Imagine a world where other people could not talk to you unless invited to. Your last few human interactions may predict if you will find the idea appealing or not at first glance, but a pause for thought would immediately suggest many potential problems with this personal space utopia.

If you think about this world, you can easily see the dark path towards dystopia and chaos. Just like eating your greens, the human mind needs exposure to information that it would not choose to accept in. A prolonged diet of information from the same sources will atrophy the mind muscle and imprison conscious thought in an echo chamber.

You may be feeling that this imagined world is very much the same as our present reality in the universe of online social media. In fact, every major social network is based on the ‘follow’ model, where users subscribe to a few individual information feeds from friends, newssources or celebrities.

This dark enlightenment about the nature of our digital sphere may be difficult to accept and adjust to, but nevertheless you should initiate the course of action that it demands. Escape and delete ‘follow’ based social networks including Instagram and Facebook from Mark Zuckerberg’s evil empire, the fascism-enabler Twitter and the infantilizing SnapChat.

At TRIBE (http://www.tribe-chat.com) we have a vision for an open flow of information and ideas between humans. TRIBE for the web focuses on topic discussion. The TRIBE mobile app creates an augmented reality of communication in the form of location based chat which lets users build digital interaction bridges across their immediate physical space. Stop following, lead by example. Join the TRIBE and start talking with real people.