I walk into a French chain hairdresser in my neighborhood. Ladies with long tips from behind the counter greet me with professional smiles and offer coffee, fluttering their eyelash extensions. The sterile white interior, like a set from a 1980s sci-fi movie. The staff's outfits are also very white. An almost true blonde leads me to a chair. She puts a white apron on me. I say that I didn't make an appointment with anyone in particular. The lady nods, replies that they will send someone to me right away. I poke my gaze into the mirror, critically examining my balding head, and I hear one say to the other: "Mrs. Bożenko, you'll go for the brunette." Somehow it suspiciously reminded me of a phrase from "Pulp Fiction": "Bring out the gimp."
In the background, calm elevator music. Plum, plum and dreamy lowjubejbi of the singer, which probably had a chic coiffure to match the mood of this establishment. The creak of the door. The rustling of feet dragging on white stoneware. A body enters the frame of the mirror to my right imperceptibly.
A shirt, once white, and black baggy pants. To top it off, wide, splayed leather shoes. Standing over me is a man cut out of any barber shop in Spain or Latin America. Neither old nor young. He reaches his left hand into my hair, examines it, but somehow without interest. And to the side he looks.
With his other hand he searches for scissors in a black bucket on the countertop under the mirror. Neither me nor be, not even any "good morning to the honorable gentleman." Raven-black hair thick as a helmet. Face drawn, gaze absent. It was me to him in the language of Cervantes, because I saw right through him, in the sense of a man, not a writer. "How about some foreplay first?", I say with a filthy smile. The body suddenly tightened, tensed. That one tilted his head and said, but without smiling: "Ay, que no he sabido que vos esta hablando español!". This immediately gave him away: Argentine, like nothing. I start pulling him by the tongue, where he's from and how he got here, so the peasant opens up and tells his story in a sad voice.
"From my country I, sir, left under extremely unfortunate circumstances, at the age of eighteen. My mother was a Spanish Jewess, so to Spain my steps were immediately directed, and for many years I lived in Madrid and Barcelona. In each of these cities I had brides, a lot of brides and I learned the trade, and then I continued to move on to Europe. In Germany, Austria, Norway and wherever else I lived, and I had a lot of brides there, too."
I glare at the guy. I'm trying to judge whether he's worth such a sin again to have so many brides. But what do I know about the tastes of Austrian and Norwegian women? After all, he's a brunet so dense, though not swarthy, but rather almost as white as the laminate from the countertop next to him. "And now I've arrived in Poland and here I work, and here I have a fiancée, too," he says.
That's me asking him if he learned local languages in all these countries, if only from these brides. He says no, that who would remember it. That people now speak English everywhere, and he just happened to have mastered the language enough to cut those hairs and have those brides. As he talked about himself and his wandering, he still cut me with scissors with a kind of commitment, but soon after that things got complicated. "And do you plan to stay in Poland for longer? Do you have any plans for the future here?", I asked. I must have hit some kind of trigger, because when the word "future" was uttered, he suddenly takes his hands off my head and says with unexpected poignancy: "The future? Sir, but what future!". And this is where it starts! The guy stands behind me, occasionally taking a step to the side, with his hands gesturing vigorously, with a comb in one and scissors in the other. "Lord imagine, I predicted all this already twenty years ago! All this revolution! This posthumanism! I understood it right away!"
My eyes get big and my mouth opens to the question, but he continues, "Because it's obvious: they have been putting the plan into practice for decades, a new leap of humanity is being prepared, but at a price, because it has a huge, nay, frightening price, and I saw it a long time ago! They will take away the freedom of humanity and shape us so that we resemble each other as much as possible. Such us are easier to control, easier to rule and send into space! And on spaceships, sir, there will be no democracy, because there the captain rules! Vertical hierarchy, you understand!".
