the AFR finds and tests the Entertainment (pp. 726–727)
each subsequent reviewing of the Entertainment now would have the price of one digit from the Subject’s extremities. […] There could be no index of diminishing satisfaction as in the econometrics of normal U.S.A. commodities. For the samizdat Entertainment’s allure to be macro-politically lethal, the ninth digit of extremities had to come off as quickly and willingly as the second.
Context
This is fatal pleasure reduced to a spreadsheet, and it's the theme's most chilling formalization. Broullîme prices each re-viewing at one of the Subject's own fingers and hands him the saw, building a matrix of replays against decision-time to prove the one thing that makes the cartridge a weapon: that the desire is incapable of satiation, that unlike every normal commodity there is "no index of diminishing satisfaction." A pleasure you tire of is safe; this one has to be verified as the pleasure the ninth finger buys as eagerly as the second. The horror isn't the saw, it's the econometrics — the Entertainment's whole lethal genius stated as the absence of a downward-sloping demand curve.