Infinite Jest Review Part 1: Pages 1-141
Love Will Save The World
Introduction: Mediated reality, VR existentialism and long distance dating
Love makes it clear that TV is not more real than the real - ask any stalker. The stalker phenomenon of a person developing a one sided crush on a celebrity - a media person - is characterized exactly by the need to transcend the media, to see, observe, and meet them "in real life". I say this because today, in the age of universal smartphone mediated life, for a great many people the virtual - "TV" - has taken de facto priority.
The virtual universe is the prime reality, and the physical, “real” world, of drudgery and daily life, is a sort of secondary universe, which exists only to serve the electronic existence, as content and fuel for it.
People become alienated from themselves, their bodies and their world, and live absentmindedly with their head in the cloud. But the stalker phenomenon proves that this worldview is fundamentally a delusion. If it wasn't then there would be no stalkers - it would be impossible, and each obsessive would be satisfied in the virtual, the passive. But love makes it clear, self evident, that virtual reality is not prime reality. You can only indulge in this delusion when you are not in love. People say love is a temporary madness and delusion of hormones. What if love is prime reality? As a serious relativist you must consider the option that the real world is real.
Advertisement and technologically mediated reality
There is lots of history happening. British race war, major political assassinations, one million war dead in eastern Europe. Very big things are happening. But nothing is apparently so important that it prevents YouTube from prioritizing updating their website to combat add blockers, to combat the insignificant 0.1 percent of users who use it, which has zero impact on their bottom line, even though they have long since won the war and everyone just pays the pervert protection racket to not be harrased by sissy hypno every 5 minutes.
Advertisement does not sell products. Any sale is an afterthought, a second order effect. It is more important than one million dead, that I am forced to sit through a 20 second infantalization mkultra mind wipe. This is the world today. This is not a conclusion or reasoning, but merely an observation.
David Foster Wallace, Zizek, TLP and others have made interesting psychological analysis of the TV advertisements of their era, to make interesting observations about culture and technology and the social question. Zizek makes observations on commercialized moral absolution for the guilt of partaking in consumer culture, DFW makes insights about receiving absolution from the guilt of passivity (we watch TV to experience vicariously what its like to be a person who never watches TV), TLP on desire. What can we read in the tea leaves today, when we look at the modern commercial? What does advertising reveal about the human condition today? As YouTube updates their anti-anti-ad technology I am offered a glimpse of the reality that normal people live in: An Indian ai nightmare of total nonsense. Total demonic Incoherence. Eat die rot pain hate. Ukulele. Woman’s voice. Toddler sounds. Goo goo gaga.
I am listening to David Foster Wallace’s essay “E unibus pluram” at work. I am listening to a robotic voice reading it, uploaded on YouTube, for convenience. Yesterday, YouTube upgraded their anti anti ad software, and ads break through my ad blocker, and I am blasted away with sing-song womanly voice babbling total nonsense with a ukulele in the background. I don't even know what it's an ad for, it's incomprehensible. High interest Loans? Sex toys? Indecipherable. It's not selling a product, it's selling a vibe. Metrosexual compliance. Economic and political edging. Passivity. Existential submission. I haven't gotten that far in Infinite Jest yet, but I've been spoiled that this is basically what the spooky evil infinite jest tape is, in the book: Infantalising sissy hypno so good that people just watch it until they die.
I am planning to be distracted from the Internet for a while, and it seems strangely familiar. Isn’t this what we do when we turn on the TV, and when we doomscroll? Planning to be distracted.
I think a lot of people think "the internet" is qualitatively different from TV. “it is interactive” and so forth. How is it different? Maybe it could have been.
But now, the Internet has been centralized to 3 or 4 sites, "content distribution hubs', who are all more or less identical video hosting sites. You have a favorite, twitter or tiktok or Instagram - but what do you watch on it? What you choose to watch? Who chooses? The almighty algorithm. TV has returned, fully. The Internet is over. The dream of decentralized information is over - back to regular scheduled programming.1
What is on? Dancing women jumping up and down. Tiktok. Sexual Infantilization. Mhh ice cream so good. This is what is on every channel, because even the channels it’s not on, are about reposting screenshots of it, and “discussing” it. You are always watching the same thing as everyone else, only at different levels of comfortable conceptual distance. When you read screenshots from reddit on twitter, you are not better than the redditors you condemn (“how can they be so stupid and naive?”). You are down in the dirt with them, only through another layer of fetishization.
