Hal watches Accomplice!, the blizzard coverage (pp. 947–948)

The blizzard becomes pure spectation — weather as content, the storm consumed on a dozen simultaneous tracks. Hal channel-surfs a saturation of coverage in which the actual event has dissolved into spectacle: people filmed floundering and doing "spectacular pratfalls," a reporter vanishing into a sinkhole with only his mic-hand protruding, a snowmobiler plunging into a drift while the camera lingers on the spot where "nothing emerged," and one track returning again and again to a man "endlessly trying to brush off a windshield that immediately whitened," his flat glazed face treated as "an important visual image." The weather isn't information here; it's programming, the same event refracted into as many watchable angles as the market will bear, the audience settled in to watch its own region flounder. Spectation-as-weather is the era's default — even the sky is content, even catastrophe is a track you can select for focus.