Then I vaguely remembered Witkacy's criticism of modernity as a way to lose the subjectivity of individuals into docile masses transformed. And was poor Witkacy wrong? Everyone took him for a freak, but he felt the writing with his nose! The barber now pulls a cell phone out of his pocket and shows me the entries in the digital notebook. "Lord look, it's a thought from years ago, but how prophetic, that they will first enter our every moment of our day, nestle into the devices they sell us, convince us that it's impossible to live without them, that words can't be written, spoken or sent." His voice trembles. "They have glued us to these rectangles, and we have given like sheep. The Lord looks out the window, every other person on the street has his eyes fixed on the screen, without it he doesn't know where to go, without it he doesn't know how to fill the void! Yes, emptiness, because we can no longer be alone with ourselves, with our thoughts. Their flickers and vibrations have replaced our thoughts for us!". I look out the window and indeed: a young woman with a greyhound is staring intently at the phone. A muscular bearded man with a black object to his ear passes her.
"And do you know what happens next? They're going to get into our glasses first with these phones, then under our skin and into our heads, to be even closer to us, to be with us permanently! So that we won't be able to disconnect from them even for a moment - from knowledge, commands and entertainment!": now the hairdresser is dancing all the way with excitement, his hands rising and falling, like those of a conductor.
"But this is not simply about selling, oh no, there is a greater thought behind this, I assure you, a thought of this kind, namely, to improve humanity and push it on new tracks! Hail the great vision! Am I afraid of this, you will ask? Nothing could be further from the truth! I am even waiting with wide-open arms, you are looking, for this New Man! For a better me! I tell you this with all conviction, because I have been thinking about it for years, and I am waiting for a homo sapiens better in every way, for a further human ape that is still in us and wants only el culo, blood and power!".
The Argentine is indeed now standing with his arms spread wide, like some kind of Hellraiser, head slightly down, gazing ahead without a smile, the ladies behind the counter stunned, eyes bulging until their eyebrows sharply adjusted at the centers of their foreheads. He turns his head toward me: "Only then, as digitally enhanced entities, can we meet the historical task of mankind, sir, the work of human genius of Thiel, Musk and Allen, thanks to which we will leave this carcass and fly to populate the cosmos!" he states emphatically, now with his hand up, as if holding the torch of education instead of scissors.
Tired of looking over my shoulder, I turn in my chair and ask stupidly from under my apron: "And aren't you afraid that we will cease to be human? That it will take away our meaning? That there will be nothing to live for?" The brunet's shoulders droop, now smiling understandingly, as if he were talking to a ten-year-old: "But sir, so what if AI and robots put us out of work first? So what if it all seeps into us? That we may lose many of our feelings? The Lord will understand: what matters here is the long-range goal, much longer than our meager existences! Your life and mine don't matter in the slightest in this shape!" he says the sentence in exultation, but at the last two words, ninguna importancia, something seems to have clicked in him. In an instant the air escapes from the brunette: he flails before my eyes, as if someone had let the air out of him. His arms fall along his body. He lowers his head, stares at the floor. Seconds several so he stands huddled, in baggy pants. I can see the outline of his skinny knees through the stretched out material. It runs through my mind that those knees can barely support the weight of his upper body. Suddenly, without a word, he moves ahead, shuffling his feet. He passes the reception desk with terrified ladies.
We all lead him away with our eyes as he disappears behind a white door in the back room. Shortly thereafter, cut off completely by an apologetic blonde, I walk out into the autumn street. Glancing at my phone, I realize it's been an hour since I walked in. Normally it takes the establishment's staff about 20 minutes to cut me down for a "mother-in-law's dream." The brunette felt the writing with his nose. He was right: it would be easy to replace him with a robot. For the time being, however, he was bailed out by a regular hairdresser. Hopefully, I will be able to count on this ordinariness for a long time to come, and on us: banal human beings as far from the ideal of Messrs. Thiel, Musk and Allen.
Jakub Szczęsny
more: A&B 12/2025 - RE-THINK - MBA Kraków 2025,
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