E Unibus Infinitum
David Foster Wallace's E Unibus Pluram: was published in 1993, but is more relevant than ever today.
October 10, 2025•5 min read
mediaculture
Introduction
Over the last couple of months I've been reading through some of David Foster Wallace's non-fiction collections, which has been something of a departure for me. I hadn't really dabbled in non-fiction literature for pleasure before, but there's something about the way Wallace writes that just clicked. Essays like Consider the Lobster and The View from Mrs. Thompson's House drew me in—his writing and perspective on different topics are often refreshing and really engaging in ways I hadn't expected from non-fiction.
As I made my way through A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, I came across E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction, Wallace's examination of how television was reshaping American consciousness and fiction writing. In it, Wallace explores how TV creates cycles of passive consumption, transforms viewers into self-aware performers of their own lives, and traps genuine communication behind layers of ironic detachment. He argues that television had fundamentally altered how Americans relate to entertainment, to each other, and to themselves, creating a culture where everything becomes performance and sincerity becomes nearly impossible.
Reading through his analysis, I kept having moments of recognition. The psychological patterns he identified so early on in TV culture—the addiction mechanisms, the performative self-awareness, the tyranny of irony— felt strikingly familiar to what we're experiencing with social media today.
Mind you, this essay was written in 1993—years before social media existed, when the internet was still a curiosity for academics and tech enthusiasts, and most people had never heard the word "website." The fact that every concern Wallace raises about television culture would eventually become the defining characteristics of our digital age feels uncanny.
Malignantly Addictive
DFW describes television, even in its early form, as something more insidious than simple entertainment. He calls it "malignantly addictive," and his definition is really precise:
But something is malignantly addictive if (1) it causes real problems for the addict, and (2) it offers itself as relief from the very problems it causes. A malignant addiction is also distinguished for spreading the problems of the addiction out and in in interference patterns, creating difficulties for relationships, communities, and the addict's very sense of self and soul.
Wallace maps out this cycle in detail. You feel lonely, so you watch TV for companionship. But the more time you spend with these "2D images," the less time you spend building real relationships. The less real human contact you have, the more alienated you feel. The more alienated you feel, the more you retreat to the comfort of your screen. And there you have it.
Wallace saw this trap being built in 1993. He watched "Joe Briefcase" come home from work and sink into six hours of television to "unwind," not realizing he was winding himself tighter in a different way. TV whispered promises that "somewhere, life is quicker, denser, more interesting, more ... well, lively than contemporary life as Joe Briefcase knows and moves through it."
But television's real genius wasn't just the promise of escape, it was how effortless that escape felt. Wallace identified TV's core appeal: it "engages without demanding." You could "rest while undergoing stimulation. Receive without giving." No participation required, no energy expended, just passive absorption.
Television's biggest minute-by-minute appeal is that it engages without demanding. One can rest while undergoing stimulation. Receive without giving. In this respect, television resembles other things mothers call "special treats" – e.g., candy, or liquor – treats that are basically fine and fun in small amounts but bad for us in large amounts and really bad for us if consumed as any kind of nutritive staple.
Social media perfected this formula. Infinite content that feels engaging while requiring nothing from you but attention, and now it's always in your pocket instead of waiting for you at home.
The cruel irony Wallace identified: "what average Joe Briefcase does more than almost anything else in contemporary life is watch television, an activity which anyone with an average brain can see does not make for a very dense and lively life."
I don't have to spell it out for you. "Watch television" might as well be social media, games, or your favorite flavor of digital escapism.
We know something's wrong. Wallace notes that Joe Briefcase knows "there's some kind of psychic three-card monte going on." We make jokes about "doomscrolling" and "phone addiction." We post memes about needing to touch grass. We're aware we're being manipulated, but we keep playing the game anyway.
