technological changes, creating a permanent technological dystopia. Ord said that Orwell's writings show that his concern was genuine rather than just a throwaway part of the fictional plot of Nineteen Eighty-Four. In 1949, Orwell wrote that "[a] ruling class which could guard against (four previously enumerated sources of risk) would remain in power permanently." That same year, Bertrand Russell wrote that "modern techniques have made possible a new intensity of governmental control, and this possibility has been exploited very fully in totalitarian states." In the late 2010s, The Economist has described China's developed Social Credit System under Chinese Communist Party general secretary Xi Jinping's administration, to screen and rank its citizens based on their personal behavior, as totalitarian. Opponents of China's ranking system say that it is intrusive and it is just another tool which a one-party state can use to control the population. The New York Times compared Chinese paramount leader Xi Jinping's cult of personality and his ideology Xi Jinping Thought to that of Mao Zedong during the Cold War. Supporters say that it will transform China into a more civilized and law-abiding society. Shoshana Zuboff considers it instrumentarian rather than totalitarian. Other emerging technologies that could empower future totalitarian regimes include brain-reading, contact tracing and various applications of artificial intelligence. Philosopher Nick Bostrom said that there is a possible trade-off, namely that some existential risks might be mitigated by the establishment of a powerful and permanent world government, and in turn the establishment of such a government could enhance the existential risks which are associated with the rule of a permanent dictatorship. Religious totalitarianism The Taliban is a totalitarian Sunni Islamist militant group and political movement in Afghanistan that emerged in the aftermath of the Soviet-Afghan War and the end of the Cold War. It governed most of Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001 and won full control of Afghanistan in 2021. Features of its totalitarian governance include the imposition of Pashtunwali culture of the plurality Pashtun ethnic group as religious law, the exclusion of minorities and non-Taliban members from the government, and extensive violations of women's rights. The Islamic State is a Salafi-Jihadist terrorist group founded by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in 1999, which espouses a totalitarian ideology that is a fundamentalist hybrid of Global Jihadism, Wahhabism and Qutbism. In 2014, the group declared itself as a caliphate that sought world domination and established what has been described