Fahrenheit 451 is Alive and Well—Digitally

There’s a new arson. Only this time, it’s harder to see the digital smoke.

Censorship—via book burnings—dates back to 600 BC. Perhaps the most famous recent example occurred May 10, 1933 in Germany. 34 universities participated in burns of more than 25,000 “offensive” books.

Such elimination “aimed to synchronize professional and cultural organizations with Nazi ideology and policy,” according to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Could something like this happen in America? It can, and it does.

Already.

Only now instead of pages turning to ash, our ones and zeros vanish. By controlling digital access, Big Tech also wants to “synchronize” society.

Worse, we are letting them.

Of course, school and library book bans have occurred for decades, accounting for 99% of all bans in the U.S. They have included beloved authors like Roald Dahl, Judy Blume, Dr. Seuss, John Steinbeck, and Mark Twain.

Just out of view is a more dangerous threat today.

In our technological age, censoring and thought control looks quite different. We often don’t witness the physical destruction of information. But censorship still occurs, albeit in more insidious ways.

Consider this: Roughly 35.6 million users google something every hour, generating 8.5 billion searches daily. Demand Sage reports, “Google Search owns approximately 92% of the search engine market share.” (And at libraries across the U.S., over half of all books and publications exist only online.)

Nowadays, there’s no need to incinerate actual books like some real-life Winston Smith toiling for the Ministry of Truth. If you control a search engine and the content it supplies, you control what info people find—or don’t find. You also control what conclusions they draw, and ultimately, how they think.

Also, because the big tech leviathan Amazon has so much publishing control through its outsized market share, this one company can disappear titles, yet another form of digital book burning.

Just ask coauthors Dr. McCullough and John Leake whose “top reviewed book for over 18 months [was] suddenly deemed ‘offensive’ and terminated” from the site. (It was only reinstated after widespread outrage forced Amazon’s hand—something that does not happen with every such book cancelation.)

These days, internet censorship takes many forms, from content filters to shadow banning—an Orwellian phrase if I ever heard one. Individuals can even find their domains “deregistered,” rendering them unsearchable or unfindable.

Why does this matter?

For one thing, ideas also disappear when books and info disappear. New generations who may have never read a certain title lose out when a powerful company memory-holes them. I can personally attest it’s become harder to write books and articles due to digital censorship. Some of the content that existed online only five years ago is now gone, very much affecting the zeitgeist.

This problem will only exacerbate if present conditions continue.

Already, Amazon sells 53% of all books and 80% of all eBooks. Journalist Abigail Shrier warns, “When a company controls over 83% of the market for books, it begins the process of deleting ideas from a society.”

It’s growing ever clearer that Big Tech via Google and Amazon seek to control what we know, how we know it, and what to think.

This is the new Fahrenheit 451.

But we can turn this situation around, starting with building awareness of the problem. Another solution? Promote open-source info online. And at the very least: save your physical books.

You never know when you’ll need them.