the AFR snatches the WYYY engineer
But so very much private watching of customized screens behind drawn curtains in the dreamy familiarity of home. A floating no-space world of personal spectation. Whole new millennial era, under Gentle and Lace-Forché. Total freedom, privacy, choice.
Context
Here the essay states the paradox that the rest of the scene will unfold. Total freedom, privacy, and choice deliver a "floating no-space world of personal spectation" — and the very completeness of that private freedom is what has hollowed people out. Each of the three gifts is real and each is a subtraction: freedom from schedule, privacy from company, choice from the comfort of the inflicted. The line reads as utopian ad-copy and lands as a diagnosis, the "no-space" doing the quiet work — spectation so total and so customized that the watcher is nowhere, floating, unbounded and therefore starving for something the drawn curtains can't supply.