Save a Book, Burn a Data Centre: Why Fahrenheit 451 Should Become Mandatory Reading
By Caitlín Small
At the beginning of this year, I decided to finally read Fahrenheit 451, written in 1953 by Ray Bradbury. The rumours are true; somehow a man predicted what the world would become 73 years into the future. His concepts of mind-numbing TV screens spanning entire household walls and earbuds that negated much need for true, genuine human interaction, while frighteningly accurate, weren’t even the most impressive of his literary fortune-telling.
Rather, it was the overarching themes of human violence, mistrust in education and, as a result, self-censorship. Humans in Bradbury’s world are wholly apathetic and joyride to kill for fun. This display of complete moral decay is especially timely, considering the happenings in Kildare this August [1]. Books are also illegal and burned by “firemen” upon any instance of their discovery, but the unnerving part was that the “Firemen [were] rarely necessary. The public itself stopped reading on its own accord.” And so, I pose these questions, in a completely earnest fashion: when was the last time you read a book? Do you find time in your day to dedicate even a couple of pages? Can you easily remember how an old book smells? It has become increasingly terrifying that, despite developing literary skills, a growing population today cannot list their favourite book read beyond primary school, or even the last time they rented a novel from the library and held it in their hands.
To me, the results of this can only be construed as terrifying. To too many others, however, it is blasé at the time, a giggle and shrug when you realise you cannot (or will not) read literature without asking an AI bot to summarise 10 pages at a time. It is therefore not shocking to me that the concept of the “dumb American” was peddled so heavily. It should not be acceptable for a social norm to exist that an entire (and heavily populated) group may be so intellectually incapacitated that they have little ability to challenge their government.
We are now also faced with the idea of “performatively” reading, and sometimes there is light-hearted truth to the matter; is Jacob well-intentioned with his copy of Marx whilst sitting inside a Starbucks? Hard to know. All the same, however, it points to a larger trend of anti-intellectualism, where one is demonised for pulling out their current read on a five-minute bus journey, because how beneficial can it really be? Well, we can’t measure exactly, but at the very least, it’s better than whatever 5 minutes scrolling on X provides.
It is time we came to terms with the fact that our grip on physical media has loosened and been jimmied out of our hands, for lack of better words, right under our nose. We no longer own outright; we license knowledge on a pay-to-play basis. Our long-term access to media has been hindered entirely; buy your dictionaries, thesauruses, novels, movies, and albums physically. Anything you really care about, for if you cannot hold it in your hands, then the means to alter and edit it become much easier for those with the power to do so.
By mocking those who use physical media, we open the door to losing even more autonomy we already cling to. Buy your books before you can’t; read them before your brain is trained not to.
Anthropic is now sourcing millions of physical books to train AI models, splicing their spines and destroying them in the process. This is all to avoid paying copyright fees, which is ironic considering the company is valued at $965bn [2].
To buy and pulp books, desirably written before 2022, i.e., the generative AI epidemic (ironic again) raises issues of legislative loopholes. One case regarding Kenny’s of Galway recently saw an order for 5,000 mostly unique, dated pieces of non-fiction. These pieces were to be shipped to likely EU collection points and then to the US, legally spliced under fair use policy loopholes [3]. The outcome of this will be that AI can mimic the act of an author, generating lifeless, uninspired books for us to gorge on, eventually numbing our minds entirely.
Art cannot evolve if generated from previous work without influence and lived experience; the human experience can only plateau from these happenings, slowly but surely, under the false guise of a mechanical piece. Fahrenheit 451 was a wake-up call for me and many others. The fact that Bradbury’s work has undergone censorship challenges in schools across America speaks volumes to its impact. A novel centred on promoting controllable media and destroying independent literature that stimulates uncomfortable thought sounds very familiar, we might find, if we just think hard enough.
Knowledge is power, and education grants us the ability to think critically. These are simple, oft-uttered words, but we must work to uphold their meaning.
References
[1] Glynn, Niall, and Hayley Halpin. 2026. ‘TikTok Declines Irish Invite to Discuss Dangerous Driving Videos’. BBC News, August 20.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c78g21ejk9go.
[2] Robins-Early, Nick. 2026. ‘Anthropic Reaches Valuation of $965Bn, Beating OpenAI to Become World’s Most Valuable AI Firm’. The Guardian, The Guardian, May 28.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/may/28/anthropic-ai-valuation.
[3] RTÉ News. 2026. ‘Galway Bookseller Suspects “Scattergun” Order Is for AI’. RTE.Ie, RTÉ, August 10. https://www.rte.ie/news/connacht/2026/0810/1587288-galway-booksai/
