Always connected

Have you ever heard the phrase, "Only connect"? It refers to an E.M. Forster quote from his 1910 novel, "Howards End" (which the Complete and Total Loser hasn't read, by the way):

"Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die."

-- Chapter 22. The "her" is Margaret.

These days the Internet is almost demanding that everyone never disconnect. Remember when "Sign Off" was always right there when you were on Yahoo! or Gmail? Not now. You have to click on something that's barely recognizable as an icon (something that looks kind of like a gear, often) to get that option, and I swear that when I click on Sign Off it goes to something different, like my profile. What they want, obviously, is to keep you on so they can track everything you do and sell the data to advertisers so they can add to their already obscene profits. At some point there will be so many hoops to jump through that we'll all just say, fine, I won't log off.
And people are afraid of the NSA's snooping. Please. We do a fine job of that on our own.