Over the past century, more than a few great writers have expressed concern about humanity’s future. In Brave New World (1932), the British author Aldous Huxley pictured a near-perfect society in which unhappiness and aggression had been removed out of humanity through a combination of genetic engineering and psychological conditioning.

It might surprise you to hear this, but these things have already happened. Now we are living in a world in which a handful of high-tech companies are not only monitoring much of our activity, but are also invisibly controlling more and more of what we think, feel, do and say.

Take Google, the biggest and the best search engine. It gives us exactly the information we are looking for, almost instantly and almost always in the first position of the list after we launch our search—the list of “search results”. And that ordered list is so good, in fact, that about 50 per cent of our clicks go to the top two items, and more than 90 per cent of our clicks go to the 10 items listed on the first page of results. Seconds later, the decision we make or the opinion we form is determined by that short list we are shown, even though we have no idea how the list was generated.

Of course, Google decides which of the billions of web pages it is going to include in our search results, and it also decides how to rank them. However, how it decides these things is a deep, dark secret—one of the best-kept secrets in the world, like the formula for Coca-Cola.

The technology that now surrounds us is not just a harmless toy; it has also made possible undetectable and untraceable control of entire populations. If we choose to ignore this, we do so at our own risk.

WeChat, one of the world’s most popular mobile apps and social networks, brought home iF Gold Award for its smart retail innovation, Scan & Go. It is the first ever Chinese product to win4 gold in the iF Service Design category.

Established in 1953, the German-based iF Design Award has always been known for its “Independent, Rigorous(细致的) and Reliable” standards.

Scan & Go enables shoppers at retail stores to turn their mobile phone into a virtual checkout counter. When shopping, customers use their mobile phones to scan product barcodes(条形码), view product information, get discounts, complete self-checkout, and pay directly within the app via WeChat Pay. There is no queuing up at the cash register.

According to statistics, sales during peak hours in traditional supermarkets account for 60% of total turnover, and on average customers spend three to five minutes on queueing and payment during peak hours. With Scan & Go, customers no longer have to queue, and the payment time is shortened to one minute.

In order to realize queue-less purchasing, the WeChat team greatly optimizes retailers’ in-store customer handling efficiency during peak hours, and enables overall management of the consumer traffic flow. By introducing dedicated lanes for Scan & Go, supermarkets have achieved over a five-fold increase in converting(转变) digital members within two months.

In addition to improving retailers’ checkout efficiency and providing customers with a better shopping experience, Scan & Go also combines promotion and marketing modes through Mini Programs, to help increase sales. It helps retailers(零售商) to link the online and offline aspects of their business, and has become the standard tool in China for merchants to realize digital transformation. Scan & Go is now widely used by retailers in China.