Fahrenheit 451: RAY BRADBURY.

• Author: Suderman, Peter

ho needs books when you have mass media to dull your brain, and mob passions to keep you enraged?

Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 (1953) is famously a novel about a world where books are banned and burned as a method of social control. The story follows Guy Montag, a "fireman" who sets books aflame. He's an agent of the state tasked with destroying literature that might spur people to think for themselves. Eventually, he is awakened to great writing's power to engage and enliven the mind.

But it's also a story about the power of modern media to both stupefy and incense the collective consciousness. It culminates in a crowdsourced manhunt televised for the amusement of self-satisfied dullards, all to serve the agenda of an authoritarian state. While the novel predates social media by decades, it describes what might be understood as media-driven cancel mobs. Bradbury understood how censorship could slide from seemingly innocuous attempts to ban a few "dangerous" ideas to prohibiting entire zones of thought, opinion, and inquiry--and eventually to direct attacks on the individuals who hold those ideas.

So it was rather ironic when, years later, the book became unavailable in its original form, having been sanitized for public schools. Starting in 1967, publisher Ballantine Books produced a second version of the text for consumption by...