In China, at least, all he has to do is to look at your mobile phone’s data.

And, yes, in case you are wondering – yes, the ChiComs are a particularly impressive kind of high-tech evil:

I am in the middle of re-reading 1984, for the first time since high school, I think. It is shocking, and deeply disturbing, how eerily prescient the book was about the state of the world today.

George Orwell was about 40 years off in terms of his predictions, and his vision of a dystopian future in which all of your thoughts and actions are controlled by entities that care nothing for you, and indeed in many cases actively hate you, missed the mark by putting the blame entirely on the State, rather than on a Satanic alliance between government and private companies.

But, in order to understand where China is headed now, you need to look at three books – the aforementioned 1984, Aldous Huxley’s equally legendary classic Brave New World, and a less well-known dystopian cyberpunk novel called Hard Wired by Walter J. Williams, which predicted many of the elements of today’s world.

These three novels offer competing but ultimately deeply disturbing visions of the world.

George Orwell, writing in the 1950s, reckoned that the world would follow a Soviet-style autocracy, where everything would be regulated by the State and the world would descend into a bleak, soulless, crushing nihilism where even your thoughts could be counted as crimes. He was wrong about the Soviet Union lasting long enough to do this, and he was wrong about how it would be done, but he was not wrong about what would happen.

Thoughtcrime and historical revisionism are literal realities today. The Left in America, and across much of the degenerating Western world, is actively tearing down statues and smashing the “hated” symbols of the past, in their reckless and incredibly foolish quest to build a Utopia free of sin.

Aldous Huxley, on the other hand, reckoned that humanity would become slaves to their own base desires, and would eventually become a dopamine-addicted bunch of drooling imbeciles, hooked on non-stop entertainment, drugs, and sex. Things aren’t quite that bad, not yet, but you wouldn’t realise it from looking at the state of the entertainment in the West. What with gay sex scenes now being fully acceptable on mainstream television, sex-drenched realitard TV shows being the highest-rated on television, and skyrocketing drug addiction rates throughout the United States, at least, he wasn’t really that far off.

And then we come to Walter Williams’s novel, which predicted a number of the technological innovations that we see today. I haven’t read this book, by the way, nor have I played the Cyberpunk board game that drew inspiration from it. But from what I understand, a lot of the technology that we have today, in the form of dopamine-triggering mobile devices, body-augmenting prosthetics, and robot- and AI-driven manufacturing, were predicted right there in the 1980s by this one author.

Those three novels predicted where we are right now. What they could not have predicted, because they were written from a very Western point of view, is how quickly Asian cultures would take them up.

There is one very important cultural difference between Western and Eastern peoples, which I have observed firsthand.

Westerners have an instinctive, almost Luddite, fear and distrust of advanced technology, at least at first. It takes Americans and Brits and Europeans some time to adjust to the realities of new technology.

My father has told me stories about how, when personal computers first came on the scene in the workplace in the 1980s, he saw the way things were going and insisted on training himself on how to use the one hugely expensive DOS-based machine that was available in his office at the time. Several years later, he went to the USA – this was in the late 1980s or early 1990s, I think – well after the PC revolution had taken place, and he found that American executives were still insisting on doing things the old-fashioned way for presentations.

“The old-fashioned way” amounted to creating all slides on those old transparent acetate sheets – anyone remember those? – that would then be placed on projectors that would display the slides on a wall. The Americans at the time refused to use presentation software from IBM and Microsoft, because they didn’t trust it. But that was the way of the future, and they eventually had to embrace it.

(Much, I might add, to the detriment of everything around them. I have maintained from the very beginning of my career that productivity in every office would go through the roof if only presentation software, especially PowerPoint, were banned forthwith. As it is written, “It is said that power corrupts, and PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.”)

Asians, on the other hand, embrace new technology with a fervour and speed that has to be seen to be believed.

You will see this all around you if you go to Singapore or Hong Kong, or especially Planet Japan, which is literally like a different world because of how oddly paradoxical their way of life is. If you come up with a way to get rid of cash, or do things on a mobile phone, they will flock to it in their thousands and eventually millions. Asians actually like having less social interaction and more convenience at their fingertips – to the point where you can sit one not-at-all-ugly South Korean dude in a room full of like 40 girls, and he won’t even get up and say hello to any of them, but will communicate his preferences to all of them ONLY through a mobile phone:

(Yes, I know that was for a TV show. Trust me on this: if you actually go to Asia, you will find that online dating is far more popular and useful there than it is in the West.)

