the Madame Psychosis show (pp. 192–193)
She almost reminds the engineer of certain types in high school whom everyone adored because you sensed it made no difference to them whether you adored them.
Context
The adored broadcaster who is adored precisely because she's indifferent to being adored. The engineer can't say why Madame Psychosis compels him, then lands on it: she's like the high-school figures everyone worshipped because their worship meant nothing to the person receiving it. It's a sharp little law of the attention economy — that the surest way to command an audience is to appear not to want one, that indifference reads as authenticity and pulls devotion toward it. And it's loaded for this particular broadcaster, who is (though the scene withholds it) the veiled face destined to become the Entertainment's fatal star: her power over an audience is already legible here as the power of the one who doesn't need them, the object whose unavailability is exactly what makes it irresistible.