I recently re-read Ray Bradbury’s classic Fahrenheit 451 for the first time since junior high. This book is now frequently described as a “period piece,” as a work with some enduring relevance, but a work irretrievably tethered to Cold War-era conceptions of power, government, and culture.
However, re-reading this novel in the age of Trump, Netflix, Amazon, and endless entertainment, it is exceedingly clear that we should still care very deeply about it for several reasons.
First, this book predicts some cultural trends, trends which, the way Bradbury describes them in his imagined future, may seem a bit campy or, indeed, a bit tethered to Cold War-era concerns, but are in fact, growing and advancing toward fruition, as he imagined, just in ways that are exponentially more sophisticated.
Take the entertainment system imagined in the book, for example. Citizens have “TV parlors,” in which the walls are converted fully to television screens. Viewers can participate in sweepstakes to have small speaking parts in different shows from within their TV parlor. Guy Montag, the main character, finds that his wife, Mildred, has sent away box tops for a small part as “the homemaker” in a show. She receives the script and reads along.
