For years I’ve been idly toying with the idea of trying to make a richer, more accessible version of Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience for today’s reader. This month I finally got around to implementing it.
You can find it here: Civil Disobedience, a thread by @hdthoreau.
It presents the essay as though it were a social media thread, and enhances it by adding “replies” from many people who have commented on the essay over the years — presented as though these commentators were reacting to it and to one another all around the same time. It flattens time, or cuts at a right angle through time.
Among these replies are also excerpts from Thoreau’s journals or his other published works in which he elaborates on some of the same themes he brings up in Civil Disobedience.
A couple of (ostensible) “bots” also contribute to the conversation — wikibot chimes in from time to time to explain some of Thoreau’s references that may no longer be common knowledge (who were Samuel Hoar and Daniel Webster anyway?), and biblebot gives you chapter-and-verse whenever Thoreau makes an allusion to something in the Christian bible.
I think this will be useful to people who want a richer, higher-dimensional experience of Civil Disobedience.