This point cannot be overstated: On a psychological and social level, in how we relate to media, there is no meaningful difference between the phone doomscrolling of our day, with the television watching of our Boomer parents. Except: you are now physically caressing the TV. If you are reading this on a phone, you are most likely doing it right now - gently stroking the screen with a finger to scroll the page.
Its TV, but with literal shit on it, because you love TV so much that you caress it while sitting on the toilet.2
Virtual reality dreamtime
People live already in a fully science fiction virtual reality. We just for the most part haven't really accepted it yet. I'd argue that this has been the case since 1950, television, and only gradually become more formalized and in your face. TV already created a new "prime reality", that people began to priorities over the old one. People measure reality by how well it stacks up to TV, and not the other way around.
Before 1950 we socialized children by including them in activities, and playing, activities which lets the child observe and mimicked and roleplay. After 1950 we socialized children by having them watch psychopaths pretend to have emotions.
We tell ourselves that we know, rationally, "this is fake, this is actors reading a script". “I know the television is fake”. But then what happens a generation later? Everyone complains: My life feels fake and I feel like an actor reading a script. As DFW says in e unibus pluram, TV then grows and morphs into something that becomes an excuse for those feelings: We watch TV to experience vicariously what it is like to be someone who doesn’t watch TV. This technology is not a tool, it is a drug. TV is pot. Smartphones are heroin. In 2023 we socialize children by giving them a portal to hell on their 6th birthday.
A man goes to the doctor, complains life is fake and he feels like an actor reading a script. The doctor says kill yourself (he is Canadian).
There is this idea that people “want to be on TV” - that they want to be famous. There is a general understanding of this in western culture, we teach it and warn children about it. But that is not quite right, and the Internet proves this: 5 percent posters to 95 lurkers. Only a very tiny amount of people “want to be famous”. What all people actually want is to live IN TV. To be immersed, and live in the dream world. In dreams agency is weird - things happen to you passively, you are all the characters and the stage, and yet you are none of them, without agency. This is what TV and virtual reality is. Slumber. Rainbow serpent. Dreamtime.
People don’t want to be famous. They want to be oblivious to their fame. They don’t want to be the actor, they want to be portrayed. They want the actor to play them. They want to live inside the TV.
It just also happens to be entirely fake and a simulation and a hallucination. Relativism is not real. There is a real world, and these things are hallucinations. And it has the same allure as all hallucinogenics.
I state this with certainty and pathos. How can I be so sure? Is it merely nietzschean will, choosing my reality, Kierkegaardian existentialism? Will to power? I simply report what has been revealed to me: Love reveals that there is no substitute.
Ask any stalker - and if you own a smartphone, ask yourself. Smartphone mediated relationships are all parasocial relationships, regardless of whether you know people in the "real" world or not, regardless of physical proximity, as long as you prioritise the virtual (subconsciously or not). We are today all stalkers of each other. And what does your gut say about this state of affair? This is not enough. We must hide in bushes and take pictures of each other through the window. We must become closer. The virtual is NOT ENOUGH. To simply sit and look at the screen is unbearable torture, if you love the thing you are looking at. The thing you love is in prison, and you are watching your own reflection, your miserable face as you have to confront your impotence and powerlessness: you cannot intervene. This is incompatible with the experience of love, because love is always generative, passionate, and calling to action. Ten hour phone calls to another continent sounds romantic when you write it out, but when you do it, it's miserable. Worried you missed out on teenage love? Start a long distance relationship with an anonymous stranger on twitter.
Dating Advice: Love Will Save The World
Long distance relationships are difficult because they make you acutely self aware, and most people are not Good enough, that being aware of yourself is a particularly pleasant experience.
The reason people say long distance is so difficult and/or impossible, is because it requires total commitment. It is painful and delayed gratification with no guarantees for marshmallows at the end, and in the face of this uncertainty you can never flinch or doubt. It requires not just faith but zeal, and hormonal hornyness is a poor substitute for character. Your penis is a poor substitute for a backbone. Material gratification and reason is quite simply not enough. There is a reason porn and stalking is not enough for you.
Odds are, the reason your last relationship failed, or that your marriage is failing, or that you never had a girlfriend, is because you are already living in Bladerunner 2049. You are three Inception-layers down into virtual realities within virtual realities, and what is the point of having sex if you aren't even sure whether it's actually happening or not?
These objections are all reasonable. Operating from within reason.
