Homo Zapiens

by Victor Pelevin

The USSR, which they’d begun to renovate and improve at about the time when Tatarsky decided to change his profession, improved so much that it ceased to exist (if a state is capable of entering nirvana, that’s what must have happened in this case);

Meanwhile the television was still showing the same old repulsive physiognomies that had been sickening the viewers for the last twenty years. Now they were saying exactly the same things they used to jail other people for, except that they were far bolder, far more decisive and radical. Tatarsky often found himself imagining Germany in 1946, with Doktor Goebbels shrieking hysterically on the radio about the abyss into which fascism had led the nation,

Tatarsky realised what the difference was between the era of decaying imperialism and the era of primitive capital accumulation. In the West both the client who ordered advertising and the copywriter tried to brainwash the consumer, but in Russia the copywriter’s job was to screw with the client’s brains.

None of the passers-by paid any attention to Gireiev. Just like a fire hydrant or an advertisement for Pepsi-Cola, he failed to register in their field of perception because he conveyed absolutely no new visual information.

In his crazy gear he seemed like the final fragment of some lost universe — not the Soviet universe, because that didn’t contain any wandering Tibetan astrologers, but some other world that had existed in parallel with the Soviet one, even in contradiction of it, and had perished together with it. Tatarsky felt regret at its passing, because a great deal of what he had liked and been moved by had come from that parallel universe, which everyone had been certain could never come to any harm; but it had been overtaken by the same fate as the Soviet eternity, and just as imperceptibly.

The human mind had sold this romanticism to itself far too many times to be able to do any more business on it.

He went up to the eighth floor and found the room with the number he needed; there was a metal plate on the door bearing the words: ‘Ideological Department’ - apparently a leftover from Soviet times. ’Or maybe not,‘ thought Tatarsky.

in the area of radical youth culture nothing sells as well as well-packaged and politically correct rebellion against a world that is ruled by political correctness and in which everything is packaged to be sold.

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).

Lapsang Souchong and Pu Er are types of tea :-)

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.

In the future, not a single work of art will be created simply for its own sake; the time is approaching when books and films will appear in which the dominant element of content will be a secret hymn of praise to Coca-Cola and an attack on Pepsi-Cola — or vice-versa.

And anyway, why does any advertiser give us an ad?’ Tatarsky shrugged. ‘No, go on, tell me.’ ‘To sell product.’ ‘That’s in America - to sell product.’ ‘Then so he can feel like a big-shot.’ ‘That was three years ago,’ Khanin said in a didactic tone. ‘Things are different now. Nowadays the client wants to show the big guys who keep a careful eye on what’s happening on screen and in real life that he can simply flush a million dollars down the tubes; and for that, the worse his advert is, the better.

‘Comrades! Let us drown the Russian bourgeoisie in a flood of images!’