Last night I was lying in bed trying to get to sleep, and as is typical when trying to clear my mind I instead was assaulted by a swarm of loosely-connected tangential thoughts. I won't get into the whole sequence, but somewhere down the line I recalled a discussion with a friend of mine at the post office a few days ago that focused around the fallacy of neoliberalism. This led me to conceive an editorial cartoon, which I may yet draw, of a steam train, with the tender full of public money and the engineer (a government worker if you're feeling cynical) shovelling it into the insatiable furnace of corporate interest.

"But wait!" I already heard the critics cry, "Isn't that powering the engine? Aren't we going somewhere?" And then I started pondering what metaphors the passenger cars could represent, and at that point the vision mutated into an analogy once used in a discussion of F.A. Hayek's conceptualization of freedom as absence of coercion secured through private property, which soon enough turned into a debate about his neoliberal economic philosophy. The trickle-down theory that so enamoured Reagan et al. was propagated as a passenger train on the move, the first-class compartments occupied by the monied elite and their political counterparts, whose exorbitant wealth would roll down the aisles to the less-opportune passengers. (I was already scratching my head when I first heard the scenario, too.) According to this setup, there would always be class difference, but to bring the train to a halt and redistribute the wealth was dismissed as an unnecessary, indeed harmful, interruption. (I'm thinking the train was trying not to arrive late for the next G-8 summit.)

"Hold on a minute," I thought, in one of the precious few 'eureka' moments of my life, "We've neglected a very important question: Where, exactly, is this train heading?"

I'm certainly no anprim, but at the same time I find the old adage "you can't stop progress" a weak excuse for lack of will to seriously confront the ethical questions of advance for advancement's sake. Without getting into the wealth of literature I've read on the subject (since to properly explain it all I'll need multiple journals), the continued defence of free market capitalism, despite the legacy of Africa, South America, the Russian crisis and the 2008 crash (to name but a select few) calls to mind the definition of insanity as repeating the same action and expecting a different result. Progress gave us penicillin. Progress also gave us Mutually Assured Destruction. Progress landed us on the moon. Progress nearly annihilated the indigenous Americans. In my cartoon, the progress train, the engine indifferent and the engineer unwatching, thunders over the edge of a cliff.

But just like my jumbled stream of consciousness last night, let's now veer away from that most deplorable of pseudo-sciences, economics, and talk about what the kids these days really care about: social media. Or rather, what the erosion of any concept of privacy of information means for today's society. Over at CivFanatics in one of the threads on Snowden, one of our European forumers commented on the curious tendency of Americans to take up arms against mere rumours of government snooping, yet willingly divulge tomes of personal data to corporations. Some (read: very little) of it is consensual, thanks in large part to arbitrary policy changes (Facebook) or gradual erosion (Google's original terms of service promised never to record any personal information; this draft does not appear in its official archives). The result is aggregate data leagues beyond what the CIA or FBI or NSA have collected by themselves. And unlike a totalitarian state, which one assumes is at least mining data to secure its own interests, the first and last reason corporations collect this information is to sell it. Snowden only grazed the tip of the iceberg.

How did it get this way? In large part, public apathy. I was fiercely opposed to Internet-based DRM from day one, which I considered intolerably intrusive, and routinely balk at gaming journalists' pronouncements that the model is here to stay. When it comes to draconian DRM, Xbox Live and Ubisoft routinely shoot themselves in the foot and are rightly criticized; yet despite Steam being a more benign platform, are we really willing to roll over and accept this system as the new industry standard simply because it's not as bad as it could be? Next time you encounter a Terms of Service form or are listening to the latest news about some government surveillance programme, ask yourself: Is this really the sort of progress we want?