the AFR snatches the WYYY engineer — "And (get this) 94% of all…"

The tech-catalog opening resolves into the theme's demographic snapshot: a civilization that has reduced itself, for the purpose of entertainment, to "sofas and eyes." Ninety-four percent of paid entertainment now consumed alone at home, public education absorbed "on couches," sixty million people genuflecting to a disseminated exercise program in separate rooms — the whole apparatus described as furniture and receptors, the body dissolved to the two organs that recline and receive. It's the census of the audience the Entertainment is built to kill: already voluntarily supine, already private, already trained to take its life in through a screen.