The most unsettling part of Wallace's analysis is how the medium trains us to need more of what's making us sick. Television "somehow trains or conditions our viewership" until we expect and even crave "trite, hackneyed, numbing" content. Social media has weaponized this conditioning with algorithmic precision. The apps literally study our behavior to deliver more effective doses of the thing that's slowly hollowing us out.
The cycle feeds itself. We feel bad, so we reach for our phones. The phone makes us feel worse in subtle ways we barely register, so we reach for it again. Each time, the platform gets better at keeping us there, and we get worse at being anywhere else.
Watching Ourselves Watching
Wallace identified something unsettling about our relationship with TV as the time we spend watching increases. "The practice of watching is expansive. Exponential," he wrote. "We spend enough time watching, pretty soon we start watching ourselves watching. We start to 'feel' ourselves feeling, yearn to experience 'experiences.'"
He saw that six hours of daily TV watching was fundamentally changing how people related to their own lives. Instead of just living, people were becoming "spectatorial, self-conscious"—experiencing their own existence as if they were both the actor and the audience.
Wallace described this as America shifting from "a nation of do-ers and be-ers" to "an atomized mass of self-conscious watchers and appearers." Even in 1993, he could see people stepping outside their own experiences to observe themselves having them. That recursive loop (watching yourself watch, feeling yourself feel) was already making authentic, immediate experience harder to access.
When you spend six hours a day watching other people live, you start to see your own life from the outside, as if you're both the actor and the audience of your own experience.
For 360 minutes per diem, we receive unconscious reinforcement of the deep thesis that the most significant feature of truly alive persons is watchableness, and that genuine human worth is not just identical with but rooted in the phenomenon of watching.
Now imagine what happens when those six hours turn into constant interaction with platforms designed to make you both performer and spectator simultaneously.
Social media took Wallace's insight and made it interactive. The same psychological mechanism he identified became the foundation of how these platforms work. Stories aren't just sharing; they're performing spontaneity. Taking photos at dinner involves a quick mental calculation about whether this version of your life is worth sharing. Going to concerts means experiencing them through your phone screen, creating this weird double consciousness where you're there but also already thinking about how it looks from the outside.
Wallace's "Joe Briefcase" was stuck in the audience, watching others perform on TV. Social media democratized performance. Anyone can go viral, anyone can build an audience, anyone can become internet famous. This amplifies the performer/audience dynamic Wallace identified because we're all potentially both. You're scrolling through others' performances while simultaneously crafting your own, always aware that your audience is also performing for their audiences.
From Demigods to Parasocial Mortals
The people we espy on TV offer us familiarity, community. Intimate friendship. But we split what we see. The characters are our 'close friends'; but the performers are beyond strangers, they're images, demigods, and they move in a different sphere, hang out with and marry only each other, seem even as actors accessible to Audience only via the mediation of tabloids, talk show, EM signal.
When DFW described actors as demigods and characters as close friends, he was diagnosing a profound cultural sickness that most people hadn't even noticed yet. Americans were already choosing the easy intimacy of one-way relationships over the messy work of building real community.
People form genuine emotional bonds with fictional characters while worshipping the real humans who played them from a safe distance. You can feel close to Ross from Friends, but David Schwimmer exists in an untouchable sphere, accessible only through carefully managed media appearances. The fictional person feels approachable; the real person becomes an object of worship rather than potential human connection.
But when the character became the actors themselves, this protective hierarchy collapsed. YouTubers, TikTokers, podcast hosts, influencers—they became what actors used to be, except their character is themselves. The careful separation between character and performer (which at least provided some psychological distance) disappeared into a single, seemingly authentic persona.
The performer is the character now (or at least aims to look like they are). When you follow Emma Chamberlain or watch MrBeast, you're not falling for fictional characters they portray. You're falling for what appears to be their actual personalities, their real lives, their authentic selves. The emotional bond feels more legitimate because you believe you're connecting with the actual person, not a role they're playing.
