PERSON
David Foster Wallace
The American novelist who built a machine of perfect pleasure in fiction decades before the engineers caught up, then spent his short career developing the moral vocabulary for surviving it—attention as the whole of freedom, addiction as the architecture of dependency, sincerity as the irreducible human contribution no algorithm can counterfeit.
David Foster Wallace is the right thinker for the age of artificial intelligence for a reason that is almost embarrassingly literal: he invented the thing, in fiction, before the engineers did. At the center of his 1996 novel sits an object called
the Entertainment—a film so perfectly pleasurable that anyone who begins watching cannot stop, will not eat or sleep or move, and dies. It is a weapon of pure engagement optimization, and it predates by two decades the recommendation systems tuned to keep a billion people scrolling. He did not present this as science fiction but as a slightly exaggerated diagnosis of where the culture already was. The exaggeration has since thinned to almost nothing. But to read Wallace only for the prophecy is to miss why the prophecy was possible. He was not a futurist. He was a moralist of
attention