InterLace and the Death of Broadcast

essay

A seventh-grader's history of the end

Somewhere near the middle of Infinite Jest, while Mario's puppet show grinds on and Hal sinks into a sugar funk, the novel pauses to deliver a nine-page potted history of how broadcast television died. It comes to us secondhand, as the recollected substance of a school paper: the only remotely filmic thing Hal ever wrote was a seventh-grade research project, for Mr. Ogilvie's Intro to Entertainment Studies, on "the tangled fates of broadcast television and the American ad industry" (scene 087, p. 411). What the digression is to videophony, this stretch is to the industry: a self-contained economic fable, narrated in a reverent past tense, about the extinction of an entire way of watching. The videophone arc belongs elsewhere; the whole business of who sells whom the watching, and how the networks fell, is here.

The Big Four networks were already dying, Hal's paper explains, of cable and the remote control — "the total-viewer-control hand-held remotes known historically as zappers" (scene 087, p. 411). Against them rose a cable trade association whose whole pitch was ideological: it derided the "passivity" of viewers penned into four channels and extolled the "empoweringly American choice" of five hundred (scene 087, p. 412). The war was fought, brilliantly, on the terrain the networks had built themselves — the conditioned reflex that ties "the Freedom to Choose and the Right to Be Entertained" to everything U.S. and true (scene 087, p. 412). The cable campaign's slogan was an order dressed as liberation: "Don't Sit Still for Anything Less" (scene 087, p. 412).

What finished the Big Four, though, was not the argument but a side effect. The same agency running the anti-passivity war, Viney and Veals, discovered it could make cheap, wildly effective network ads for products no one had heard of — and that the most effective of these ads were unbearable to watch. The tongue-scraper campaign for Fond du Lac's NoCoat was the "Uberad," a spot so viscerally repellent it sold the product while making viewers flee the channel; it did, the paper says, what all advertising is supposed to do, "create an anxiety relievable by purchase" (scene 087, p. 414), only it did so more well than wisely. The flights from the NoCoat spots gutted the ratings of every ad and program around them, and the retreat became a rout: "the Big Four broadcast Networks finally just plain fell off the shelf" (scene 087, p. 415). Within days three of them had gone dark. The cable barons who fed on the wreckage are named, drily, as "U.S. broadcast TV's true angels of death" (scene 087, p. 415).

The object-world InterLace built

Into the vacuum steps a video-rental mogul, Noreen Lace-Forche, whom the novel lets Bill Gates christen "The Killer-App Queen" (scene 087, p. 415). She had a shell company idling in wait for exactly this collapse: "an obscure-sounding concern called InterLace TelEntertainment" (scene 087, p. 415). Her genius is to turn the cable barons' own anti-passivity weapon against them. She hires the surviving ad maestro, P. Tom Veals, to run one more campaign, and its pitch is the syllogism the whole novel turns on: "What matter whether your 'choices' are 4 or 104, or 504?" (scene 087, p. 415). Five hundred channels is still someone else's menu. The real product is the abolition of the menu — "what if a viewer could more or less 100% choose what's on at any given time?" (scene 087, p. 416).

The hardware that answers the question is worth cataloguing, because it is where the novel's foresight and its blind spot sit side by side. Programming would arrive over fiber-optic line in "convenient fiber-optic pulses" that landed on palm-sized diskettes "InterLace was marketing as 'cartridges'" (scene 087, p. 416); the viewing appliance, a high-definition machine with a cartridge drive, was "recognizably renamed by Veals's boys in Recognition 'Teleputers' or 'TPs'" (scene 087, p. 417). Menu-programming that came down the line on demand the novel calls "spontaneous dissemination" (scene 087, p. 417). InterLace then buys everything — the networks' vaults, the computer conglomerates, the satellite orbiters, the transmission patents — until it owns the grid end to end and the per-pulse fees fall. It is a monopoly built out of a promise of choice.

The object-world is furnished in miniature two hundred pages earlier, in the apartment of a Saudi medical attache. His evening ritual is the consumer end of InterLace's economy: he comes home to find "the living room's teleputer booted and warmed up" and "the evening's entertainment cartridges already selected and arranged and lined up in dock ready for remote insertion into the viewer's drive" (scene 007, p. 34). His teleputer also receives "the spontaneous disseminations of the InterLace Subscription Pulse-Matrix" (scene 007, p. 35), and his wife draws their cartridges on "a complimentary goodwill account" at the local outlet (scene 007, p. 35). It is on-demand viewing rendered as domestic liturgy — and note the seam where the prophecy frays: on the night the story turns, the crucial cartridge does not stream or pulse in. It arrives, like the others, in the mail.

