Hal on the TV-ad genealogy and InterLace's rise
the psychic matrix where viewers had been conditioned […] to associate the Freedom to Choose and the Right to Be Entertained with all that was U.S. and true.
Context
The genealogy of the Entertainment's market begins with a slogan that fuses American freedom to the act of being entertained. The cable kabal attacks the networks "right at the ideological root," teaching viewers that choice and entertainment are the same sacred thing — and Hal's own footnote catches the recursion: viewers were "conditioned, rather deliciously, by the Big Four Networks and their advertisers themselves." This is the market laying the exact track Marathe will indict on the rock in the desert: a culture that has been sold the equation Freedom-to-Choose = Right-to-Be-Entertained has no defense left when someone offers it the most entertaining thing possible, because refusing it would feel like refusing freedom itself. The Entertainment's lethality is pre-purchased here, in an ad campaign, decades before the cartridge exists.