[chiply]

I'm not sure I agree.

A more solid prophecy would be InterLace and the teleputer (analogous to streaming and smartphones, respectively).

I do think the Entertainment is a solid prophecy of doom scroll / infinite scroll, which is now showing up in basically every application.

The videophony chapter is also especially prophetic when you consider the prevalence of things like filters. I actually noticed the other day on a Google Meet that there is a 'touch up my appearance' feature. Wild.

This one is a lark, but one funny thing, although very different from ONAN (Mexico + USA + Canada), is that we're kind of witnessing an 'ONAN' world cup (all the matches are in these exact three countries). Again, obviously different from ONAN in Infinite Jest, but I thought that was funny.

I'm not sure he predicted the internet, as you mentioned, as the internet was invented in the 60s. If you meant the world wide web, that was created in 1989, popularized in 1990. IJ came out in 1996, so my instinct is that DFW knew about the internet/www when he wrote the book.

[nephihaha]

The world wide web only started gaining serious traction in the mid 1990s, and I would say '97 was when it began to become part of normie culture as opposed to nerds. Even by the 2000s, there were many people who had never been on it.

Yes, he was definitely prophetic about filters. I remember that bit.

(On an unrelated note, I saw a thread elsewhere about whether Kurt Cobain was a frequent internet user. He could have been since he lived long enough, but he never left much trace if he was.)