The technical-interview craft — silence as method; the "M*A*S*H" confession

texture · 30 April - 1 May YDAU

• When: across the one desert night, 30 April - 1 May YDAU
• What: Steeply "made his early career with Unspecified Services conducting technical interviews," and on the mountainside he works Marathe with an interviewer's toolkit: pretend-preening to have the subject "elaborate himself more fully" (038), long emotionless looking-down as his "most effective interviewing tactic" (096), and above all silence as a defusing device. The long "MAS*H" anecdote — his father consumed to death by a broadcast sitcom, obsessively note-taking and writing letters to a fictional Major Burns — reads at once as a genuine confession and as an interviewing move; Steeply half-pictures the samizdat's Hank Hoyne in "the old man's old recliner, hunched and scribbling feverishly," using the private grief to bait Marathe toward the Entertainment's pull. The craft is the surveillance apparatus's human interface. See the Steeply timeline.