Consciousness and man

I enter bars near where I live and look around aghast. Every experience is a designer one. The bar staff are bottle-twirling stars; flat screen televisions leave little room for people to explore their mental 'spaces', images and sounds served right there; music from audio sources interlace the room, spinning a web to be filtered by the mind as per personal taste; faked importance is shown to meaningless clientele, areas marked as VIP lounges to flatter the easily flattered. Colours, sounds and decor dressed in dimming lights as the night proceeds, all there today, then closed for a reftit tomorrow when we all got bored. Why?

The list could go on, life's descent into a personal emancipation through technology exhibiting a sinister form of social control via the illusion of choice. Why did technology fail to deliver mankind from identity through community, as the high priests of a better world claimed? Why has it made us less able to think for ourselves? And less free (which of these questions has primacy is a moot point as well)?

I don't own a mobile phone. A work colleague of mine summed up his reasons why he doesn't that equally belong to me. He comes from the time when if the phone rang in the pub you said 'if it's for me I'm not here'; now people are forever on their mobile phones, fearing missing the latest text gossip. As communication becomes easier so it's quality declines, but my point is that technology has changed the nature of relations of power in such as way as to make us more accessible to others, theefore more accountable and less free. So when personal identity can no longer provide a shield where can we turn. Intoxicating liquids maybe.

And isn't that the point, that in the 'advanced' world man has demonstatred his ability through technology to replicate consciousness? We, the human animal, live behind consciousness in an unidentifiable unverifable character and find ourselves assailed by the consciousness of a television, a mobile phone text, derived from humans but far outreaching human constraints in their 'claim' on us. So much for Descartes his view that animals are machines because they are not consciousness. Consciousness demands it's escape route to the nature we share with other
animals. Perhaps that's why, after a few drinks in that wood pannelled, darkened, pastel shaded bar, we take pride in having a good night which by definition we can't remember.

Our mistake is not to see machines as forms of consciousness. They're not alive or aware; but they are conscious. We mistakenly think consciousness distinguishes humans from machines, but rather it is our emotions that distinguish us, the mechanism behind the choosing of what we are conscious of. After all, I can still switch this computer off and will do so without it's permission. Our animal natures play in the grounds of emotion, a darkened ground of unknown
striving. We then present a consciousness of presentation to the world. Back in the bar, the degradation of the self to the minimum of presentation is something we barely notice.