Choice as the product

What InterLace actually sells is sovereignty. The viewer, Veals's spokeswoman proposes, could "become her/his own programming director," could "define the very entertainment-happiness it was her/his right to pursue" (scene 087, pp. 416-417). And in the aftermath the market reorganizes itself around that sovereignty: "American mass-entertainment became inherently pro-active, consumer-driven" (scene 087, p. 417). Advertising is abolished from the stream altogether — any halfway decent processor edits out anything shrill — so revenue has to come from the watching itself: "The more pleasing a given cartridge was, the more orders there were for it from viewers" (scene 087, p. 417). For the first time, the novel notes, "Personal pleasure and gross revenue looked at last to lie along the same demand curve" (scene 087, p. 417). This is pulse-purchasing: you pay per thing watched, and the more perfectly a thing pleases you, the more it earns.

The novel does not let the word "choice" stand unexamined. Its own footnote to Hal's history concedes that Lace-Forche and Veals are geniuses whose real feat was to work "an American ideology committed to the appearance of freedom," a thing "almost unanalyzably compelling" (endnote 164, p. 1031). There is a minority academic reading, argued at length by a single critic, that takes this footnote as the key to the whole book: that the near-collapse of the continent is caused less by any single lethal film than by the media apparatus itself, and that "the central factor in creating the environment in which this eschaton could occur is the corporate media structure and its creators, most notably, P. Tom Veals" (kaufman-demand-appearance-of-freedom-ij). On this reading the InterLace grid is not the novel's backdrop but its engine: a machine for manufacturing the feeling of freedom while narrowing what there is to be free about.

And the choice-economy has a limit case, which the novel supplies and which the dossier on the Entertainment elsewhere anatomizes in full. If personal pleasure and revenue lie along one demand curve, the terminal point of the curve is a viewer who has chosen one thing so perfectly pleasing that he will never choose anything again. That is the medical attache, found with his cartridge "configured for a recursive loop" and himself "having now wet both his pants and the special recliner" (scene 014, p. 54). The film that does this to him is the samizdat's business, not this history's; what belongs here is the economics. The sovereign viewer and the doomed viewer are the same person. A market built to give the watcher exactly what he wants has no defense against a thing he cannot stop wanting.

Advertising, meanwhile, does not die so much as migrate. Barred from the pulses, the ravaged ad industry colonizes every surface left: "Billboards sprouted with near-mycological fury alongside even rural twolaners" (scene 087, p. 418), "No bus, train, trolley, or hack went unfestooned with high-gloss ads" (scene 087, p. 418), and carmakers paint come-ons on side panels until buyers refuse to be seen in "cars that sold out" (scene 087, p. 418). Its most inventive relocation is onto time itself. When ads can no longer run inside the years' programming, the years go up for sale: Subsidized Time, the scheme by which the calendar is auctioned to sponsors, "conceived on the back of a chintzy Chinese-zodiac paper placemat" (scene 087, p. 410). By the puppet show's telling, a president cannot recall which bowl game he attended because its name has become the "Ken-L-Ration-Magnavox-Kemper-Insurance-Forsythia Bowl" (scene 091, p. 442). When you can no longer sell a break in the broadcast, you sell the year.

The prescience question, graded

More than most stretches of the novel, this one now circulates as prophecy — the book that "predicted streaming." It is worth grading the claim honestly, because the honest case for the novel's media foresight is the one that keeps both the hits and the misses in view.

