Hal in the Headmaster's waiting room

Tavis's whole first career was killed by the shift from communal spectacle to solitary home-viewing, and the shift is the theme in an economic footnote. He'd been an engineer of vast live-spectator venues — stadia, superdomes, the crowd-bearing SkyDome — until "more and more events were designed for cartridge-dissemination and private home-viewing" and the market for gathered-crowd architecture collapsed. It's the same cultural movement that produced the Entertainment: away from the public, physical, shared audience and toward the isolated viewer alone with a screen. The SkyDome scandal Tavis carries (spectators, "many of them innocent children," able to see into the hotel-sex windows, the scoreboard broadcasting the coital images) is the old communal spectation at its most grotesquely literal — a crowd watching what it shouldn't, the spectacle turned on itself — and its obsolescence, replaced by everyone watching alone at home, is exactly the terrain the samizdat will colonize. The man who built rooms for crowds is now redundant in a culture that watches by itself.