@Background Pony Number 17  
Jorge Luis Borges foresaw first in “The Library of Babel” and “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”.

@ALIS  
Who said the government was behind it? That’s just silly. We’re doing it to ourselves.

If anything’s proven Fahrenheit 451 a false prophecy, it’s Wikipedia. An repository of human knowledge on almost any subject, created by private individuals not acting on behalf of any government, and preserved (hopefully) forever on media that can be reproduced endlessly and transmitted anywhere. Bradbury’s “book talkers” couldn’t even imagine a scheme to preserve the written word like that.

@Lawful Girly
 
You forgot your hat. /Tinfoil
 
Mindless Reality TV and Soap Opera type entertainment has been around since forever. It isn’t some cwazy conspiracy it is what people have always enjoyed. The only difference is the volumes consumed thanks to newer advanced storing technology. Mass printing, cassettes, CD’s tapes, records, broadcasting, digital storage…
 
The government couldn’t have less to do with soaps and reality TV. If you want to see that kind of thing stopped you would have to pry the distribution technology away and restrict people from making it (a la 1984), because this is what humans do themselves and god bless us for it.

@Alalic  
Although one part of the book still rings true–mindless reality TV and soap operas have become the popular thing, with surround sound systems and earbuds so you can listen to it in bed and it’s used to keep the populace in check a la “Brave New World”. (Bradbury didn’t use those terms, but they’re uncannily similar.)

@cb5  
Nah, if anything we are getting farther away from a future like 451.  
The internet is a haven of free info, even with all the attempts by governments and companies to change that.
 
Even then, governments have always been trying to censor people since forever- it’s not really a new thing.

@cb5
 
Nope. We have more access than ever to the written word and we use it.
 
All TV is, is Plays on a screen. In 451 they have supplanted books, in reality we just switched written knowledge to a new format.
 
People think our entertainment is lower brow but we only see “The Classics” of the past not the everyday crap.
 
Today knowledge is just available in greater quantities.

Anybody else find it disturbing that we’re kind of close to such a world?

Imminent librarian rage.

That book is NSFTS: Not Safe For Twilight Sparkle.

Mm, that 451 looked like Eastern jargon. Apologies. :3

It’s Farenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. Read moar.

@thps48  
Surely you have at least heard about Fahrenheit 451?

@thps48  
what? no!

Is this a Nazi ref? :T