Hal on the TV-ad genealogy and InterLace's rise — "what if the viewer could become…"

The Declaration of Independence rewritten as a home-entertainment ad, and the swap is the whole point. InterLace's winning appeal promises the viewer total sovereignty — be your own programming director, choose 100% of what's on — and it names the payoff "the very entertainment-happiness it was her/his right to pursue." The pursuit of happiness has been quietly resolved into the pursuit of entertainment-happiness, the founding American right collapsed into the right to watch exactly what you want. And the market that grants this wish is built so that "personal pleasure and gross revenue" finally "lie along the same demand curve" — the more pleasing the cartridge, the more it sells, so there's "no more reluctance to make a program too entertaining." The economic engine now has a single incentive: maximize pleasingness without limit. That vector has a terminus, and the terminus is a cartridge no one can stop watching.