evidence: "Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!" urges American transcendentalist writer Henry David Thoreau in Walden (1854), his account of living frugally in a log cabin near Concord, Massachusetts. "Let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail." [...] Even the slowly dribbling "news feed" of mid-19th-century New England was seemingly too much for Thoreau, experienced as irritation to the point of pain. "For my part, I could easily live without the post-office," he writes in Walden, seemingly excusing himself from circuits of worldly communication in order to retreat more effectively into the contemplative mode he practises by his Massachusetts pond. A tendency in Thoreau towards inwardness or self-reliance looks startlingly out of kilter with our networked world. From Walden, again: "I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion." Here is the transcendentalist appearing withdrawn, anti-social, even potentially sociopathic. [...] The passage is characteristic of the social engagement of Thoreau’s writing. In reading his work as he turns 200, we do not, after all, find simply a regressive or detached figure. Rather, we encounter a writer who frequently provides us with valuable intellectual and rhetorical resources to take into our ongoing struggles in the world.