DFW may of course have reason to gloat, but I am not here to discuss the quality of Infinite Jest, which I am only just over a third of the way through in any event. Suffice to say it is—smugness and all—consumable and entrancing in much the way its subject-matter is purported to be, and it has filled me with desires much like those of its Substance-addicted characters to hole up someplace for days, unplug my phone, and indulge shamelessly in the drug of this book, telling myself this is the last time. The point I want to discuss here is not that the book is delicious and delightful and achingly sad and funny and poignant and smug and annoying and sexist (tending to divide the female fifty percent of the human population into either potential sex partners or a single all-giving mother figure) and many other things...
No, the point here is that the book also purports to be set, none-too-earnestly, in the not-too-distant future; and while many of DFW's 1996 satirical predictions about the shape of things to come—at least as regards North American society—have not come to pass from the vantage-point of 2021 (we have not, for instance, renamed our calendar years after consumer products; and while it is true that we stream and watch content at a once-unimaginable scale, we no longer do so via video cartridges* of any kind†), there is one speculative rant that graces the pages of Wallace's opus that holds up as entirely accurate and on-point. This is DFW's capsule future-history (appearing at roughly pp. 146-151 of the Back Bay Books edition) of the rise and subsequent demise of video telephonic conferencing.
There is no one in 2021 who does not have thoughts on the matter, and often strong ones; because there is no one who has not felt some amount of horror and exhaustion and depletion in relation to the video teleconferencing medium of communication. "Zoom fatigue" was the term that one started to hear everywhere sometime last spring. I knew the feeling. After a Zoom meeting had run its course, I was not good for anything else for another hour. The strain was overwhelming. I had to stand up and walk around the room. And nothing could be more dreadful than the Zoom meeting that came after that Zoom meeting. At some point, the magnitude of the problem was so widely recognized that "Zoom fatigue" no longer sufficed as a term. By summer 2020, a colleague was sending around articles that spoke of "Zoom trauma."
Exactly why the medium is so odious and painful may not have been consciously accessible to us. But we feel in reading DFW's speculations on the subject in 1996 a certain shock of recognition. Yes, we think—this is why. As DFW explains, the beauty of the audio-only telephone was that it granted freedom for the attention to wander while simultaneously fostering the illusion that the person on the other end was hanging on one's own every word. Each, never seeing the other, could imagine the other in whatever state of adoring attentive contemplation was most flattering to the conception of self, while they could themselves all the while be attending to matters of personal grooming, doodling, and allowing their bodies and minds generally to take a free and self-directed course.
But the video teleconference took this away from us. David Foster Wallace knew this by casting his mind a few years forward into the future. We know it from hard experience. Once we are on camera, we have to pay attention, and show that we are doing so. We have to keep our faces molded into a strained mask of total raptness. Or else we may forget to do so—and this, far from being abetted by the invisibility and hence freedom of the medium, as in audio calls—is now fraught with incredible peril. DFW names the dread possibilities of being caught absent-mindedly picking one's nose or adjusting the crease in one's pants while in the camera's visual range. The Zoom era, sadly, has introduced us to even more horrifying and mortifying potentialities than this. Need I mention the name Jeffrey Toobin?
Foreseeing that people would eventually no longer be willing to stomach the responsibility and consequent anxiety of being at every moment visible on the screen—one's every motion and the details of all one's reactions being open both to the monitoring of colleagues and to the invidious comparisons one makes in one's own mind to the idealized image of one's own appearance that (DFW notes) we each of us carry around inside of us—DFW predicted, Criswell-like, that people would eventually turn to various modes of masking the naked truth of their video image with sundry digital enhancements. And while we haven't yet perhaps gone as far as he foretold (airbrushed Zoom avatars that do the attention-paying for us have not yet appeared in my neck of the woods), we are well on our way to creating the "Tableaux" that DFW foresaw would replace the actual backgrounds of crummy apartments and unmade beds that appear behind us in our natural work-from-home states.
How, then, does it all end? By, in DFW's telling, eventually coming full-course, completing the total circuit. For as soon as we discover that the video background and the video image can be altered we begin to do so. As soon as we realize it is possible to mask our real-world inattention and facial distraction, we gratefully seize the opportunity. And so at last we stumble upon the ultimate solution—the biggest and most direct way to blot out the unpleasant truths that are being captured in our Zoom thumbnails about our personal appearances and behaviors and surroundings—namely, to simply turn off the video entirely. And I am already seeing some of my colleagues make use of exactly this expedient, thus making a quantum leap, bypassing DFW's avatar phase before it has even gotten off the ground.
In which case, however—as DFW reminds us—we might as well have simply stayed on the audio-only telephone to start with. And so we are, like Bouvard and Pécuchet, right back where we began, clerks going back to clerking, callers going back to making calls, and seeing in our vaunted technological progress little more than another illustration of the ancient principle that all is vanity. But without vanity, there would be no art, and no Infinite Jest, and certainly no DFW.
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* In fairness, these cartridges are described as something more closely resembling DVDs, and their content is downloadable over fiberoptic internet in the manner of streaming—so that's pretty prescient.
† Oh, and while Rush Limbaugh did not eventually become U.S. president, something arguably even more ludicrous and horrifying happened.
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