Pages 410–418

Interdependence Day evening — Mario's movie · first-time reader guide · all scenes

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

The second half of Hal's gala reverie (the first ran pp. 395–98): four cannolis and four cannabis occasions into the day, still stomach-sick over sitting through the Eschaton wreck, Hal turns his mind away from the too-Himself-ish film and recaps his own seventh-grade term paper — a history of how U.S. broadcast television and the ad industry died and got replaced by InterLace's rent-what-you-want cartridge system. Eight pages of media history at glacial-thirteen-year-old remove; it explains the machinery every earlier scene has been quietly running on.

Terms, in order of appearance

A.C.D.C. (p. 412) — the cable industry's trade association; the rock-band echo comes free.
Malone / Turner (p. 411) — real cable magnates: TCI's John Malone, TBS's Ted Turner.
Nunhagen Aspirin (p. 412) — the fatal silent ads of cranio-facial-pain paintings; the same brand as the ad on the idling Ford at Eschaton (p. 333).
Ch. 11 (p. 415) — the U.S. bankruptcy-code chapter; Fox's fate.
Icarian (p. 415) — like Icarus: destroyed by flying too high.
Killer-App (p. 415) — real tech idiom: the application that sells the whole platform; Lace-Forché's crown.
Huizenga (p. 415) — Wayne Huizenga, the real video-rental-empire magnate; hence the joke of his fearing her.
Tobin Bridge (p. 415) — real Boston bridge, notorious for jumpers; Veals's partner's half-gainer.
Baby Bells (p. 417) — real: the regional phone companies split off from AT&T.
Teleputer / TP (p. 417) — christened here; the gadget the book's people have been using since p. 33.

After you read: three things

1. The history is structured like an addiction. Ads that work by creating "an anxiety relievable by purchase" (p. 414), escalating in potency — paintings, liposuction footage, tongue-scrapers — until the NoCoat campaign works "way more well than wisely" and wakes numbed viewers to "the power and agency their thumbs actually afforded them" (p. 413). And when the cable-less millions lose their entertainment entirely, the withdrawal year tops the charts in domestic crime and outright suicide (p. 415).

2. You've heard the endpoint argued on a mountainside. InterLace's winning copy calls 504 channels "the invitation to choose which of 504 visual spoon-feedings you'd sit there and open wide for" (p. 416); Marathe's indictment on p. 318 was of a people who'd die to be "fed this death of pleasure with spoons." Seller and enemy share one image — and the system's end-state is stated flat: "Personal pleasure and gross revenue looked at last to lie along the same demand curve" (p. 417). A distribution grid optimized purely for pleasure is now fully built; you know what's loose in it.

3. The frame is a boy keeping ledgers. "Having smoked cannabis on four separate occasions—twice w/ others—on this continental day of rest" (p. 410) is Hal's own accounting voice, and the whole reverie exists because the film on screen is "reminiscent enough of the late Himself" to be unbearable head-on. Note too endnote 161: the term paper's companion piece is Hal's essay on the catatonic "hero of non-action" — the one you read excerpts of back on pp. 140–42.

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