It is also worth noting that Equal Rites was published 1-2 years after this speech. Was Prachett trying to gauge the reaction to his satire by explicitly stating it?
I doubt he was thinking in those terms. More likely this was a concept that he'd already started to think of, and so the things he wrote about concerned things of that nature.
It's like how programmers designing registration systems become obsessed with talking about registration forms and CAPTCHAs. It's just where their minds dwell as they work.
