1/ In the 1930s, the US and USSR were undergoing parallel socioeconomic transformations. The US (or, the West generally) and China are undergoing parallel socioeconomic transformations today. A few thoughts.

2/ 1930s: Recent decades were a time of rapid modernization. The powered machine had greatly reduced the manpower required to produce food and get it to market. At the same time, more and more manpower was required to run factories in the growing cities.

3/ The pre-industrial economy had left behind a world of small, independent farms. But to remain competitive, countries needed to aggregate small farms into efficient industrial operations, and to get the small farmers to work in the urban industrial economy.

4/ Stalin collectivized Soviet agriculture using terror, slavery, and mass starvation. He destroyed the small farmers and herded them into mines and factories by force. Meanwhile, the same socioeconomic transformation was being accomplished in the US, also backed by force.

5/ During the Depression, small farms were wiped out, seized by banks, and sold to developers & agricultural conglomerates. Farmers flowed into cities seeking work on assembly lines. Same process as in the USSR at the same time, carried out by sheriffs instead of the NKVD.

6/ Today: China uses data harvesting, facial recognition, and AI to set up a surveillance state and social credit system that Orwell couldn't dream up. Citizens are monitored, their behavior cataloged, and their rights amended accordingly by state enforcers.

7/ As in the 1930s, we are making the same transformation by less direct means: Incentives and propaganda which cause people to create a surveillance state and social credit system themselves - DIY totalitarianism.

8/ Technological regimes have their own internal logic that lead inexorably to prescribed social and political outcomes. In the 1930s, states that were not fully mobilized for industry could not remain competitive, and competitive states imposed themselves on the uncompetitive.

9/ E.g. after the San Bernadino attack, the FBI accrued to itself the right to hack into our iPhones. Who can argue w/that? The lure of digital tech is such that no state that does not explicitly oppose itself to its totalitarian possibilities will inevitably be consumed by them.

10/ The USSR & China's history of totalitarianism provided political means Western leaders often pine for. But Tom Friedman needn't worry, for where they go by force, we follow by choice through manufactured consent. "The fates lead those who will, those who won't are dragged."