This creates a more insidious form of the intimacy Wallace identified. Instead of Ross being your "close friend" while David Schwimmer remained an untouchable deity, your favorite YouTuber presents as both the relatable friendand the real person behind that friendship. The protective split is gone.
Social media amplified this by creating multiple layers of apparent intimacy. You don't just get one weekly TV appearance; you get their polished YouTube videos, their random 2am thoughts on Twitter, their Instagram Stories in candid moments, their unfiltered reactions during Live streams. Each layer makes you feel like you're peeling back another protective barrier, getting closer to who they "really" are. This graduated intimacy makes the relationship feel earned and authentic—you're not just seeing their public face, you're witnessing their 'private' moments too.
The merge happened right as social media was making people more isolated. Wallace had already identified how TV watching created loneliness cycles; the more you retreat into screen relationships, the harder real-world connections become. Social media accelerated this isolation while simultaneously offering more compelling pseudo-relationships to fill the void. The creators you follow feel more real, more accessible, more like actual friends than any TV character ever could.
Parasocial relationships are still one-sided interactions with strangers who don't know you exist (the same one-way intimacy Wallace warned about), but now they pack much more psychological punch. The trap he identified is still there, just much stronger.
Irony
Irony tyrannizes us. The reason why our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down.
Wallace identified one of the most brilliant cultural cons in American history. Television managed to steal the very weapon being used against it and turn it into armor.
Here's what happened: In the 1960s and 70s, irony was the tool of choice for artists, writers, and cultural critics who wanted to expose the hypocrisy of mainstream American values. Wallace describes how television presented this wholesome, sanitized version of American life while the country was dealing with Vietnam, Watergate, racial violence, and massive social upheaval. Ironic art and literature held up a funhouse mirror to this contradiction, saying essentially: "Look how absurd these pretenses are."
TV figured this out and adapted. Instead of being destroyed by ironic critique, television absorbed it. Shows started winking at their own absurdity. Commercials began making fun of commercials. David Letterman would mock the very medium he was working in, but somehow this made him more of a TV star, not less. Wallace saw how the medium that had once been criticized for its fake sincerity now dominated through fake cynicism.
It turned irony from a tool of exposure into a tool of protection and trained viewers to adopt the same defensive stance. If everything on TV was ironic, and you watched TV for six hours a day, you learned that ironic detachment was the appropriate way to engage with culture. Being sincere made you look naive. Taking things seriously made you look like you didn't get the joke.
What do you do when postmodern rebellion becomes a pop-cultural institution? For this of course is the second clue to why avant-garde irony and rebellion have become dilute and malign. They have been absorbed, emptied, and redeployed by the very televisual establishment they had originally set themselves athwart.
Television's conquest was complete by the 1990s. The internet took this foundation and ran with it, spawning early forums that birthed a new language of memes and in-jokes, each layer of reference building on the last. Social media accelerated this evolution, compressing years of subcultural development into viral cycles measured in days. The defensive irony Wallace observed on TV became something else entirely: post-irony.
Traditional irony at least maintained a clear distinction—you knew someone was being ironic, even if you couldn't pin down their actual beliefs. Post-irony deliberately muddles sincere and ironic intent. It's irony that's aware of its own ironic limitations, so it cycles through multiple layers of self-reference until meaning becomes genuinely ambiguous.
Consider the "sigma male" phenomenon that popped up over the last few years. What started as clear satire of toxic masculinity became genuinely adopted by some, ironically celebrated by others, and simultaneously mocked and embraced by still others; often by the same person in the same post. Due to Poe's Law, what began as obvious parody gradually became indistinguishable from sincere belief. At some point the joke stopped being a joke, but nobody can pinpoint exactly when that happened. The ironic performance became genuine ideology so gradually that even the people participating couldn't tell you when they stopped pretending.
The result is what is often called "irony poisoning": people lose the ability to distinguish their own genuine beliefs from ironic performance. Spend enough time pretending to believe something "as a joke," and the line between performance and reality dissolves. Entire online communities have watched their ironic roleplay become unironic ideology, unable to identify when or how the shift occurred.
