I only got a “smart” television set 18 months ago, so I have already avoided years of covert surveillance by the CIA, the FBI, MI5, CI5 and NWA. No one is safe from Samsung’s all-seeing Eye of Sauron. Apparently, a deeply embedded program currently enables the intelligence agencies to note and monitor anyone who is watching ITV’s The Nightly Show, in the belief that they must be a weird loner-misfit, inexplicably fascinated by human suffering, a ticking social time bomb just waiting to explode.

I am a late adopter of new technology. If I had played the ape at the opening of 2001: A Space Odyssey, I would have thrown the bone up in the air, and then Stanley Kubrick would have cut, not to a similarly shaped satellite swooping through the cosmos in the far future, but to me, some years later, still throwing the bone up in the air, and obstinately refusing banana-based inducements to upgrade to a more aerodynamic bone.

My nephew thinks it's funny that I don't know what Candy Crush is. I think it's funny that he'll never own his own home

To me, the modern world, with its smart televisions and Facebooks and Deliveroos, seems so impossibly futuristic I feel like Jeff Bridges in the movie Tron (1982). Is he a bewildered man trapped inside a mainframe computer, dreaming of being a bewildered man trapped inside a Dino De Laurentiis remake of King Kong (1976)? Or is he a bewildered man trapped inside a Dino De Laurentiis remake of King Kong (1976) dreaming that he is a bewildered man trapped inside a mainframe computer?

I still have an old Nokia mobile phone, so basic it doesn’t even have that Snake game on it or a built-in camera. For years I have managed fine without being able to manipulate an imaginary reptile on demand, or photograph my noodles, to make people I was at school with in the 1980s envy my metrosexual lifestyle.

But at the Edinburgh fringe in 2015, some adult San Franciscan hipster friends of the Generation X tastemaker Harmon Leon accused me of owning the Nokia “ironically, to try and look weird”. And yet they were the ones with dreadlocks, tattoos of Rick Moranis, pierced scrotums and pointed Viking beards! And that was just the women!!

I understand from the Guardian that Nokia is relaunching a version of the Nokia phone I still have as a retro-cool item. This just goes to show that if you stand in the same place long enough you will eventually become a fashion icon. Or be run over by a bus.

In a recent broadsheet newspaper personality test entitled “Are you a member of the metropolitan liberal elite?”, the only points I scored were for owning vinyl records. But I simply never got rid of them the first time around, so my analogue listening habits indicated only indolence and luddite tendencies, not premeditated upward social mobility. I am not you.

My nephew thinks it is funny that I do not know what Candy Crush is. I think it is funny that he will never own his own home.

Having spent three decades assembling a collection of maps of the entire British Isles and every city centre, I refuse to use a satnav, and as a result am often lost. But, while lost, oh the things I have seen! The real Britain that satnavs avoid; the Gnome Reserve at West Putford; the legendarily extreme adverse camber on the A944 near Aberdeen; and Roy Wood, from Wizzard, shooing a badger out of his garden, near Yeaveley in Derbyshire.

Right now, I am in a hotel room in Guildford. If I suddenly wanted my record player at home to comfort my lonely cat with a burst of the Spin Doctors’ irresistible 1991 earworm Two Princes, my distant abode would remain silent. I do not understand the technology required to remotely activate my appliances, though the cat, left to his own devices, has made a reasonable fist of using my paper shredder. Admittedly, as a urinal.

Even though I have a “smart” television, I am yet to work out how to subscribe to newfangled internet computer-television stations like Netflix or Amazon Prime. Consequently, to the annoyance of incredulous acquaintances, I am yet to see Game of Thrones, or Peter Stringfellow’s Lord of the Rings, as I like to call it. Though I understand one can achieve the same experience from just sitting around with a Terry Pratchett novel in one hand and a copy of Hustler’s Barely Legal in the other.

But perhaps this ignorance has made me safe. Can it really be true that “they” are spying on “us” through our televisions, just like Big Brother does on Winston Smith in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four? It has become a cliche to invoke the prophetic nature of Orwell’s dystopian fiction, but just because doing so is a cliche does not make Orwell’s prophecies any less prophetic.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Illustration by David Foldvari.

Now I’m in a Guildford hotel room, afraid, at 5.45pm. There’s a smart television mounted on the wall behind me, reflected in the mirror in front of me. Is someone watching me, through that very television screen, now, as I sit here, writing this, about them, watching me, on that? Is this sentence now being read over my shoulder as I write it, by them? If I write that I know they are watching, will they stop watching, or will they strike? You. I know you are watching.

I have to go over the road to do my standup show at seven. But just before I wrote that last paragraph I ordered room service – a small shepherd’s pie with a side order of seasonal veg. Nothing fancy. I try to keep tour costs down and pass the savings on to the customer. No one would begrudge me a pie. Would they? And yet, if “they” are reading this, “they” know that I am on to “them”.

Time to go. The pie sits untouched. Who could, in the current climate, confidently eat a shepherd’s pie bought into their room by a stranger?

At the newly built G Live theatre in Guildford, there is an insurmountable design fault. The lights in the dressing rooms are operated not by switches, of which there are none, but by movement sensors. So if you sit still for too long reading, or trying to learn words, you are plunged into darkness and have to leap up and dance around to restore the light. And likewise, it is not possible to rest or sleep, as the room remains dazzlingly bright perpetually. But unravelling the technology now would be too much trouble. It is what it is. People have learned to live with it.

Stewart Lee’s Content Provider is now touring; see stewartlee.co.uk for details