This letter submitted to the contest of the Zvuki.Ru website became the best in 2003. Thanks to the editors for understanding.
We live in an era of change. There's probably no need to even mention the ancient Chinese saying that has long turned into either a cliché, or a Russian national idea, or even fully materialized into our modern reality: "May you live in an era of change!". Whether this is a curse or a wish for happiness, everyone in the post-Soviet space decides for themselves. While the "golden billion" enjoys the meaningless and thoughtless lightness of their existence, we are trying to build our lives on the ruins of a great empire, using the conveniently rolled-up wheel of progress and the friendly hand of the West, even if sometimes it's unclear what that hand is doing in our pocket. Along with the desired prosperity, Western philosophy and culture are pouring into us in a wide river, sadly killing our own achievements, and blocking the path for the "rational, good, eternal" made in ex-USSR. The tendency to replace reason and feelings with technology and information, respectively, has reached absurdity in its modern incarnation, when pedophile (Michael Jackson) or lesbian (t.A.T.u.) motifs are used for the PR of new albums, and no one is interested anymore in the fresh rumor that Britney Spears got married for 2 hours, and immediately divorced. Teenagers with brains washed by music TV have long ago swept the albums of all the aforementioned "heroes of our time" from peer-to-peer networks or pirate stalls and underpasses. You're still boiling? Then we're coming to you! - has become more of a mass media motto than a laundry detergent slogan. Beliefs instilled overnight by ubiquitous overt and covert advertising have become a cheap commodity, and freedom has turned into degradation. Why have your own opinion when there's a ready-made one?
By analogy with Zvuki's "Disappointment of the Year" nomination, one could award the "Disappointment of the Century" prize, and it would go to technology. Humans time after time pin their hopes on technical means, and we always end up with a bummer. Yes, now anyone has the opportunity to compose and record their own music, but recording and communication equipment found much greater use in the conveyor-belt riveting of semi-finished "stars" for raking in the dough, and, as has often happened in Russian history, here this idea took on particularly ugly and degenerate forms. If the products of the English pop-culture incubator "Girls Aloud" don't evoke any special negative emotions, but are simply well-molded fast food with ketchup in the form of little guitars and passable voices, then the domestic "Fabrikas" and "Kornis", created exclusively by the grace of producers for the further brainwashing of the population, sometimes induce a gag reflex even in this very population. And while technocrats talk about the possibility of posthumanist evolution, techno-pessimists in the form of the cold and gloomy Swedes Covenant warn us of the danger of enslavement by our own creation.
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