Paradox is what transcendence and harmonic resonance between the left and right hemispheres looks like from within the left. Paradox is what purpose, meaning, value, looks like, from within the borders of reason. Reason can never go all the way around it, can never cover it or contain it. It only overlaps with reason.
What if the real isolation, destruction of social mores, the Sex war, culture and expectations and romance, was not because "Tinder made 5s able to fuck 10s and no longer settle for the nice guy", nor "porn made guys expect anal on the first date", but, because Facebook and Instagram overnight turned every human relationship into a long distance relationship?
Why is the joke that “twitter is a marriage app”? Could it be, that if all relationships are now de facto long distance, that this is a format where you can attack the problem directly, bull by the horns - going full long distance relationship? Facing the problem head on?
What if the reason people are having all these romance problems is because everyone unknowingly starts in the hardest part? Without consciously knowing it or admitting it? And people are confused and frustrated because all the systems that were in place suddenly don't work any more, and they don't know why? What if there was a paradoxical relief in doing e-dating - because all of a sudden you're at least honest about what's happening?
What if you're not playing the game you think you are, and that's why you're not winning?
Romance and love are not a mutual acting out little fetishistic roles for each other. If it was, the long distance would be sufficient. The virtual would be equivalent, porn would be equivalent, para-socially enjoying celebrities would be equivalent. But it is not. There will never be AI girlfriends, and the sex-bots already exist, you just haven't noticed yet. You carry it in your pocket every day. You have a sexual relationship with your phone. It is not enough, but you watch porn to vicariously experience what it's like to not watch porn, and that keeps you going another day.
What if the Blade runner/Her “virtual gf overlay on top of a prostitute” is not some future prospect, but what you have already been doing for ten years, and you already live in VR and you already have a physical sex relationship with your phone, and a long distance with your wife? Why are you watching Instagram reels during sex? Why are you recording yourself having sex?
What if it is the case that:
IF you adopt knowingly or not the paradigm of virtual supremacy, of Internet mediated reality, THEN, all your relationships are de facto “long distance”?
It is not enough to love, you must let yourself be loved, and love will show you the real world if you let it. It is not enough to say, “I love, but I am too wretched to be loved”.
The game is the same as it ever was. Either/or. Men and women haven't changed. What has changed in our era, and our techno-social environment, is that the choice is forced on you from the start. Before the start even. The hardest question comes first now. You cannot be lukewarm, but must be either hot or cold.
I am not arguing this, I am not presenting you with a reason and argument, for you to recognize and judge on your own capacity for logic and computation. I am informing you, I am telling you, I am bearing witness, I am showing you how. This can all be shown to you, if you want it. This is not a laboratory where we are doing le scientific method. This is a courtroom, and I am delivering testimony:
Love will save the world. And love will reveal the world to you, as it is, an-sich, if you let it. Love will banish all illusion and hallucination, and it will show you what you are. And you have to be able to stomach seeing what you are, to see the real world.
Date to marry. Start a relationship with a girl on another continent. Or just another city - or your neighbor - it doesn't really matter. Proximity doesn’t matter. Do something impossible and inconvenient, and sacrifice everything for it. Text and write love letters and reinvent arranged marriage and medieval courtship for 6 months. Don't try to have backup plans. Don’t say “oh she’s probably not committed to me so I’d better try to use dating apps in the mean time”. Don't plan to fail. Never look down. You might as well. You already are, whether you like it or not. When you plan contingencies, you are planning to fail, and when you plan to fail, you are not really planning, you are just failing. Giving up. Trying to circumvent the game on a technicality. You have to risk everything.
This is what it always was. The only thing that has changed today is that you no longer have the option of lying to yourself about it. You can no longer tell yourself a nice little story that protects your ego, you cannot be a boomer. You can no longer live in a pleasant delusion and hallucination, a nice little safe virtual reality, because every time you look at her on the screen, you also see yourself, and you can only keep looking at her if you can stomach what you're seeing3.
You can never be Harrison Ford in Blade Runner (what does it matter what is real?). You are literally Ryan Gosling in Blade Runner (you know what is real and you cannot Unsee it).
Harrison Ford says, choose your own reality. Is the dog real or not? It doesn’t matter what is real, who cares? Life is will to power.
Ryan Gosling says, I accept that I am fake, and yet, I will sacrifice everything for the Real, even though I get nothing in return. Even though I am innocent, I will give everything and suffer injustice and torture and struggle, because something is real, and I have seen it, because I loved, and Love revealed the world to me.
