As I write this, the bodies of hundreds of people are being pulled from the water off the coast of Libya, after two boats sank, drowning women, men, and children migrating in desperation from places like Syria, Bangladesh and sub-Saharan Africa.

The images become a horrific blur. Last week: Riot police in Macedonia firing tear gas at thousands of families trying to cross the border from Greece.  April: Seven hundred people dying when a smuggling ship sank off the coast of Italy.  Right now: Officials recovering the bodies of 71 people found rotting in a refrigerator truck left on the side of a road outside Vienna.  We don’t know who these 71 people were, only small heart wrenching details: three of them were children, a Syrian passport was found.  What we know is that they were migrating, that they were 71 of the millions of people around the world who have been uprooted from their home countries by economic, political, and climate chaos.

The global magnitude of this chaos is staggering.  The numbers for 2015 continue to swell, possibly higher than the 59.5 million people the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) says were forcibly displaced in 2014.  In other words, one in every 122 human beings on the planet is now either a refugee, asylum-seeker, or a person who has been internally displaced.  Here in the US, thousands of African Americans were displaced by hurricane Katrina and the “second storm” of racism that followed in the water’s wake, with many still demanding their right of return.

All this is a shadow of the migration that is to come.  In the years ahead we face huge waves of migration by economic, political and climate refugees, at an almost unimaginable scale.

Tonight, as I write this, I ask myself who is responsible. I ask myself what can we do.

What I know is that we are all responsible.

What I know is that we all must act.

What I know is that people, in defiance of states, must embrace our global human family and provide refuge and support to those who have been pushed off of their lands due to growing economic inequality, climate drought, war and conflict.

What I know is that the President’s Trans Pacific Partnership will make this problem one hundred times worse and one thousand times harder to solve through “legal means.” It will create the conditions that will accelerate harm and increase human trafficking and the loss of human life.

What I know is that we must open borders, stop criminalizing migration and migrants, and defy any state that does violence to members of our shared human family.

What I know is that we are living in a time in which we will truly live together as brothers and sister or perish together as fools. I know those are our only choices. I know the cries of those dying at sea warn us of what lies ahead for all of us.

What I know is that even if all our “clean power” dreams were implemented today, the level of climate disaster already underway will continue to drive huge levels of human migration as people leave their lands in search of places where there is enough water to grow food so their children can eat.

What I know is that we must continue the fight for climate mitigation, but step up our work on adaptation and increasing social equity. Embracing all migrants and our global human family is a core responsibility in everything we do.

What I know is that even as we insist that our government bring an end policies rooted militarism, materialism, and racism – the policies that are driving this migration — we cannot to wait for states to take action.

What I know is that we must insist – immediately in the upcoming Paris climate talks — that our national, state and local governments do all they can to protect human life by reversing the impacts of climate change.

What I know is that we must pour all our hearts and souls into the movements for global democracy, global governance, and people-to-people sovereignty.

What I know is that there is no such thing as domestic policy or foreign policy in an interconnected world. We must insist that all national leaders act in the interest of our global family.

What I know is that we must find ways to be good neighbors, to defy the state and provide safe harbor to those pushed out of their homes by an economy that has benefited many of us at the expense of the rest of the world.  I know we can and should insist that our government mitigate the harm of human trafficking.  To end this trafficking we must end the violent inequality that drives it.

What I know is that we must pledge allegiance to our global human family. Migration is a human right.

My pledge is this:

I pledge allegiance to my global human family and to

defend the web of life that is our home.

One world. One love. One family.

Interconnected, Interdependent

Indivisible.

I vow to defy the state or any authority

that promotes violence, hate or

the lie of separation.

In the name of love

I pledge.

What is your pledge?

#GlobalHumanFamily

#WhatsYourPledge?

#MigrationIsBeautiful

#MigrationIsARight

#ForcedMigrationIsACrime

#TheRightToStay

#TheRightToMove

#TheRightToReturn

#ActForHumanity

#ActForClimate

#DefendThePeople

#DefyTheState
#AssertTheRightToDoWhatIsRight

Last year, as the uprising in Ferguson and the movement for Black lives sparked direct action all across the country, many of us turned out on the streets – and actively spread the word to others via the Internet.

On our organization’s Facebook page we planned to broadcast information about actions as far and wide as we could, using “boosts”, a click that allows you to pay a few dollars for Facebook to proactively place content into the feeds of your followers and their followers, boosting visibility for important things.

