"Now, here's a book about lung cancer. All the cigarette smokers got into a panic, so for everybody's peace of mind, we burn it. Ah, now this one must be very profound. The Ethics of Aristotle. Now anybody that read that must believe he's a cut above anybody that hadn't. You see, it's no good Montag. We've all got to be alike. The only way to be happy is for everyone to be made equal. So, we must burn the books, Montag. All the books [holds up Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler]."There are infinite reasons for suppressing information. I always appreciate when someone recognizes that anyone can become a fascist.
And it's interesting that there is a remake in the works considering that Mel Gibson (tied to an early version of the project) once said that he didn't think that burning books still had the same impact given the ubiquity of computers and digitization.
What would they have now besides the "451" firemen? Would there be a "1T" (one Tesla) division for hard drive data "burning." Maybe, but I guess that's not as exciting as using a flamethrower to burn a pile of books, unless there's a way to aim your degausser at some guy and suck all the piercings from off his face (or wherever).
Adding computers to the story would be interesting; it would be cool to see someone downloading porn and then unmasking the hidden novel within the image with some steganography software.
And it would really be cool to see a "library" filled with computers where everyone is just looking at images and watching movies with not one book to be found anywhere; gosh, wouldn't that be just crazy?!
And for the record, no books were harmed in the making of this post. But I did get one of my piercings caught on something. Ouch.
