nexes. Not just out of interest but of quality. And then things get real interesting. And we will beg for those things ot be there. Because otherwise we’re gonna spend 95 percent of our time body-surfing through shit that every joker in his basement—who’s not a pro, like you were talking about last night. I tell you, there’s no single more interesting time to be alive on the planet Earth than in the next twenty years. It’s gonna be—you’re gonna get to watch all of human history played out again real quickly.
DL: Why? What meant, exactly?
DFW: If you go back to Hobbes, and why we ended up begging, why people in a state of nature end up begging for a ruler who has the power of life and death over them? We absolutely have to give our power away. The Internet is going to be exactly the same way. Unless there are walls and sites and gatekeepers that say, “All right, you want fairly good fiction on the Web? Let us pick that for you.” Because it’s gonna take you four days to find something any good, through all the shit that’s gonna come, right?
We’re going to beg for it. We are literally gonna pay for it. But once we do that, then all these democratic hoo-hah dreams of the Internet will of course have gone down the pipes. And we’re back again to three or four Hollywood studios, or four of five publishing houses, being the…right? And all of us who grouse, all the anarchists who grouse about power being localized in these media elites, are gonna realize that the actual system dictates that. The way way—I’m absolutely convinced—that the despot in Hobbes is a logical extension of what the State of Nature is. 0 Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, [David Lipsky, 2010] pg. 83-88.