The reason there are no movies that take place “after covid” is the same as why there are no movies that successfully depict what life feels like post universal Internet and smartphone adaptation. We are culturally shell-shocked, and we don’t even know how to live, in these new worlds. We are all in dreamtime, we are immersed, we are living inside the TV. And we don’t yet quite know how to live it, let alone depict it.
The profound insight of DFW is that people don't want to be on TV, they want to watch TV. The people we think are living this imagined higher life, the characters inside the TV, are in fact exactly defined by their not living inside the TV. It's all very paradoxical. You watch TV to vicariously experience what it's like to not watch TV. This is the DFW insight. The key to the prison is inside the cell, the door locks on the inside. The only people who want to live inside the TV, are the people who already are.
To ask the question “why don’t the character in the movie just google the answer” is not really valid, even though we all ask it, when the movie is bad. It is the equivalent of asking, in 1990, “why are these characters all out and about doing things and having adventures, and not just sitting on the couch watching TV?”. Well, because that’s the point. That’s why you are watching in the first place. To experience what its like to not be on your phone.
David Foster Wallace and the future of literature
DFW worries in E Unibus Pluram, he pre-empts the critique: people will call you gay and a square and old fashioned and not cool. Here he was simply wrong. I am one of the new American fiction writers he prophecised, and I can report: no one says that. We are instead called hateful. Psychologised and accused of being motivated by blind sadism, or animal bloodlust. But even now at this late date, they cannot bring themselves to condemn our sincerity - only deny it. The ironist and postmodernistist don't reject sincerity. It is not an active rejection. It is a passive lack of it4. They cannot bring themselves to - because they themselves desire it more than anything.
Turns out sincerity was it's own reward, and you were just nervous. Maybe you lacked grit.
Love is painful. Bitter. Self aware. It never goes away and when you love, you never enter fully into the dreamstate. You are painfully self aware, painfully aware, painfully present. That pain anchors you. Because it is pain, it must be chosen. You must be continually choosing it. Yes.
Infinite Jest is hard to read today, as we live in the world he predicted, because it is very silly and goofy, and we are all today sincere, whether we like it or not. He was wrong about irony. It is not an endlessly recursive loop, you don’t ever get trapped in it. Irony is just death. It stops. It doesn’t go on forever. Only people do, if they choose to. He chose death.
The way media - movies, tv, and even fiction - works today is fundamentally different from 30 years ago. in the previous paradigm, a movie was a momentary lynchian dream experience, like a little drug trip, that you took your sweetheart to the movies to indulge in for an hour or two, and then you returned to the real world to make out. The purpose of “art” and “fiction” was a momentary religious experience, where you have a hallucination, and then you return to your real life, retaining some kind of moral or insight or point or intention, from it, than you can use as you see fit in your own life. But your own life has priority, and the movie serves you.
Today, what is the defining characteristic of media? immersion. You want to stay in the dream. You dont want to return to your own life. When you finish watching the movie, you go online to read about it or engage in discourse. When you finish “binging” the "tv series” you go the the wikipedia and read all the lore. When a book is turned into a film, they stretch a 3 book series into 7 movies. Even when people write books, they overwrite and fill it with trite meaningless filler that goes on and on and on. Because the point is to hold on to your attention for as long as possible. This is not just something the evil Hollywood people do to the innocent audience - it is also what people want. People don’t want to live their own lives. For all the usual suspect reasons: modernity, death of meaning, death of God, Economical downturn, Millennials will be a lot more poor than their parents.
These are all very good reasons to check out. They are good reasons. They operate from within the borders of reason.
DFW was worried and articulates a coherent principled critique against the project of new sincerity. There is only one problem with it: There is no coherent principled critique. No one is making it. The only such thing is the one you make of yourself, in your neuroticism. The coherent principled critique is coming from inside the house. This is why DFW is dead. He made a better argument for his enemies, than his enemies were ever capable of making. He crouched himself in pre-emptive critique that no one was making. This my friends, is death.
What is irony? Self alienation. What is DFW critique? Self critique from within self alienation. The critique does not exist outside of the left hemisphere. But meaning does.
When we return to the real world, to the body, and out of our neurotic flight-fight panicked lizard brain overthinking, when we become ourselves and go into the world, these critiques become invalid, they become null. They are not disproven or invalidated, but they become insignificant and nonsense.
David Foster Wallace would be alive today if he had started lifting weights.
