Da Infinite Jest all'Infinite Scroll: David Foster Wallace nell'epoca della distrazione senza fine

This article explores the relationship between David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996) and the contemporary logic of the “Infinite Scroll” that structures today’s digital platforms. Starting from a close reading of the novel and from Wallace’s non-fiction (in particular E Unibus Pluram and This Is Water), the paper investigates how Infinite Jest anticipates key dynamics of the current attention economy: the design of addictive entertainment, the commodification of time and focus, and the transformation of distraction into a structural condition of subjectivity in the digital era. The “Entertainment” – the enigmatic and fatally seductive film at the centre of the plot – is interpreted as an allegorical device that prefigures the technical and affective infrastructures of endless feeds and auto-play mechanisms. Through an interdisciplinary framework that draws on media theory, philosophy and sociology (Debord, Baudrillard, Han, Crary, Stiegler, Bauman, among others), the paper analyses the ways in which the novel dramatizes the saturation of perception, the fragmentation of experience and the outsourcing of choice to algorithmic systems. Particular attention is devoted to the metaphor of tennis and the Enfield Tennis Academy (ETA) as figures of discipline and resistance to the pull of easy pleasure, and to the fragmented, note-saturated form of the novel as a literary analogue of the contemporary feed. The argument is that Infinite Jest can be read as a pre-digital text for thinking about the infrastructures of digital distraction and as a possible “training ground” for a renewed ethics of attention in the age of the Infinite Scroll.