Scene 047: videophony rise fall

• p. 144-145: The all-caps title-question itself — a page-long sentence performing the era's tech-euphoria (the tap-dancing homuncular icon, the boater and cane) before asking why demand collapsed; by YDAU video is under 10% of calls.
• p. 145: The trivalent nutshell announced: stress, vanity, self-obliterating microeconomic logic.
• p. 145-146: (1) The voice-only delusion anatomized — the highway-hypnotic semi-attentive fugue (doodling, blemish-scans, stove-stirring) while never suspecting the other end of the same; "This bilateral illusion of unilateral attention was almost infantilely gratifying… it would be like being able both to lie and to trust other people at the same time."
• p. 146: Video kills it: the earnest overintense listener's expression now mandatory; catching your interfacee stripping a shoelace's gumlet and realizing your fantasy was deluded; "monstrously stressful."
• p. 146-147: (2) Vanity: answer-as-you-are informality dies; worse, the playback appearance-check — 60% of focus-group respondents calling their own faces "untrustworthy, unlikable, or hard to like," the Nixon comparison; Video-Physiognomic Dysphoria named.
• p. 147-148: High-Definition Masking: composite photography, then form-fitting polybutylene masks with Velcro straps, hanging wrinkled on the console's mask-hook; mistaken-identity snafus on family phones.
• p. 148: The skew: it's weirdly hard to evaluate your own looks, so consumers demand masks better-looking than themselves; Optimistically Misrepresentational Masking (OMM); leaving the house becomes scary because your real face now disappoints.
• p. 148-149: Full-body 2-D cutouts as cameras widen; cost pressure plus "horrific social pressure" to afford the best masked body-image; the Transmittable Tableau — a doctored still photo of someone resembling you "only in such limited respects as like race and limb-number" in a tastefully appointed room.
• p. 149-150: (3) The annular curve stated outright: advance → unforeseen disadvantage → entrepreneurial compensation → compensation undercuts the advance → consumer recidivism, curve-closure, shirt-loss; behind their Tableaux, callers were "once again stresslessly invisible… free—since once again unseen—to doodle, blemish-scan, manicure."
• p. 150-151: Voice-only's return as "retrograde transcendence of sci-fi-ish high-tech," a status-symbol of anti-vanity; late videophony users become tacky cultural symbols (leisure-suit equivalents); mask-hooks repurposed for hanging address diaries; the panagoraphobia stays and feeds home-shopping/-delivery markets.

Backward

• JOI held a patent on the videophonic Transmittable Tableaux (p. 64, scene 020 — Carlisle's catch): the auteur of the terminal Entertainment also patented the apparatus of telephonic disguise; and the same p. 64 dossier is where "annular" fusion enters — the essay's "classically annular" tech-curve and the energy economy share one source page.
• Panagoraphobia and home-delivery (p. 151) underwrite the attaché scenes' shut-in viewership and the broader spectation economy (scene 017's tech catalog; the Entertainment's lethal endpoint: total attention, nothing paid back — the perfected one-way call).
• The annular-curve economics rhyme with annular fusion itself (waste fueling the cycle that produces more waste, scenes 030 et al.) — same shape, different industry.
• The bilateral-illusion analysis is scene 041 dramatized in advance: Hal lying comfortably while never suspecting Orin of the same is exactly the gratification of "being able both to lie and to trust other people at the same time."

Forward

• Masks chosen over faces is the U.H.I.D. logic nationalized — Joelle's veil (introduced with the Union of the Hideously and Improbably Deformed) makes literal-personal what OMM made consumer-general; "aesthetic disappointment" at the unmasked face is her stated fear inverted.
• Explains the period texture everywhere: Hal and Orin's voice-only calls (scenes 006/041 — "Mmyellow"), Erdedy "using just audio" on his teleputer (p. 18, scene 004 — retroactively glossed by this essay), Madame Psychosis's radio intimacy (pp. 181+: voice without face as the last safe medium), and Orin's phone seductions.

• p. 146: "This bilateral illusion of unilateral attention… like being able both to lie and to trust other people at the same time." — this scene's keystone passage for communication-solipsism; the whole paragraph rewards reading (it begins on p. 145; the quote sentences sit on p. 146).
• p. 145: "the tumescent demand curve for 'videophony' suddenly collapsed like a kicked tent" — the title-question's own best phrase; the fad's whole shape in a simile.
• p. 147: "untrustworthy, unlikable, or hard to like… comparing their video-faces to that of Richard Nixon" — self-perception as horror; comic data-points.
• p. 147: "It wasn't just 'Anchorman's Bloat'… a shiny pallid indefiniteness that struck them as not just unflattering but somehow evasive, furtive, untrustworthy, unlikable." — the phone-face anatomized; source-grade language for the masks system.
• p. 148: "suffer… the same illusion-shattering aesthetic disappointment that, e.g., certain women who always wear makeup give people the first time they ever see them without makeup" — the OMM phobia in one figure; the exact fear Joelle's veil institutionalizes.
• p. 149: "resembled you the caller only in such limited respects as like race and limb-number" — the Tableau's total self-erasure.
• p. 149-150: "conforms neatly to this curve's classically annular shape" — annularity named in-text; cite for the theme's definition.
• p. 150-151: "a kind of retrograde transcendence of sci-fi-ish high-tech… a kind of status-symbol of anti-vanity" — irony's recapture of sincerity, in one clause.