In the decades following its publication and the years covered in the novel passing by, Infinite Jest gestated within itself a multitude of legacies. For one, it's size and structure make it the archetypical novel that people are itching to finish but never do; there was even a support group for this. Additionally, Wallace is the latest in a long line of authors to have their name be turned into an adjective; you see an occassional "Wallaceian" in a sea of Kafkaesques, Dickensians, and Pynchonesques. Of course, since the core way works are engaged with nowadays is shilling, you're more likely to see people say "this sounds like something from Infinite Jest" or "you should read Infinite Jest". These shills have codified the "Lit Bro", a type of guy that people get mad at and/or try to avoid accusations of being. Wallace himself is seen as a clairvoyant, his opus a called shot for the new millennium.
While the most ardent Infinite Jest shills extol its encyclopedic and literary virtues, what got me to push through it was learning more about the novel's portrayal of its world and the lives of its citizens. The groups of people living in this world the book focuses on get through the absurdity of their day to day lives by enducing euphoria, entertaining ones self, through outside help. The most obvious form of outside help enlisted; by virtue of including a laundry list of substances used, is getting really fucked up. Throughout the novel, we see instances of people sowing this behavior and others reaping the consequences of addiction. Hal Incandenza and his cadre at the Enfield Tennis Academy are sowing throughout their coming of age. This flagrant disregard leads to an environment where Pemulis spiking drinks is seen as a perfectly acceptable form of revenge along with a dynamic similar to MLB clubhouses during the greenie craze. An entire operation forms to ensure that nobody submits their own piss when "random" drug tests come around. Its implied that Lyle the "guru" who hangs out in the weight room uses the sweat of the students as a drug himself.
With this in mind, Hal's ultimate fate can be seen as him reaping what he was sowing much faster than anticipated. He is not the first in the family to have the boomerang come back for him. Orin's adult life after becoming the punter of the moribund Arizona Cardinals (just like our world) involved a descent into hedonism, sequestering himself into seedy hotels tallying sexual conquests. "Himself" appeared to have been functioning for the longest time, but deep down could not express his true feelings for his loved ones outside of creating films; culminating in the titular Infinite Jest and his eventual suicide.
The Ennet House plot thread consists entirely of reaping, often in increasingly grotesque manners. As these are enrolees into a Twelve-Step Program, there is prevailing faith that a Higher Power, or God of our understanding will help them through.
The main target of Wallace's polemic on entertainment dominating the popular conscience is the creation of porn. Note that I am not talking about literal pornographic films here, any creation appealing to a multitude of irresistible desires can and will be described as "[X] porn". This doesn't mean that Wallace isn't leaning into the parallels with literal pornographic films. The titular Infinite Jest is very frequently referred to by the euphemism "the Entertainment", compare to the insistance that pornographic film be called Adult Entertainment (emphasizing both words: it is "For Adults Only" and "For Entertainment Purposes Only"). The superstate the US, Mexico, and Canada form is known as ONAN, as in "onanism", another term for masturbation (looking back at our world's present, "GOON(ER)" isn't nearly as good a source of backronyms). The president that oversaw the formation of ONAN? Johnny (slang for condom) Gentle. At the time of the novel's publication, Wallace intended for the significance of James O Incandenza's name to encompass only the first two initials ("JO" for "Jack Off"). In hindsight, his initials become even funnier: JOI for "Jack Off Instructions", a specific form of fetish video that owes its existence to the internet and the development of parasocial relationships. The ETA's school psychologist operates under the assumption that Freud was right, and what we know about the students and their attraction to the Moms seems to be a textual reinforcement of that worldview. Eric Clipperton bringing a gun, a much more phallic instrument than a tennis racket if there ever was one, gets recontextualized with this knowledge.
Getting back to the thesis that entertainment is getting too vouyeristic and masturbatory even when not sexually explicit in nature; the Entertainment is such a powerful cognitohazard because it takes the entire Hierarchy of Needs triangle and turns it into a hypertetrahedron that gets beamed at audiences all at once. In hindsight, this is not the only thing that cannot be. ETA pastime "Eschaton" essentially a LARPing system for storyboarding nuclear armageddon, fits perfectly into a worldview where people are horny for the apocalypse.
Infinite Jest's legacy of being predictive deserves more analysis. The common thread between every work that has been claimed to have successfully predicted America's tragectory, from Infinite Jest to The Simpsons and beyond, is that they understand America as a nation of id. This id is satisfied through the form of big, dumb spectacles. The Super Bowl is a prime example of a big, dumb spectacle, and every competitive venture in the world trying to copy the Super Bowl in this regard has been duly noted. The machinations of American imperialism have often relied more on making a spectacle out of a show of force for those holding the levers of power than coherent strategy; even before Donald Trump turned the porn war into an art form, the Dubya administration inaugurated Iraq with a bombing campaign known as "Shock and Awe". Tying these two examples together, metaphors for warfare have often been used when talking about football, since at their broadest stroke they are both enterprises of violence interrupted by litigation. The desire for big, dumb spetacle manifests itself even in how we learn about violence at scales between the two things previously discussed. Mass shootings and police brutality have been compared to being the background noise of America as hellworld. To stay in the headlines longer than a few days, these incidents either need extreme body counts or extreme prejudice; a sign of a turning horrifying acts into spectacle just as much as it is desensitization to said acts.
To me, the best way to gauge the accuracy of predictions of the future by comparing how cynical the prediction was to what actually happened. Take, for example, everything being sold as advertising space, up to and including the calendar. I would argue that Wallace was insufficiently cynical by virtue of having everything being advertised a tangible consumer good instead of speculations or hallucinations. I would wager that if Subsidized Time was actually enacted, we would see years such as the Year of DraftKings or Year of ChatGPT among other things today's world is tired of hearing about. Another prediction that ended up less cynical than reality was who Wallace identified as creating the things that are cooking people's brains. The Entertainment is the work of a human autuer trying to express their true feelings about the world. AI slop is, well, AI and slop. The Great Convexity/Concavity is more cynical than the largest accumulations of waste in real life; garbage patches accumulating over many years at the center of oceanic gyres are in international waters and the international scientific community to clean up. Compare this to a giant pit of waste on land made intentionally and rapidly whose status is the biggest geopolitical issue the book manages to entertain showing us the complexities of.
The elephant in the room with all of this is parallels between President Johnny Gentle and President Donald Trump. At the surface level, both are famous entertainers and at least some of their initial ascents in the political sphere could be attributed to this name recognition. The comparisons grow from there, especially given what Trump's new pursuits during his second term have been. Gentle is the driving force behind the creation of the Great Convexity/Concavity, and one could infer that it is purely a vanity project. Similarly, Trump has been destroying parts of the White House and the Kennedy Center to create things that fit his own twisted aesthetic. In terms of what both figures actually did, their legacy is most likely them destroying the international status quo because the American electorate was bored. This is in essence what occurred on Interdependence Day, and commentators online have been swift to recognize it as such. Gentle and Trump are both America's id manifested into a person, which ties everything about how predicting the future of America requires one to understand it as a nation of id together.
