Timothy

In 200 b.c. the Qin Dynasty unified China for the first time and wanted to create a new world. They burned books from conquered states and other schools of thought to erase inconvenient history. Status quo doesn't benefit from widespread knowledge. Knowledge threatens the state of things because the more people know and the more they think, the more they can come up with ways to change things. And change is unforgivable from an Orwellian perspective. It's why Ignorance is Strength and why you either fully buy into the new reality or get your soul crashed until you don't know what reality means. What's so unique about our world is that all knowledge and compute is at the tip of our fingers, yet no one reads anymore. There's multiple records of every piece of data, landscape, person, and nobody thinks about it. The wave of information we live in is akin to a place without it. So many news that the important ones go unnoticed. So much freedom on paper that we don't think if we are really free. I think I read in the prologue of Fahrenheit 451 that you don't have to burn books in a world of non-readers, a world of non-knowers. In Bradbury's world, firemen are not hired with a top-down mandate to burn books. Firemen are a bottom-up demand. They are meant to keep people in the state of things they deliberately chose.