Genetically Modified Society

They teach us: “Be not as all!”, but they don’t let us be ourselves, they call: “Say what you think!”, but they forbid us to think, they assure us: “Everything’s in your hands!”, but they tie our hands. We are told that happiness can be found under a lid of the bottle of Coca-Cola, that life — is a pursuit of pleasures and money — a measure of all. We are brought up to be aggressive consumers, they are stamped on one curve created by inquiries of the market. They developed the whole “science to buy”, having made us accustomed to shopping from the cradle by means of children's marketing and we believe that a world — is a supermarket where it is possible to buy everything that is on sale and to sell everything that is bought.

But there are no winner in a race of consumption, all lost there. We became applications to our gadgets and hostages of own things, our dreams are similar to commercials and diary records — to the list of desirable purchases. Marketing services invent our desires and people’s hunters — marketing experts — know us better than we know ourselves. All of us are counted up by them, studied, weighed and found easy to get. They pack our dreams into colourful advertizing leaflets filled by hotels, resorts and parties, places which are necessary to visit, dishes which need to be tried and emotions which we are obliged to test. We forgot to talk about abstract things, discussing menu at lunch, other people’s cloths - on a walk, comfortableness of the hotel – during the travel. “A person returns from nothing to nothing, gloomy day of death suddenly destroys blossoming life and only empty name remains after a man”, - a voice of the unknown Roman who beat out those words on a stone reaches us down the ages. What will remain after us? Questionnaires of buyers? Inscriptions on T-shirts? Statuses in social networks?

Show business — is totalitarian sect on which gates is written: “Yourself abandon who enter here”. “Star” conveyor produces us idols, forcing to follow each their step, to live their lives instead of own. It is unimportant whether we listen to music, watch movies, read magazines — the main thing is that we stay informed about last gossips of show business. Big headings tell us about "star" adulteries, dirty wash hang out on billboards — and there is no law rescuing from prosecution of annoying "stars"! Dictatorship of luster kills not only souls: mad fans jump out from windows, teenagers phlebotomize, spoiled, crippled lives are innumerable. Unless it’s high time to establish monuments to victims of glamour fascism? Exposing private life on pages of mass media we are assigned to play the role of the domestics spying after the bars in a keyhole. We know about the Hollywood actors more than about neighbors and their life seems to us more interesting than own ones. We don't visit friend spending evenings in front of TV and they graciously open doors of their mansions, permitting to dream, to gossip for a while, to touch "beautiful" life from the other side of a screen, they do it to eat our secret worship and envy on mystical level. Becoming infected by life to a camera we travel, walk, dance, laugh, meet friends and make love so that to show photos on the Internet then. Adopting aping of "stars" we multiply false photo-smiles and virtualize life drawing it in Photoshop. Instead of catching an instant we kill it as we were inspired that the main thing is not to live, but to pose, not to be, but to seem.

The modern psychology borders on with psychiatry and advises of fashionable psychoanalysts remind notes from madhouse. They teach to communicate with those who are useful, to love the one who is favorable, to leave those who have had their days. They teach to behave in a family as at work, in love — as in the market, in the office — as in the war; not to concede, not to give in, hold the ground, not to hear, to see anything, to speak nothing. We are inspired that courses of acting are necessary not only to the actors, turning our life into a bad theater they teach to act with friends, darlings and even with oneself. Trying on thought-up images and models of behavior which suit us as “bootikin”, we turn into emotional stumps incapable to feel anything. We follow advises from journals sacredly believing that their authors know what are not known to us and we live according to ready recipes of happiness, wearing out second-hand destiny. We speak phrases from films, we joke using jokes of radio hosts, we wear cloth which fashion orders and we do not understand why we do what glossy gospel tell us to do and remain deeply unhappy.

We are afraid to stay on your own, we drive thoughts away as uninvited guests, we do not trust own opinion, we are sick with some special form of ego-phobia - fear of ourselves. It seems to us that, having rejected brands, music, films, horoscopes, fashionable books, restaurant menus, club parties, newspaper headings, avatars and nicknames — we will lose ourselves having remained naked and faceless. We believe that mask which society puts on us is our real face.

We are poisoned with masscult causing mass psychosis, with primitive music, with incoherent and scrappy SMS literature, painting reminding tests of Rorschach, we are stuffed with theater of marasmus and three-dimensional cinema with flat plot forcing to search for implication where there is no literal meaning. We are fed with fast-art hammering our heads with cheat-burgers which are written quicker, than are read and film-burgers which are forgotten before final caption ends. There is no place for psychology and human relations in modern art, everything is narrowed down to the naked unmotivated "action" which characters are flat as heroes of computer games. Illusion of life is projected on reality and we also become insensible and empty as film-stars of our time with wrong moral objectives as compasses with broken shooters. Art teaches? Modern — cripples doing us moral color-blind persons who do not distinguish what is good and what is bad. “People, — Mao spoke, — are a clean sheet of paper on which every hieroglyph can be written”. Or perhaps we — the white screen on which it is possible to show any cinema?

Television entered our flesh and blood, having turned into Homo Video. TV set became external brain having made us helpless without TV-guide. It obligingly offers us a set of convenient outlooks and if earlier we argued because we had different opinions, now — because we watch different TV shows. Dissidence blazes in fires of inquisitional mass media which burn out different opinion in a germ. It is simpler to speak with TV-set, than to discuss something with the one who spends his free time in front of the screen: all arguments, all logic explanations — house built on a bog, as mass media destroy mere ability to think deforming brain and atrophy imagination. Long ago imagination became atavism, the remnant of the past inaccessible to the person-TV-viewer: thoughts as wolves imposed with red tags can't leave the borders of television cliches.

Young people revolt, they are sensitive to rough television receptions and are capable to resist. Though they also can’t escape networks of a world web where all of us are lighter than emptiness. Escaping from loneliness we sink in it deeper among network friends, Internet flirtation and virtual affairs. The Internet skating rink irons not worse than television. The matter is not in total control of social networks or transparency of mail boxes — whom we are interesting to? — but in abundance of unnecessary information, in million pictures, photos, verses, gossips, articles and news, in million persons among which you lose yourself.

However, our life is more virtual, than the Internet. Freedom of choice doesn't provide choice: they decide for us whom and with whom to be, what to say, where to go and what for to live. They put into our heads thoughts as computer programs and stimulate surrogate tele-emotions by pressing a knob. Our prophets are false and idols are dull, we live in anti-Utopia, in the world which fantasts prophesied, infinite 1984 is outside. We don't know who we are: either slaves of freedom, or free slaves. We dream in reality and we live for fun. We die not having been born.

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