Hal on the TV-ad genealogy and InterLace's rise — "they awakened from their spectatorial slumbers…"
they awakened from their spectatorial slumbers literally millions of Network-devotees who’d hitherto been so numbed and pacified they usually hadn’t bothered to expend the thumb-muscle-energy required to zap or surf away from anything on the screen, awakened legions of these suddenly violently repelled and disturbed viewers to the power and agency their thumbs actually afforded them.
Context
The baseline state of the audience, revealed by the one thing that jolts it awake. What the excruciating Nunhagen ads accidentally expose is how deep the "spectatorial slumbers" ran — millions "so numbed and pacified" they wouldn't move a thumb to change what was in front of them, absorbing whatever the screen pumped out because clicking away cost more energy than enduring it. It takes a genuinely repellent image to wake them to the fact that their thumbs had "power and agency" at all. That's the era's true viewer: not choosing but defaulting, so pacified that agency has to be startled back into him by disgust. The Entertainment is the opposite lever — a thing so pleasing the numbed viewer will never want to lift the thumb, the spectatorial slumber made permanent.