And this was around the same time that The Chainsmokers had their first hit with “#SELFIE”, which rose to #1 on the Billboard Dance Club chart (and which will always be a staple of my senior year of college). I developed this thesis not long after “selfie” was named the 2013 Word of the Year by the Oxford Dictionary. Basically, it emphasized any product that improves how you look in a selfie. When I first worked in investing, I had a thesis that I called the “above the neck” thesis. Written at the inception of the internet (and 11 years before the first iPhone), Infinite Jest foreshadows a quarter-century of consumer technology colliding with human behavior. These masks airbrush wrinkles, whiten teeth, and erase eye bags.Įventually, people who use the digital masks become so vain and so obsessed with looking flawless that they refuse to interact with people in real life, sans mask.

In Wallace’s America, the rise of a “video phone” makes users so self-conscious about their appearance that they turn to digital masks to look perfect on screen. In his 1996 novel Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace foretold a dystopian, technology-infused America that looks eerily like our country today.

Facetune meme