The samizdat emergency — the cartridge surfaces across the U.S.; O.U.S. names it

pivotal · ~two summers before YDAU, escalating to Nov YDAU

• When: the cartridge "at first seemed to be just popping haphazardly up in random locales" starting ~two summers before YDAU (when D.E.A. and the Academy of D.A.S. first came to O.U.S.); the naming and the Boston coordination are early-to-mid Nov YDAU
• What: An "unwatchable underground Entertainment-cartridge" begins appearing in Berkeley NCA, New Iberia LA, Tempe AZ, and elsewhere — a film such that "whoever saw it wanted nothing else ever in life but to see it again." It leaves a spreading wake of the pithed: in Berkeley, seventeen police, paramedics, and teleputer-technicians lost before someone kills the home's power; two-thirds of an ASU film-festival audience gone; three Academy of D.A.S. members mailed unlabelled copies. C.D.C. and the entertainment pros refuse controlled-viewing tests; a Famous Crooner has to be restrained from a "personal review." Tine's staff sifts dozens of candidate names and settles on the intelligence-community term: "the samizdat." This is the emergency the whole thread answers to.