23 August 2015
The children of Infinite Jest
Listening to dialog from the movie The End of the Tour (which we will probably go see tonight), spoken by David Foster Wallace:
So look, as the internet grows in the next 10, 15 years, and virtual reality pornography becomes a reality ... we're gonna have to develop some real machinery inside our guts to turn off pure, unalloyed pleasure or I don't know about you, I'm gonna have to leave the planet. ... 'Cause the technology is just gonna get better and better and it's gonna get easier and easier and more and more convenient and more and more pleasurable to sit alone with images on a screen given to us by people who do not love us but want our money and that's fine in low doses but if it's the basic main staple of your diet you're gonna die.
Taken from the On The Media interview that Brooke Gladstone had with David Lipsky 'We've Sort of Become Friends': The Original Tapes from David Foster Wallace's '96 Book Tour (transcript here).
This fear is examined and realized in Peter Watts' book Echopraxia in several forms: biological sex has become non-existent, relationships are created by altering each others' personalities to be more compatible, a large percentage of the human population lives only hooked in to a virtual world, etc. He suggests that our basic desire to eliminate pain will inevitably lead us to become not-human. Our toolmaking will destroy us. DFW worried in a similar manner concerning drug addiction and pleasure-seeking. The idea of a rat continually pressing a button for pleasure until it dies is unnerving. When I had written about Echopraxia, I recognized the connection to works by several other SF writers but hadn't considered how deeply these themes are encoded in Infinite Jest until I heard the quote above.
- The city posted by sstrader on 6 March 2016 at 9:43:27 PM
- The children of Infinite Jest posted by sstrader on 23 August 2015 at 3:48:24 PM
- Posthuman dystopia posted by sstrader on 22 March 2015 at 10:21:25 AM
- Poetry and apocalypse posted by sstrader on 22 November 2014 at 10:41:33 AM
- Roman Jakobson's functions of language posted by sstrader on 5 October 2014 at 10:36:23 AM