The culture the tech made — total home spectation and the spect-op hunger

pivotal · YDAU

• When: YDAU, framed by the mid-November Public Gardens pond-draining (scene 121)
• What: The dissemination order's social endpoint, inventoried: half of metro Bostonians now work at home via digital link; 50% of public education is disseminated as accredited pulses absorbed "at home on couches"; upwards of 60 million North Americans do Tawni Kondo's spontaneously disseminated aerobics daily; and "94% of all O.N.A.N.ite paid entertainment now absorbed at home" — "an entertainment-market of sofas and eyes." The result is "a floating no-space world of personal spectation" under Gentle and Lace-Forché, whose flip side is a compensatory hunger to stand live witness — the sub-rosa schedule of "spect-ops," Gapers' Blocks, street-musician pecking-orders, crowds "held tight by an almost seemingly nucleic force." The technology that atomized the audience into private teleputered watchers manufactures its own opposite: crowds forming faster than they can be policed. (The Public Gardens pond-draining that frames this is also the A.F.R.'s snatch of the WYYY engineer — See the A.F.R. and Samizdat threads; held here to the spectation-culture altitude.)