The Chinese already have 200 million cameras and a “social scorecard” that makes sure your behaviour conforms to Communist norms, or you are punished. The system is entirely based on face recognition. So yes, I think these worthy concerns are a little after the fact. Don’t ask what the U.K. is up to, either, those septic sceptred isles are supersaturated with cameras.

Will humanity wake up? When they pay fortunes for the latest smartphone with face recognition? Don’t bet on it.

There is only one way a human being can survive as a human being under these circumstances. You have to go under the radar. Way down under the radar. You have to develop human interactions in quiet corners where no cameras are to be found. You have to smile when you’re in public and keep smiling.

Those of us who lived in the shadows of the Cold War, ex-Communists, spied on by the left, spied on by the right, spied on by the Brits and the Americans, spied on by the Special Branch, spied on by the professors, spied on by the banks, by the phone company, by the postal services … we learned to keep a low profile. You avoid group photos, you avoid photos altogether. My entire family picture collection is about a dozen photos. I’m amazed I’ve got so many.

The protocols for sealing envelopes have changed. No longer may you tape an envelope closed, an absolutely foolproof way of securing your message. In his book Spycatcher, Peter Wright reveals that MI5 and the Post Office never found a way around an envelope sealed with Sellotape. The Special Branch in South Africa would occasionally cut open my mail quite brazenly, seal it up again, and send it on stamped “Opened In Error”. This was when I was receiving hundreds of confirmation of contact or QSL cards from Soviet radio hams.

So now I tape an envelope and I put it inside an untaped envelope. In 2009, just to prove how slow South Africa data services were, a company used a carrier pigeon to deliver a 4GB memory stick over 60 miles. The pigeon won by many hours. But this is missing the point. Human beings need to fight the machines by quietly passing information around in physical form, samizdat-style, just as they did in the Soviet Union. The carrier pigeon will be back for real one day.

And boy, you had better learn to be polite on Twitter and Quora and anywhere else you post. Do not type a single word that might remotely be construed as contentious by any kind of robot. I honestly wonder how long I will last on Medium. Google only recently stopped scanning your email content to target you for ads. Do not for a moment think that your emails are not being scanned and parsed and analysed. Don’t worry, it’s all done by machine, no actual human being will ban you for saying something you shouldn’t on email. It will be the algorithm that shuts you down, just like the algorithms shut you down on Twitter.

If you want to know how to survive under the radar, go speak to Falun Gong in China. There’s a credible and truly gruesome statistic that over 60,000 Falun Gong members have been imprisoned, killed, and their organs harvested. This is for no more than possession of a meditation cushion, anything that gives you away as a spiritual practitioner. The Chinese government has never been able to infiltrate this sect, which actually has more members than the Chinese Communist Party. This is open war on human spirituality.

There is a massive social upheaval coming in China, massive beyond all belief, something to shake the world to its core. I edit econometric papers from China, including papers prepared by their super-ministries. Their big problem right now is shutting down coalmines and dealing with the social aftermath of mass unemployment, as the global economy cools down. They have shifted untold millions from rural areas into cities, and they still have endless ghost cities to fill. When that real estate bubble bursts, the bang will be heard in deep space.

Ah, well. Don’t worry, all you AI punters. The powers that be will start a war, they will instigate terror, they will sow all kinds of chaos to make us accept the surveillance super-state. There may even have to be an alien threat. You can brace yourself for anything. But the cameras are coming, like it or not.

So keep your head down. Those kids in hoodies know a thing or two. The heat is on, no question.