Infinite Jest in 2025: Wallace's Eerily Accurate Predictions

- 6 minutes read - 1185 words

In my previous posts, I introduced Infinite Jest and positioned it as both the quintessential Generation X novel and a worthy entrant into the American literary canon. Now, as we conclude this series, I want to examine Wallace’s most remarkable achievement: his prescient vision of our technological and cultural future, and what his insights can tell us about navigating our present reality.

The Prophet of Cupertino

One of the shocking aspects of Infinite Jest is how many predictions Wallace nailed from the early 90’s about a world some 30 years into the future. Written before smartphones, social media, streaming services, or the modern internet, the novel portrays a world that feels unnervingly familiar to us in 2025.

Wallace’s conception of the “teleputer” - a synthesis of TV, telephone, and computer of the early 1990s - anticipated our current technological landscape with remarkable accuracy. What he imagined as a device for consuming entertainment and communication has been realized through TCP/IP networks, ubiquitous personal computing devices, and streaming platforms that have transformed how we consume media.

The novel’s vision of “The Entertainment” - content so engrossing that viewers would rather die than stop watching - once seemed like satirical hyperbole. Today, it reads like a barely-exaggerated version of our algorithm-driven content delivery systems, designed to maximize “engagement” at all costs. Netflix’s auto-play feature, TikTok’s endless scroll, and YouTube’s recommendation engine all exemplify the principle Wallace identified: content delivery systems optimized not for human flourishing but for attention capture.

In Infinite Jest, Wallace does the fundamental reductionist fungibility calculus of happiness in our time: we have an inbuilt animal need for as many blips of happy hormones that we can get, and we will rabidly pursue the stimulations that release them. This insight underlies the billion-dollar attention economy that now dominates our lives.

Political Prophecy

In its satirical-yet-earnest way, Infinite Jest imagines a world where the president is a narcissistic, Vegas-grade, mountebank huckster entertainer who peddles lies and Good Old Days myths. He’s also a germophobe. The parallels to recent American politics hardly need spelling out.

Johnny Gentle, the former lounge singer turned president in Wallace’s Organization of North American Nations (O.N.A.N.), rose to power by playing on nostalgia and germophobia. His administration’s blend of environmental fanaticism and toxic nationalism feels disturbingly familiar in our post-2016 landscape. Even more unsettlingly, in 2025 we find ourselves with a U.S. president picking fights with trading partners and menacing invasions of Canada, Greenland, and Panama in strange bellicosity directly recalling Gentle’s menacing of Quebec. When a cosplaying billionaire game-show host rode down a golden escalator and into the White House, Wallace’s satirical vision suddenly seemed less like fiction and more like prophecy.

Emotional Commodification

Perhaps most insightfully, Wallace recognized that emotions themselves could be commodified and sold as drugs. His depiction of entertainment as a form of self-medication has proven remarkably prescient in an era of partisan “newsfotainment” channels that package and sell rage as their primary product.

Wallace saw that rage, fear, and outrage could be packaged and sold just as effectively as pleasure or comfort. The success of networks like Fox News and the rise of algorithmic content feeds that promote emotional engagement (regardless of its nature) validate this insight. The “doomscrolling” phenomenon is the natural endpoint of what Wallace identified decades ago.

He recognized that by rights we’re better off materially than any humans have ever been before, but we’re emotionally gutted, drowning in our own trash, ennui, ahedonia, and listlessness. This diagnosis feels even more accurate in 2025 than it did in 1996.

The Man Behind the Vision

Wallace’s erudition, and occasional egomania, shine through on virtually every page of Infinite Jest. He was a formidable essayist, a talented tennis player, technological explorer, depressive, and occasional drug user. In his works, we feel his yearning and know that there’s an earnest, saintly heart raging and gasping furiously.

A particular challenge in reading this book is that that heart couldn’t bear this world and, as often happens to dreamers according to Don McLean, Wallace ultimately committed suicide. A personal work which has several motifs on suicide and an author who ultimately commits it leads to the work being read as a prefiguring of said suicide. As such, it’s hard not to see Wallace “in there” or see Infinite Jest as a “cry for help.” But to do so is to do a great disservice to the work.

To the extent suicide appears in the book it, like dozens of other themes and ideas, is well-written, engaging, and rings “true.” The book is a moral and social cri de coeur, the stakes are literally life and death. As such suicide is a necessary element to drive characters and plots as part of the novel’s mechanics. And, like many other topics in the book, Wallace on suicide is enlightening and well-done. Says the post-suicide-attempt character, Kate Gompert:

“I didn’t want to especially hurt myself. Or like punish. I don’t hate myself. I just wanted out. I didn’t want to play anymore.”

Here Wallace attacks the euphemism “hurt oneself” which masks the truth of Kate’s depression’s cause, the cause that drives the media and drug addictions described throughout the novel.

On the other hand, it’d be hard to not read Infinite Jest as a cautionary tale and imagine that the world at the time of his suicide was the near-total fulfillment of everything he cautioned against. But again, we should let the work speak for itself.

Personal Reflections

Reading Infinite Jest in 2025 is an uncanny experience. The technological landscape Wallace envisioned has largely come to pass, though in forms he couldn’t have specifically anticipated. Instead of cartridges of “The Entertainment,” we have streaming services with auto-play features. Instead of teleputers, we have smartphones that never leave our sides. Instead of subsidized time, we have corporate-sponsored everything, from stadiums to social media feeds.

What strikes me most powerfully about revisiting Wallace’s masterpiece now is not just how much he got right, but how urgent his core message feels. In a world of constant distraction and algorithmically optimized pleasure, his call for sincerity, connection, and mindful choice resonates more powerfully than ever.

When I first encountered this book on that fateful trip to Paris, I couldn’t have known how thoroughly its vision would be realized in the intervening years. Now, like a literary Cassandra, Wallace’s warnings echo through our hyperconnected, attention-fractured landscape.

If Wallace’s vision of the future has largely come to pass, perhaps we should also take seriously his proposed solutions: genuine human connection, sincerity instead of irony, and the conscious choice to break free from the loops of addiction - whether to substances or entertainment. In a world where the technology to fulfill our every desire is at our fingertips, the most radical act might be choosing, occasionally, to put it down.

The true terror and genius of Infinite Jest is that it saw us coming. The question now is whether we can see ourselves clearly enough to heed its warnings.

A semi-bio-pic: “End of the Tour” will help readers see Wallace and hear the major thesis of “Infinite Jest.”