Structurally, the novel was uncannily right about the shape of the thing. It saw the death of the shared schedule — the end of the mass audience gathered in front of the same program at the same hour — and the arrival of atomized, on-demand, viewer-chosen, ad-free watching billed against pleasure itself. Tom Bissell, in the reception's most-cited appreciation, calls Infinite Jest "the first great Internet novel" and credits it with warning against "the insidious virality of popular entertainment" before the technology to prove the point existed (bissell-four-theories-ij). Jonathan Franzen, writing as the closest of Wallace's writer-friends, names the target more precisely: the novel set out to resist "the monocultural spectre that David had envisioned," a coming world of "a universal crowd of individuals whose most salient characteristic is their being identically entertained," and argues that even the book's form — its "annotation, digression, nonlinearity, hyperlinkage" — anticipated the medium that would displace it (franzen-farther-away-2011). At the thirtieth anniversary a New Yorker critic simply gives up and addresses the dead author: "Oh, honey, I find myself murmuring to the David Foster Wallace of 1996. Had he only known" (hoby-ij-turned-thirty).

But the misses are real and specific, and the reception names them too. Bissell, in the same breath as his praise, concedes that Wallace failed to anticipate the break from disc- and cartridge-based media to the cloud (bissell-four-theories-ij) — and that is the exact seam this essay keeps returning to. InterLace disseminates its programming as physical diskettes; the attache's fatal cartridge comes by First Class mail; the teleputer is a discrete appliance you boot and warm up. The novel foresaw the logic of streaming and got the hardware of it wrong: no stream, no cloud, no phone — objects in the post, machines on the console. Its one further wager, that the on-demand economy would abolish advertising, is the miss the present has most thoroughly falsified: real streaming brought the commercials back. What the novel imagined as the sovereign viewer's reward — watching billed straight against pleasure, no ads — turned out to be a promise the medium made and then withdrew.

The case has serious skeptics, and they matter. Wallace himself declined the mantle: told repeatedly that the novel was really "about the Web," he answered that "You don't have to be on the Internet for life to feel this way" and noted, flatly, that "he had never been online" (newyorker-dtmax-wickedness). And the most sustained scholarly reading of the novel and the attention economy argues expressly against the prophecy frame: that Infinite Jest is not a prophecy but a narrative hyperbole, and that its prescience is structural and analogical — a diagnosis of a logic that later platforms would normalize, not a forecast of the devices that would run it (Italian scholarship, rendered here in paraphrase, petrassi-infinite-scroll). The honest verdict is the one the novel's own hardware forces: a poor forecast of machines, a superb one of the market they would run on.

When nothing is ever simply "on"

Broadcast's death is not a set piece in Infinite Jest; it is the ground the book stands on. Every screen in the novel is a teleputer, every program a chosen cartridge, every viewing an act of sovereign selection billed against desire. The shared schedule is gone, and with it the last situation in which watching was something that happened to you rather than something you summoned. That is the world the lethal Entertainment can exist in and no other: a film that kills by being perfectly chosen requires a culture in which everything is chosen, in which nothing is ever simply on. Hal's seventh-grade history of how the networks fell is, read closely, the origin story of the disaster the rest of the novel inhabits. The book had to kill broadcast first. It needed a world in which the viewer had already won — had become, in Veals's phrase, "her/his own programming director" — so that it could show what winning costs.

Sources

bissell-four-theories-ij — the reception's most-cited craft appreciation: Infinite Jest as "the first great Internet novel," warning of entertainment's virality before the technology arrived, WITH Bissell's own hardware concession that Wallace missed the break from disc and cartridge to the cloud.
franzen-farther-away-2011 — the closest-friend statement of the anti-monoculture reading: the "monocultural spectre" of a crowd "identically entertained," and the distinctive claim that the novel's form (annotation, digression, hyperlinkage) itself anticipated the internet.
hoby-ij-turned-thirty — the thirtieth-anniversary New Yorker essay; the smartphone-era "Oh, honey... Had he only known" as the popular form of the prophecy reading.
newyorker-dtmax-wickedness — the author-side counterweight: the critics' "actually about the Web" reading carried together with Wallace's own on-record denial ("You don't have to be on the Internet for life to feel this way"; "he had never been online").
kaufman-demand-appearance-of-freedom-ij — the minority academic reading that ranks the InterLace media apparatus, not the cartridge, as the novel's engine of collapse, keyed to the novel's own endnote-164 "appearance of freedom."
petrassi-infinite-scroll — the scholarly anti-prophecy counterweight: the novel as structural and analogical diagnosis of the attention economy, expressly not a device forecast. (Italian scholarship: renderings are translation, paraphrase only here.)

The novel's own words above are quoted, page-cited, from the text itself (scenes 087, 007, 014, 091, and endnote 164).