Post-irony has also become a strategic tool for testing controversial ideas while maintaining plausible deniability. You float a genuine belief wrapped in enough ironic packaging that you can retreat to "it was just a joke" if people react negatively, but claim you meant it seriously if people respond positively. It's Schrödinger's joke, simultaneously serious and ironic until the social reaction collapses it into one interpretation or the other.
All U.S. irony is based on an implicit 'I don't really mean what I say.' So what does irony as a cultural norm mean to say? That it's impossible to mean what you say? That maybe it's too bad it's impossible, but wake up and smell the coffee already? Most likely, I think, today's irony ends up saying: 'How very banal to ask what I mean.'
This creates exactly the scenario Wallace warned about, but worse. Not only can you not pin down what anyone stands for, but even the person speaking might not know if they mean what they're saying. The "ability to interdict the question without attending to its content" that Wallace identified as tyranny has become total. You can make controversial statements and shut down questions about them simultaneously, because the ambiguity is built into the communication itself.
Anyone with the heretical gall to ask an ironist what he actually stands for ends up looking like a hysteric or a prig.
Wallace saw irony as a cultural problem in 1993. He had no idea it would evolve into a communication system where we're all trapped behind screens, performing sincerity through filters of irony so thick that even we can't find our way back to what we actually believe. Every conversation becomes a hall of mirrors where the mirrors themselves are generating new reflections, and the original image (what anyone actually thinks or feels) has long since disappeared.
Anti Rebels
The parallels between "E Unibus Pluram" and today's digital culture are so precise not because Wallace was some kind of prophet, but because he was diagnosing something deeper than television itself. He wasn't just critiquing what TV was doing to American culture, he was identifying how media shapes human psychology and social connection.
The mechanisms he spotted in 1990s television culture—consumption addiction cycles, the collapse of experience into performance, the substitution of real relationships, the weaponization of irony as cultural armor—weren't unique to television. They were the foundational patterns of how commercial media relates to human consciousness. Television just happened to be the delivery system available at the time.
These same psychological vulnerabilities were refined and intensified when we moved from TV to smartphones. The patterns Wallace identified didn't disappear, they multiplied.
The next real literary 'rebels' in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction.
Wallace saw this cultural shift happening and offered a solution: "anti-rebels" willing to risk looking uncool by being genuinely sincere. People who would "dare somehow to back away from ironic watching" and have "the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles."
But here's the thing Wallace couldn't have fully anticipated: even identifying as an "anti-rebel" risks becoming its own kind of pose. The moment authenticity becomes a conscious aesthetic, it's already been captured by the performative culture it's trying to escape.
You can see this happening everywhere. Digital minimalism becomes content about digital minimalism. "Unfiltered" authenticity becomes a carefully curated brand. People perform their rejection of performance, make viral threads about why they're leaving Twitter, turn their phone detox into Instagram stories.
This is exactly the trap Wallace identified with irony: the culture absorbs its own critique and turns resistance into another form of consumption. The market will always find a way to monetize authenticity, even authentic rejection of the market.
The most successful resistance to performative culture would probably be completely invisible to performative culture. The people actually solving the problem wouldn't be the ones talking about solving it online. They'd be living offline, in spaces that don't generate data or engagement metrics or any evidence that anyone else could point to and say "see, that's how you do it."
But seeing the trap doesn't free you from it. I'm writing this on a computer, planning to post it instead of just keeping it in my drafts (even if posting it is just for myself). Even this analysis of performative culture becomes another performance. Wallace diagnosed the problem and offered a solution, but his solution gets absorbed by the same system it's meant to resist.
That might be the most striking thing about revisiting "E Unibus Pluram"—not just that Wallace predicted our digital culture, but that he understood the forces driving it were already pretty entrenched. He drew us a map of where we were heading, and we went there anyway.