The (East) Asian love of high technology permeates all of their cultures. Gundams, robots, and friendly AIs are omnipresent in Japanese anime and manga, and the idea of a benevolent computer program determining the course of your life holds great appeal for them.

This is part of an irreducible cultural difference, formed and informed by centuries of separation in culture, history, language, and experience. East Asians think in much more hierarchical fashion than Westerners do, and as a result, if their Benevolent Government Overlords tell them that something is good, then It Is Good.

That is a gross generalisation, of course, but it is generally true.

Why should automation make people worried? After all, isn’t a robotic, cashless, mobile-driven, data-mined future just going to be easy and safe and stress-free?

Yeah, sure it is – as long as you do only what the people who control those applications, want you to do.

Remember this, and understand it well: a cashless, dehumanised, atomised, fully data-linked society is easy to control. When you combine China’s already massive social credit system with their heavy push toward cashless cities and mobile-based lifestyles, you create a population of dopamine-addicted plebs who cannot resist authority because the moment that they do anything that their overlords do not like, their ability to do even the most basic tasks is yanked out from under them.

For the Americans among you: let’s say that QR-based payment technology becomes common in the USA. And now let’s say you want to go to Wal-Mart and stock up on knives and guns and bows and arrows, because these are things that manly men spend our time and money on.

What do you suppose will happen when Google or Facebook or Amazon see that purchase?

Yeah, exactly.

Here’s one for those of you from PommieBastardLand. We all know that the Brits love themselves a pint of ale, which is served warm with no froth and ideally should have twigs and leaves and a bit of mud floating on the top. (The rest of us think you lot are potty, but that’s another discussion.) Suppose you have a few drinks over what the ‘Elf ‘n’ Safety Directorate thinks is “safe” – which is to say, more than a single half-pint, which will undoubtedly eventually be reduced to zero alcohol of any kind.

What do you suppose is going to happen when you try to buy some alcohol down at your local pub, or in Tesco’s?

Yep. Your account gets locked and your social media profile gets locked.

This is what is GUARANTEED TO HAPPEN under the rules of the current game. We all think that China’s social credit system is lunacy, but it’s actually not very far removed from what already exists in Silicon Valley. And in China’s case, at least the CommieBastards Party is (misguidedly) “acting in the interests of the Chinese people”.

The Chinese government believes, as an article of faith, that the 21st Century belongs to Zhong Guo Ren, and they will stop at NOTHING to make that dream a reality. As I have said many times, the Chinese view democracy as a quaint and ridiculous 100-year-old notion that has no relevance whatsoever to their glorious 5,000-year-old history. (That this notion of a “5,000-year-old history” is largely propaganda is beside the point.) And they view Western civilisation as vastly inferior to their own, and indeed believe that most of what made the West great in the first place, was stolen from China. Don’t, whatever you do, bring up tea, silk, paper, gunpowder, magnets, pasta, or spices with the Chinese, they get pretty pissy about that stuff.

So you can sort of understand the Chinese when they say that they want to control the world, because they used to be the Big Swinging Dicks 500 years ago and never quite got over losing that position. You can kind of understand when they claim that everything north of the Amur River and east of the Urals – which the Russkies and the rest of us call “Siberia” and recognise as being part of Russia – as their own. And you can more or less figure out why they think that they have the right to colonise Africa and settle 300 million of their own people over there, and build artificial naval bases across the Pacific and Indian Oceans.

They’re doing these things because they Believe in new technology, and they Believe that the 21st Century is China’s to own and manage. And they will brook no interference or debate on these subjects.

What, exactly, is Silicon Valley’s guiding motivation for doing many of the same things?

The answer, once you strip away all of the Utopian bullshit, is power. Raw, naked, brutal power.

The ability to control the culture, and thereby control you, is incredibly valuable. And a tiny percentage of the American population has now arrogated to itself the right to do exactly that.

George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, and Walter J. Williams couldn’t have written anything to match the reality of what happened since their books were published. If anything, they all underestimated how bad things would get.