Виктор Пелевин - Babylon

Furthermore, Lapsang Suchong of the Pu Er monastery believes that if a certain programme, for instance a football game, were to be watched simultaneously by more than four-fifths of the population of Earth, this virtual effect would become capable of displacing from the aggregate human consciousness the collective karmic vision of the human plane of existence, the consequences of which could be unpredictable (it is entirely possible that to the hell of molten metal, the hell of knife trees etc. there would be added a new hell, the hell of an eternal football championship). However, his calculations have yet to be verified, and in any case this is a matter for the future. Here we are interested not so much in the frightening prospects for tomorrow as in the no less frightening reality of today.

Let us draw our first conclusion. Corresponding to the object of the second type, that is, to a television that is switched on, we have a subject of the second type - that is, a virtual viewer, who manages his or her attention in exactly the same way as a programme production crew does. Feelings and thoughts, as well as the secretion of adrenalin and other hormones in the viewer’s organism, are dictated by an external operator and determined by the calculations of another individual. And of course, the subject of the first type does not notice the moment when he is displaced by the subject of the second type, since following this displacement there is no longer anyone to notice it, as the subject of the second type is unreal.

But it is not merely unreal (this word is in effect applicable to everything in the human world). There are no words to describe the degree of its unreality. It is a heaping of one unreality upon another, a castle constructed of air, the foundations of which stand upon a profound abyss. The question might arise: why are we wallowing in these non-existences, attempting to gauge the degree of their unreality? However, this difference between subjects of the first and second types is of extreme importance.

Subject number one believes that reality is the material world. But subject number two believes that reality is the material world as it is shown on the television.

As a product of false subject-object division, subject number one is illusory. But at least there is an observer of the chaotic movement of his or her thoughts and moods - in metaphorical terms we can say that subject number one is constantly watching a television programme about himself or herself, gradually forgetting that he or she is an observer and identifying with the programme.

From this point of view subject number two is something absolutely improbable and indescribable. It is a television programme watching another television programme. Emotions and thoughts participate in this process, but the individual in whose consciousness they arise is entirely absent.

The rapid switching of a television from one channel to another, which is used to avoid watching the advertisements, is known as zapping. Bourgeois thought has investigated in considerable detail the psychological condition of the individual who engages in zapping, and the corresponding thought patterns, which are rapidly becoming the basic forms of the modem world. But the type of zapping that is considered by the researchers of this phenomenon corresponds only to switching between channels by the viewer.

The switching to and fro of the viewer that is controlled by the producer and cameraman (that is, the forcible induction of subject number two by means of technomodifications) is a different type of zapping, a coercive form, study of which is effectively prohibited in every country of the world except Bhutan, where television is forbidden. But coercive zapping, whereby the television is converted into a remote control for the viewer, is not simply one method among others of organising an image sequence; it is the very foundation of television broadcasting, the major means by which the advertising-informational field exerts its influence on consciousness. From this point on, therefore, we shall refer to the type-two subject as Homo Zapiens, or HZ.

Let us repeat this extremely important conclusion: in the same way as a viewer who does not wish to watch the advertisements switches between television channels, instantaneous and unpredictable technomodifications switch the actual viewer to and fro. Assuming the condition of Homo Zapiens, the viewer becomes a remotely controlled television programme. And he or she spends a significant part of his life in this condition.

Comrades in the struggle! The position of modern man is not merely lamentable; one might even say there is no condition, because man hardly exists. Nothing exists to which one could point and say: ‘There, that is Homo Zapiens.’ HZ is simply the residual luminescence of a soul fallen asleep; it is a film about the shooting of another film, shown on a television in an empty house.

At this point the question logically arises of why modern man has found himself in such a situation. Who is trying to replace the already deluded Homo Sapiens with a cubic metre of empty space in the condition of HZ?

The answer, of course, is clear: nobody. But let us not become fixated on the bitter absurdity of the situation. In order to understand it in greater depth, let us recall that the main reason for the existence of television is its advertising function, which is indissolubly linked with the circulation of money. We shall therefore have to turn our attention to that area of human thought which is known as economics.

Economics is the name of a pseudo-science that deals with the illusory relations between subjects of the first and second types as they are involved in the hallucinatory process of their imaginary enrichment.

This discipline regards each individual as a cell of an organism that the economists of the ancient world knew as Mammon. In the educational materials of the Front for Full and Final Liberation it is called simply ORANUS (which translates into Russian as ‘moutharse’). This more accurately reflects its real nature and leaves less scope for mystical speculation. Each of these cells - that is, each individual, when regarded as an economic entity -possesses a kind of social membrane that allows money (which plays the role of blood and lymph in the organism of oranus) to pass into and out of the cell. From the point of view of economics, the function of each of these cells is to absorb as much money as possible through this membrane and to release as little as possible back through it.

But the imperative of oranus’s existence as a whole requires its cellular structure to be bathed in a constantly increasing stream of money. Therefore oranus, in the process of its evolution (and it is located at a level of evolution close to that of a mollusc) develops a primitive nervous system, the so-called ‘media’. This nervous system transmits throughout its virtual organism impulses that control the activity of the monadic cells.

These impulses are of three types, which are called oral, anal and displacing wow-impulses (from the commercial ejaculation ‘wow!’).

The oral wow-impulse induces a cell to ingest money in order to eliminate its suffering as a result of the conflict between its self-image and the image of the ideal ‘super-self created by advertising. Note that the point does not lie in the things that can be bought for money in order to embody this ideal ‘self - the point lies in the money itself. Certainly, many millionaires walk around in rags and drive cheap cars, but in order to be able to do that one has to be a millionaire. A poor man in the same circumstances would suffer inexpressible agonies as a result of cognitive dissonance, which is why many poor people will spend their last penny in an effort to dress well.