> There's an old adage that goes "if you're not paying for it, you are the product" What does it say about our society that this is now an *old* adage? Someon

> There's an old adage that goes "if you're not paying for it, you are the product" What does it say about our society that this is now an *old* adage? Someone yesterday commented here that this is the most repeated quote on HN: > "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it" Everything we as a society today see as categorically wrong and repugnant was at one time in the not far past actively and passively accepted by the mainstream, with nearly everyone looking the other way and going with the flow. Yet even back then our societal conscience knew the very inconvenient truth. Those who repeatedly tried to wake society's conscience, to unbury the truth were invariably branded as radicals or crazies, doomed to be modern day Cassandras.