Gately, the wraith, and the figurants (pp. 836–837)
the complete unfiguranted egalitarian aural realism was why party-line entertainment-critics always complained that the wraith’s entertainments’ public-area scenes were always incredibly dull and self-conscious and irritating, that they could never hear the really meaningful central narrative conversations for all the unfiltered babble of the peripheral crowd, which they assumed the babble(/babel) was some self-conscious viewer-hostile heavy-art directorial pose, instead of radical realism.
Context
Reception history from the dead auteur's side: the critics (heard throughout the theme — n.024's capsule reviews, Notkin's anti-confluential dismissal in 159) mistook the ethics for a "viewer-hostile heavy-art directorial pose". Their complaint is itself a figurant-complaint — they wanted the "really meaningful central narrative conversations" foregrounded and the periphery filtered, i.e. they wanted the triage the wraith refused to perform. The wraith's own name for the method — "radical realism" — lands exactly as the plan's one-liner has it; the babble(/babel) parenthetical does the theory in one keystroke.