Remember the Louisiana Purchase?

In the 1800s the United States tripled in size. But with expansion came dangers; Great Britain's mismanagement of their American colonies had resulted in rebellion, a costly war, and the birth of a new nation (and competitor.) Congress didn't want the same sort of thing to happen with the Western territories, so they passed the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, an effort to effectively manage growth.

Here's how The Houghton Mifflin Companion to US History summarized the act's significance:

The Northwest Ordinance was one of the most important acts passed by Congress under the Articles of Confederation. It laid out the process through which a territory could move to statehood, it guaranteed that new states would be on an equal footing with the old, and it protected civil liberties in the new territories. This ordinance was also the first national legislation that set limits on the expansion of slavery.

Among other things, the act guaranteed limited self-government to a territory as it grew, and promised that once it reached 60,000 people it could write a state constitution and apply for full-fledged statehood.

Now, there were problems about how Congress kept these promises. Sometimes political reasons (mostly related to slavery) caused them to drag their feet in admitting some states when they were technically qualified. However, the feeling of fair treatment and promise of eventual statehood that was fostered in the territories by the Northwest Ordinance were crucial in avoiding the creation of splinter countries in those areas.

(It should be noted that the US did experience one major attempted breakaway, which resulted in the Civil War, but that was primarily a dispute between already existing states, so it's not really relevant to the example at hand.)

The lesson we can learn here for our digital world is that inevitable growth needs to be effectively managed or else it can become a curse. A Larry Lessig TED talk discusses the inevitable expansion of today's youth into the frontier of remix culture.

It is technology that has made them different, and as we see what this technology can do,we need to recognize you can't kill the instinct the technology produces. We can only criminalize it. We can't stop our kids from using it. We can only drive it underground. We can't make our kids passive again. We can only make them, quote, "pirates." And is that good? We live in this weird time. It's kind of age of prohibitions, where in many areas of our life, we live life constantly against the law. Ordinary people live life against the law, and that's what I -- we are doing to our kids. They live life knowing they live it against the law.That realization is extraordinarily corrosive, extraordinarily corrupting. And in a democracy, we ought to be able to do better.

Now is the time to figure out how we're going to manage the content flood we're already witnessing. The counter-culture that our current, antiquated system causes isn't healthy and could cause serious rifts in society.

*Photo credit: Public Domain image found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:United-states-territorial-acquistions-midcentury.png