the Madame Psychosis show
The deep-water green of FM tuners all over the campus’s labs and dorms and barnacled clots of grad apartments align themselves slowly toward the spatter’s center, moving toward the dial’s right, a little creepily, like plants toward light they can’t even see. Ratings are minor-league by the pre-InterLace broadcast standards of yore, but they are rock-solid consistent. Audience demand for Madame Psychosis has been, from the very start, inelastic.
Context
The audience as heliotropic vegetation — spectation reduced to a tropism. The tuners across campus swivel toward the signal "like plants toward light they can't even see," an image that drains the audience of all agency: not people choosing a program but organisms bending helplessly toward a source. And the economic term seals it — demand for Madame Psychosis is "inelastic," meaning no price, no cost, no rival will move it; the wanting is fixed and involuntary. It's the same appetite the lethal cartridge will exploit, glimpsed here in its benign radio form: a hunger that pulls the listener toward the signal below the level of will, the way a plant can't decide not to grow toward light.