the institution engineered against passive reception

E.T.A. issues phone consoles and viewers but deliberately bars the cards for Spontaneous Disseminations and games, engineering its channels to prevent "stuporous passivity" — a whole institution designed around the difference between active contact and one-way reception. And the concession that let the kids have viewers at all was extracted by Troeltsch making a pest of himself "speaking into his fist," broadcasting a fake report to no one, the compulsion-to-transmit again needing neither audience nor working equipment.