In a book full of interesting stuff about modern China - Age of Ambition by Evan Osnos - there's an interesting quote from Tang Jie, creator of a popular nationalistic online video entitled China Stand Up:

Because we are in such a system, we are always asking ourselves whether we are brainwashed. We are always eager to get other information from different channels. But when you are in a so-called free system you never think about whether you are brainwashed.

Fortunately many people in the UK are starting to wonder if they are being brainwashed, especially in the light of recent high-profile deliberate fakes such as those propagated by the BBC and dismissed as mere 'editing errors'.

This kind of lame dismissal ignores the fact that editing has become the key tool in disseminating fake news.

But even editing's days are numbered.

Soon editing will surpassed by AI combining snippets of text or video in any way you ask it to. This is the real meaning of 'virtual reality' - a reality that virtually no-one recognises nor lives in.

The relative trickle of fake news today will become a tsunami in the near future when no-one will know what to believe because all or most of our reality will have been created for us by some kind of AI 'god'.

We will become a kind of perverse Truman Show except without human show-runners.

The RT TV channel was banned in the UK precisely to prevent people from getting information from different channels (of course you can still access RT online). And that censorship was nothing compared to the way many media channels were quickly banned in 'democratic' Ukraine to ensure consistent reporting of the war with Russia.

You don't have to agree with the 'regimes' in China or Russia to recognise the truth in Tang's observation. This was also what Orwell warned about in 1984 way back in 1949.

So try asking yourself, Harry Callahan style: Are you being brainwashed? Well are you?