About this episode
Thoreau's essay On the Duty of Civil Disobedience began as a lecture in 1848 — a response to the Mexican-American War, slavery, and a poll tax he refused to pay. It has been reprinted, retitled, and put to work by half a century of protest movements since.
The argument beneath it — that the individual conscience is prior to the state's machinery — reads oddly like a defence of anyone maintaining their own publishing channel outside the platforms. This episode carries Part 1 in full, then asks: if Thoreau were online today, what would he refuse to post to?
Chapters
- 0:00 — The government which governs least
- 6:00 — Standing armies, standing feeds
- 13:30 — The machine of oppression
- 21:00 — Individual friction
- 28:00 — Publishing as protest
- 35:30 — What Thoreau would delete
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