David Foster Wallace says he enjoys TV and that nothing bad about it applies to death. He thinks the big companies won't relinquish power over what was on television no matter how small transistors got. The shows we watch reinforce a sense of just pure fatalism and kind of nihilism, writes David Foster Wallace. "It's still kind of instills this fatalism in us but it makes us feel like well you know we're not the ones that are corrupt"
We dive into David Foster Wallace’s sprawling 1993 essay “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction.” How do TV and new forms of media keep their hold on us when we know at some level that they’re reinforcing our loneliness and passivity? That’s easy, Wallace says, post-modern cool. Flatter me, let me think we’re all in the joke together, give me “an ironic permission-slip to do what I do best whenever I feel confused and guilty: assume, inside, a sort of fetal position, a pose of passive reception to comfort, escape, reassurance.” But in the years since this essay, the TV landscape has completely transformed. Has it transcended its function as a surrogate companion for lonely people, or has it just found new ways to keep us isolated and passive?
Plus, we talk about the recent new SPSP guidelines and Jon Haidt’s recent essay on why he’s resigning from the organization. (Sorry, Jon!)
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