As someone currently writing a counter to the Techno-Optimist Manifesto — a document that, tellingly, has been assigned reading in some tech circles — and as someone who has taught difficult books for almost two decades, I’ve spent considerable time thinking about what happens when literature gets conscripted into ideological service. My students and I have debated Infinite Jest over the years, and what strikes me every time is how differently each generation of students reads it — one cohort finds the addiction plotlines central, another gravitates toward the tennis academy as a meditation on discipline and failure, another reads the whole novel as a prolonged joke about sincerity. That is the beauty of great literature: it refuses to settle into a single usable meaning, and it punishes readers who need it to.
Your reading, I have to say, reminds me of what Gilles Deleuze has been reputed to say — that “a theory is exactly like a box of tools, it must be useful, it must function.” Tech culture loves this framing. But Deleuze meant something far more destabilizing than a founder’s reading list: the toolbox was supposed to dismantle fixed identities and challenge the sovereignty of the subject, not confirm it. When I read this essay, I found myself wondering, with genuine curiosity rather than hostility: did we read the same book?
Because the Infinite Jest I know doesn’t resolve into a founder’s handbook. It resists that. And I say this as an invitation to dialogue, not a dismissal — because this kind of conversation between tech culture and literary culture is exactly what’s missing right now.
You write that “optimism requires seriousness, and seriousness looks painfully ridiculous, in the moments where it counts.” I find this genuinely interesting as a thesis. But what does seriousness actually mean here? The essay never defines it beyond external focus and commitment to something greater than oneself. By that criterion, the Québécois separatists in IJ — also externally focused, also committed to something greater than themselves, also willing to suffer and look ridiculous — qualify as serious. The argument is tautological: serious people are the ones we already admire for being serious, and the admiration does the work the definition should be doing. What limiting principle distinguishes worthy seriousness from destructive seriousness, and without one, how does the thesis hold?
You invoke the halfway house residents as evidence that suffering produces “the pure gravitas of their everyday heroism.” But DFW spends hundreds of pages showing that suffering is not reliably ennobling — that it destroys people, that Gately’s heroism is fragile and hard-won and not transferable as metaphor. When you map his trajectory onto founder resilience, you’ve replaced DFW’s actual argument with a business-week parable. What in the novel, specifically, licenses that equivalence?
The looksmaxxing parallel is where the essay most reveals its assumptions. You frame it as “a ridiculous goal, but it’s taken very seriously” — structurally analogous to IJ’s use of the grotesque. But looksmaxxing culture is saturated with body dysmorphia and self-harm. When that gets folded into a celebration of productive suffering, you’re not illuminating the novel — you’re aestheticizing psychological damage. How do you distinguish between suffering that builds and suffering that destroys, and does IJ actually offer that distinction, or does it deliberately refuse it?
Finally: the Techno-Optimist Manifesto — the ideological home this essay is written from — explicitly positions the humanities as obstacles to progress. IJ is, among many other things, a sustained critique of a culture that cannot tolerate discomfort except when repackaged as self-optimization. Recruiting DFW as a prophet of founder resilience takes his diagnosis and calls it a prescription. Do you think DFW would recognize himself in this reading?
I’m asking these as invitations, not attacks. This kind of dialogue between tech culture and literary culture is exactly what’s missing — and exactly what’s needed.
Sigh. And Blood Meridian is a celebration of the wild west. Did AI write this slop?
That's some serious book review there!
As someone currently writing a counter to the Techno-Optimist Manifesto — a document that, tellingly, has been assigned reading in some tech circles — and as someone who has taught difficult books for almost two decades, I’ve spent considerable time thinking about what happens when literature gets conscripted into ideological service. My students and I have debated Infinite Jest over the years, and what strikes me every time is how differently each generation of students reads it — one cohort finds the addiction plotlines central, another gravitates toward the tennis academy as a meditation on discipline and failure, another reads the whole novel as a prolonged joke about sincerity. That is the beauty of great literature: it refuses to settle into a single usable meaning, and it punishes readers who need it to.
Your reading, I have to say, reminds me of what Gilles Deleuze has been reputed to say — that “a theory is exactly like a box of tools, it must be useful, it must function.” Tech culture loves this framing. But Deleuze meant something far more destabilizing than a founder’s reading list: the toolbox was supposed to dismantle fixed identities and challenge the sovereignty of the subject, not confirm it. When I read this essay, I found myself wondering, with genuine curiosity rather than hostility: did we read the same book?
Because the Infinite Jest I know doesn’t resolve into a founder’s handbook. It resists that. And I say this as an invitation to dialogue, not a dismissal — because this kind of conversation between tech culture and literary culture is exactly what’s missing right now.
You write that “optimism requires seriousness, and seriousness looks painfully ridiculous, in the moments where it counts.” I find this genuinely interesting as a thesis. But what does seriousness actually mean here? The essay never defines it beyond external focus and commitment to something greater than oneself. By that criterion, the Québécois separatists in IJ — also externally focused, also committed to something greater than themselves, also willing to suffer and look ridiculous — qualify as serious. The argument is tautological: serious people are the ones we already admire for being serious, and the admiration does the work the definition should be doing. What limiting principle distinguishes worthy seriousness from destructive seriousness, and without one, how does the thesis hold?
You invoke the halfway house residents as evidence that suffering produces “the pure gravitas of their everyday heroism.” But DFW spends hundreds of pages showing that suffering is not reliably ennobling — that it destroys people, that Gately’s heroism is fragile and hard-won and not transferable as metaphor. When you map his trajectory onto founder resilience, you’ve replaced DFW’s actual argument with a business-week parable. What in the novel, specifically, licenses that equivalence?
The looksmaxxing parallel is where the essay most reveals its assumptions. You frame it as “a ridiculous goal, but it’s taken very seriously” — structurally analogous to IJ’s use of the grotesque. But looksmaxxing culture is saturated with body dysmorphia and self-harm. When that gets folded into a celebration of productive suffering, you’re not illuminating the novel — you’re aestheticizing psychological damage. How do you distinguish between suffering that builds and suffering that destroys, and does IJ actually offer that distinction, or does it deliberately refuse it?
Finally: the Techno-Optimist Manifesto — the ideological home this essay is written from — explicitly positions the humanities as obstacles to progress. IJ is, among many other things, a sustained critique of a culture that cannot tolerate discomfort except when repackaged as self-optimization. Recruiting DFW as a prophet of founder resilience takes his diagnosis and calls it a prescription. Do you think DFW would recognize himself in this reading?
I’m asking these as invitations, not attacks. This kind of dialogue between tech culture and literary culture is exactly what’s missing — and exactly what’s needed.
I knew this was Danco by just seeing the title
https://g.co/gemini/share/eba79ca75b59
I see what you did there with all the footnotes...
I suppose it’s time to take a look at this book everyone is talking about. 😬