Pages 144–151

3 November Y.D.A.U. — phone calls · first-time reader guide · all scenes

When you've finished these pages: three things worth a second look, at the bottom.

No characters, no location: this is a free-standing essay, dropped between scenes, on why video-calling conquered the culture for sixteen months and then "collapsed like a kicked tent." The title is the whole first page — one all-caps sentence that keeps interrupting itself; that breathlessness is the era's tech-euphoria being performed, on purpose, and the title is also literally the question the essay then answers in three numbered parts. Nothing here needs tracking; you can read it as the self-contained comic set piece it is. It's also the fullest picture yet of the gadget world the attaché's cartridges came from.

Terms, in order of appearance

InterLace / teleputer (TP) (p. 144) — the era's merged TV-computer-phone console; the attaché's cartridge setup runs on it (pp. 33–34).
homuncular icon (p. 145) — from homunculus, little man: the tap-dancing on-screen agent with straw boater and cane.
Bell-era (p. 145) — real: the old Bell/AT&T telephone monopoly; shorthand for plain voice-only calling.
B.S. 1960 (p. 147) — Before Subsidization: an ordinary, unsponsored calendar year — the real 1960.
Nixon–Kennedy debates (p. 147) — real 1960 televised debates; Nixon's sweaty, shadowed on-camera face famously read as untrustworthy.
Freddie-Mac fund (p. 145) — Freddie Mac is a real U.S. mortgage-finance corporation; here a pension fund nearly dies of videophone stock.
Ludditism (p. 150) — real: the machine-smashing English weavers of the 1810s; shorthand for refusing technology.
panagoraphobia (p. 151) — coinage: pan- + agoraphobia; a whole population newly reluctant to leave home.

After you read: three things

1. The delusion that voice-only protected (pp. 145–146). The essay's engine is one insight: an audio call let you believe you had the other person's complete attention while paying almost none yourself — doodling, blemish-scanning, stirring things on the stove. The "bilateral illusion of unilateral attention" was "almost infantilely gratifying… it would be like being able both to lie and to trust other people at the same time." Video killed it by showing you the truth. Read that stretch slowly; everything else follows from it.

2. Watch the fixes run away from the problem (pp. 146–150). Horrified by their own phone-faces, consumers buy composite-photo enhancement, then wearable masks on console hooks, then masks better-looking than their owners, then full-body cutouts, then the Transmittable Tableau — a doctored photo of a fitter stranger, clipped over the camera like a lens-cap. Behind which callers are once again unseen, doodling, unwatched: they have repurchased, at video-fiber prices, exactly the blind old phone call they started with. The curve closes.

3. Two words in it point back to p. 64. The essay calls that closed curve "classically annular" — ring-shaped — a word you've met once, in "cold annular fusion," in the dossier on Enfield Tennis Academy's founder; and that same dossier's patent list included "videophonic Tableaux" among the items that made James O. Incandenza's fortune. The essay names no inventor. The overlap is yours to notice.

Written only from this scene and earlier pages. Safe to read before you start.