Social networking is the nuclear energy of the digital era.  Its ‘discovery’, just a handful of years ago, changed everything about life online.  For the first time, we could represent the connections which had always existed between our ears, and we could grow beyond our natural limits – the failures of the flesh – into a broader connectivity than we had ever before experienced.  Breadth is not depth, but breadth has powers – and charms – previously undreamt of.  We gathered together, and connected, one to another, plugging ourselves in to one another’s minds.

With that connection came an explosion of creativity wrought from sharing: we shared our thoughts, our innovations, what we had seen and heard, what others had seen and heard. An immense river of gold flows continuously through all of our lives, the product of all of this sharing.  This sharing that is us, and has become the best hope for us, frames the way we create knowledge, solve problems, even fight revolutions.

Some have come to believe that they are the nexus of this sharing, that they are so important to the process – claiming that they brought it into being – that they deserve to control how, when, where and why we share.  They would shape our sharing to their own ends.  This is like the midwife claiming to be the mother of the child.  The midwife has an important role, but once the baby is delivered, the midwife steps away and allows the mother to nurture the child.

We are out of the womb now.  We are coming into a more complete understanding of the power of sharing, and as our understanding grows we chafe against any constraints to that sharing.  What seemed wonderful and delightful just a few years ago now kicks against the goads.  We feel tethered, bound, captured.  We wish things could be different, but we are not in control.  We ceded that control when we were too young and to naïve to comprehend what we were being asked to hand over.  Now that we are older, we find that though we ask for control, it has not been returned to us.

There is only one solution.  We must take the thing which is inalienable from us – our presence – and remove it from those who would use that presence for their own gain.  We must move, migrate, become digital refugees, fleeing a regime which seeks only its own best interests, to the detriment of our own.  We must strike out and chart the shores of a New World, a place untouched by the petty values of this blasted land, and there found a City on a Hill, a beacon for the others who will follow after us.  The regimes of the old world will only grow more grasping, less flexible, and more inclined to insult.  We may be the first, but we will not be the last.  We must map the harbors, clear the woods, and make virgin lands inviting enough that it will be an easy decision for those who will come to join us in this new country, where freedom goes hand-in-hand with presence, where privacy is not a dirty word, and where the future knows no bounds.