But, when I went to boost these calls to action I found that for the first time in my short Internet career, my boosts were denied. Thinking it was a glitch I tried again and again, until it was clear that boosting any #BlackLivesMatter action would be denied – an experience I confirmed with other people trying to do the same.

Of course a denied Facebook boost is minuscule and embarrassingly unsurprising, especially compared to really dangerous things like government surveillance and white supremacists breeding violence online.

And of course #BlackLivesMatter has always (in the words of co-founder Alicia Garza) used “social media and online platforms to expand people’s consciousness about the lives of Black people” and “create a space for Black people to organize.” With great care #BlackLivesMatter has built real relationships online and off, so the trust and momentum and communication was deep and ready for action when the moment demanded it.

The movement for Black lives was powerful enough. But my moment of Internet struggle was real and maybe a little too familiar for a lot of us, reminding me how limited and vulnerable our ride on the Internet is, and underscoring the findings of a report released today:

Unlike mainstream media, which is moderated by external gatekeepers, [social justice] groups see the Internet as a platform they control – the effect of the corporate ownership of the Internet is less visible to them.

The report, The Digital CultureSHIFT: From Scale to Power – How the Internet Shapes Social Justice Movements and Social Justice Movements Are Shaping the Internet was put out by Center for Media Justice in partnership with ColorOfChange.org and Data & Society and analyzes results from interviews with 22 progressive social change leaders (folks from places like from Presente.org, Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, Jobs with Justice, #BlackLivesMatter, and CREDO Action). DigitalCultureSHIFT found that:

• 100% of those interviewed said that digital strategies and platforms provide a voice when mainstream media ignores issues.

• The vast majority widely uses digital platforms to catalyze action, but say over-reliance on these tools can limit relationship building.

• The Internet is changing the meaning of membership and forcing social change leaders to re-think the forms of organization. More than 80% of respondents indicated that Internet was helping to shift national organizations from centralized to de-centralized, from geographically specific to geographically diverse, and from hierarchical leadership to multi-level leadership.

• Targeted surveillance is a top concern, particularly for organizations working with communities of color, migrants, or poor communities—but the vast majority of leaders interviewed felt that the movement for digital privacy did not include their voices or their visions for change. Still, digital rights groups are finding common cause with legacy and emerging civil rights groups to counter the discriminatory collection and application of data.

These findings make it clear: there’s a lot at stake.

Nonetheless, says DigitalCultureSHIFT,

The use of the Internet to drive strategies for racial and economic justice remains disconnected from fights to promote and preserve digital rights and access. This separation reduces the effectiveness of each, and weakens overall movement strategies for change.

DigitalCultureSHIFT asks an important question:

As activism for police accountability, fair wages, just immigration, and more takes center stage– social justice movements of the 21^st century are using technology to achieve greater scale and reach wider audiences. But, are these digital strategies building power for long-term social change? Or helping maintain the status quo?

How can we, as movements, shift so that our digital strategies build power?

Recommendations put forward by DigitalCultureSHIFT include things like:

• New approaches in both the field and philanthropic organizations, in which digital strategies are driven by values, focused on equity, rooted in a long-term social change vision, supported by universal digital access and rights.

• Changing the platform to change the issue. The more open and democratic our systems of communication are, the more those platforms will drive a healthy and participatory public debate on social issues.

• Scaling up successful projects like Van Jones’ Yes We Code, or the Open Web Fellows program to inject digital experts with best-in-class algorithm skills into social movements.

• Changing the way we “do change”: those in social justice fields and in the philanthropic organizations that fund this work must develop new approaches that trust and support organizers, fund at intersections, and invest in shared infrastructure, multi-level stakeholder collaboration, and digital leadership development.

The moment is urgently now, writes Color of Change’s James Rucker in the introduction to DigitalCultureSHIFT, for our movements to engage with the Internet as both a tool and as arena for change:

As the nation emerges from a decade-long fight to keep the Internet open into a period of extraordinary contest for the role digital technologies will play in the lives of Black Americans and others, missing this opportunity would empower the forces that benefit from a corporate-controlled media: large, incumbent corporations and those who currently enjoy disproportionate power.

“After years of progress bridging the gap between technology, Black representation, and social justice, writers Rucker, “this is a cost Black communities – and all those pushed to the margins of both democracy and debate – just can’t afford.”