The paradox in Gilder’s rosy forecast is the same as in all forms of artificial enhancement. The more enhancing the mediation – see for instance binoculars, amplifiers, graphic equalizers, or “high-resolution pictures hardly distinguishable from real-life images” – the more direct, vivid, and real the experience seems, which is to say the more direct, vivid, and real the fantasy and dependence are.
An exponential surge in the mass of televisual images, and a commensurate increase in my ability to cut, paste, magnify, and combine them to suit my own fancy, can do nothing but render my interactive TC a more powerful enhancer and enabler of fantasy, my attraction to that fantasy stronger, the real experiences of which my TC offers more engaging and controllable
simulacra paler and more frustrating to deal with, and me just a whole lot more dependent on my furniture.
[David Foster Wallace, E unibus pluram (1993), p. 39]