Orin survey, the wheelchair man
‘I miss stuff so low-denominator I could watch and know in advance what people were going to say.’ ‘Emotions of mastery and control and superiority. And pleasure.’
Context
Orin's nostalgia list is a portrait of the passive spectator's lost paradise, and the surveyor's flat gloss names its engine. What Orin misses — commercials louder than the programs, "Order before midnight tonight," seeing the same syndicated things "over and over again," the pleasure of sneering at something he loved — is spectation with the effort drained out of it: watching that asks nothing and rewards the viewer with a cheap sensation of "mastery and control and superiority. And pleasure." The interviewer records it as a data point because that is the appetite the AFR is prospecting for, the pre-installed hunger for frictionless watching that the Entertainment will eventually saturate to death.