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The biographer of David Foster Wallace informs us that, not long before Wallace's suicide, he considered the Internet to be "the bathroom wall of the U.S. psyche", going by a story he was working on, titled "Wicked", but never finished.
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In its pages, he returns to the great theme of "Infinite Jest": the lethal power of media. Only this time, he posits that the locus of our self-annihilation has moved online. The plot of "Wickedness" centers on a tabloid reporter named Skyles who, dying of cancer of the mouth, is trying to shoot pictures of Ronald Reagan beset by Alzheimer’s for the Web site Wicked.com. ... The issue of the media’s increasingly ferocious invasions of privacy was one that Wallace felt acutely after the publication of "Infinite Jest." In "Wickedness," the old tabloids—The Star, The News of the World—repulsive as they were, are depicted as playing by rules, but the new ones do not. "Despite all the hoopla about populism and information," Wallace writes of the Web, "what it really was was the bathroom wall of the U.S. psyche." He invented for the story the sites Latrine.com, 10footpoll.com, and filth.com, which will stop at nothing to publish humiliating photos of celebrities.
-- D. T. Max
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I kind of like the nip-slips and the upskirt shots myself.
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In its pages, he returns to the great theme of "Infinite Jest": the lethal power of media. Only this time, he posits that the locus of our self-annihilation has moved online. The plot of "Wickedness" centers on a tabloid reporter named Skyles who, dying of cancer of the mouth, is trying to shoot pictures of Ronald Reagan beset by Alzheimer’s for the Web site Wicked.com. ... The issue of the media’s increasingly ferocious invasions of privacy was one that Wallace felt acutely after the publication of "Infinite Jest." In "Wickedness," the old tabloids—The Star, The News of the World—repulsive as they were, are depicted as playing by rules, but the new ones do not. "Despite all the hoopla about populism and information," Wallace writes of the Web, "what it really was was the bathroom wall of the U.S. psyche." He invented for the story the sites Latrine.com, 10footpoll.com, and filth.com, which will stop at nothing to publish humiliating photos of celebrities.
-- D. T. Max
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I kind of like the nip-slips and the upskirt shots myself.
