David Foster Wallace seems strangely prescient. Although the specifics are a little off, Hal's essay about how the Teleputer took over the entertainment industry and pushed out the big network TV corporations mirrors what's currently going on in the home entertainment arena. "On demand" services like Netflix and Hulu haven't entirely ousted network television and cable, but that seems to be the way things are going.
Of course, what throws Wallace's parodic envisioning of the future off is that fiction allows authors to play with perfect conditions. Everything lines up perfectly for the outcome that they want to write (or they know it does if it doesn't appear to to readers), and then they go with it. This ideal condition quality of such fiction is supremely evident in Hal's note that the PR guy for the first third party president of the United States (the crooner Johnny Gentle) took up the incumbent's campaign because he had recently been pushed out of an ad agency that had previously been a giant in the then recently deceased network TV world.
Wallace pads this situation out with other conditions as well, such as a high pitch political disillusionment that sees the third party candidate's party attracting people inspired by Rush Limbaugh and Hilary Rodham Clinton alike. His reasons for how North America looks in the world of Infinite Jest are definitely fleshed out, to say the least.
And, perhaps conveniently for a blog like this, are simply too detailed to go through in one entry. Besides, it's much more entertaining to read about Mario Incandenza's filmed puppet show re-enactment of how the Organization of North American Nations (O.N.A.N.) came about and the pageantry around its annual showing at E.T.A.
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