Why ‘Fahrenheit 451’ Is the Book for Our Social Media Age
[Kip Currier: Looking forward to seeing this May 19th-debuting HBO adaptation of Ray Bradbury's ever-timely Fahrenheit 451 cautionary intellectual freedom tale, starring Michael B. Jordan as a book-burning-fireman-turned-book-preserver.]
"Bradbury believed that we wanted the
world to become this way. That we asked for the firemen to burn books.
That we wanted entertainment to replace reading and thinking. That we
voted for political and economic systems to keep us happy rather than
thoughtfully informed. He would say that we chose to give up our privacy
and freedom to tech companies. That we decided to entrust our cultural
heritage and knowledge to digital archives. The greatest army of firemen
will be irrelevant in the digital world. They will be as powerless as
spitting babies next to whoever controls a consolidated internet. How
could they stop one person, hiding in his parents’ basement with a
laptop, from hacking into thousands of years of humanity’s collective
history, literature and culture, and then rewriting all of it … or just
hitting delete?
And who would notice?"