We escape not by making the perfect critique, but by cooperation. Instead of dialogue being a competitive exercise, it becomes a cooperative one: This is also know by the name “play”.
The way we come to an Understanding, is through play. We are moving towards the same goal, but without articulating it and formalizing it. All good writing is playful. “Good writing” is just a playful way of saying, not talking down to the reader, assuming the reader is intelligent and understands what you mean - an extension of trust.
If I am right about this, then it is impossible to truly articule this. By the very rules that I have set up, I can only hint at it.
An exercise left to the reader.
What is the cure to irony? Compassion. What is the ironist? A man who judges himself beyond forgiveness.
What is compassion? To feel love and compassion for another is to feel being loved. In the act of mercy, we touch forgiveness. To let yourself be touched by it, is yourself to be loved, be forgiven. The ironist is alone not “because he cannot reach the other”, but because he refuses the others touch. - I - am beyond forgiveness. Woe is me!
To love and be loved is one and the same. You can’t have one without the other.
Prison locked on the inside.
You cannot love without knowing the whole thing. All emotions cut two ways. Because we are social animals and mirror neurons, if you like that stuff. Identity is not located in the brain and if you operate as if it was, you are not cutting yourself off from the world, you are cutting yourself in half.
The critique DFW makes is accurate and ironclad. But it only exists within the framework of reason. Like Tractatus, it is a ladder that must be discarded once climbed.
Jesus
A couple of months ago I was in church, looking at a sculpture of the crucified Jesus. I thought, as a kind of thought experiment: assuming that all Christian doctrine is true, trying to understand the man Jesus. Empathize. I imagined him praying in the garden before the crucifixion: Father, let this cup pass from me, nevertheless, not my will but yours be done.
What does this mean? To know you are the perfect Man, and choose the ultimate injustice, to be tortured to death? When you are literally the only person in all of future and past history, who doesn't, won’t ever, deserve it?
I imagine making that choice. Perfect innocence, perfection itself, choosing, giving itself, to perfect injustice. And in a moment that snuck up on me, I suddenly felt for half a moment, that I loved him. Like you would feel for the hero in a fictional story, or a family member or a friend, in a story you heard about them. No different.
To imagine that choice, I feel grateful and compassionate. I feel sorry for him, as I simultaneously feel grateful towards him. And for a split second I love him, regardless of whether he is real or not. The love is real. Charity. Agape. And in that love, I also feel loved. A strange feeling of fatherly compassion, like my fathers love.
I wasn’t thinking about it at all, I was thinking about Jesus and trying to figure it all out, but suddenly I felt that my attempts at helping other people by what little I can, by my writing, and the people who write me in private to ask for advice about things, was worthwhile, and I had done something important, and I had done a good job.
There was no voice, not even my own, not even my thoughts. It is a metaphor, it is a description of a feeling: but if the feeling had been a voice, it would have been saying: “I am pleased with you”.
“Attaboy.”
Love will save the world.
Image is king. Videos and images - no one reads text. It is common knowledge in content producers now that a screenshot of a paragraph of text will get more views than if you had simply posted the text. Text itself must be turned into images of text.
You think you are reading text right now? Morpheus from the matrix.
You should clean your phone screen every day. Covid was just a universal bacterial infection from everyone getting their own shit on their hands.
When you are watching yourself watching, you have two options: self awareness or denial. The video call shows you your own face and immersion is totally impossible.
The famous foot notes in Infinite Jest are really end notes, and the end notes are excessive. The same trick he is pulling could be achieved with actual footnotes, and it would have been much easier to read. But IJ is a book about excess, in excessive style, illustrating excess. The frustration is the point. Restraint is wished for, but rejected. DFW desires restraint, but does not want to do it himself. A flaw. DFW is dead. He died for this mistake.
The end notes are on the one hand a genius prediction of the future experience of hyperlink diving on a wiki site, that illustrates and predicts a phenomenon he had impressive foresight to intuit. But on the other hand he is also wrong, because in the book, the experience is making you self aware - “I am reading a book” - and takes you out of the hypnotic dreamtime of engagement. Where as the actual phenomenon today does the opposite, it takes you deeper into the dream, into the virtual slumber.
Randy this was good, I sent it to a friend, I want more. But anyway I have two unrelated things to ask:
1. Do you *need* money? I mean, should I upgrade to "paid" or do you not give a shit?
2. Can you repost the Sky King piece? It was awesome.
david fucker wall-ass