the AFR snatches the WYYY engineer — "Dr. James O. Incandenza, filmmaker and…"

The Entertainment's maker was himself its ideal consumer. The man who built the cartridge that turns viewers into pure passive eyes "never once missed" the annual pond-draining, was "almost a scopophile about spect-ops and crowds" — a compulsive watcher of watchers, drawn to the very appetite his art would eventually weaponize. It complicates the artifact's purpose from the spectation side: the lethal film comes out of a sensibility that loved to stand in the raw November wind and study a crowd studying nothing, that understood the era's hunger to witness because he shared it.