Marathe and Steeply: choose your temple (pp. 105–106)
He stared out at the dusk-shadow they were now inside, and as well the increasingly complicated twinkle of the U.S.A. city Tucson, seeming slackly transfixed, Steeply, in the way vistas too large for the eye to contain transfix persons in a kind of torpid spectation.
Context
"Torpid spectation" is the phrase that generalizes the whole theme past any screen. Steeply isn't watching a cartridge; he's just looking at a city's lights, a vista too big to hold, and the sight slackens and transfixes him exactly the way the Entertainment transfixes its victims. The book is telling you that the lethal cartridge isn't an alien intrusion — it's the sharpened form of an ordinary human susceptibility, the tendency to go slack and absorbed before anything large and glittering enough. Spectation is the default state the culture drifts into on its own; the samizdat just supplies a stimulus engineered to hold the slackness open forever.