WE DON'T NEED TO BURN BOOKS

Those who have read Fahrenheit 451 carefully will realize that Bradbury's greatest concern — given the social and historical context in which he wrote the novel — was not the government, nor censorship, but television. When Captain Beatty explains to Montag that no one ordered the books to be burned, but that people simply stopped reading them (which made them irrelevant, then bothersome, and finally dangerous), what emerges is a portrait of a society that rewards speed and punishes depth.

It was around 2020 that TikTok arrived — and stayed. At the time, it appeared as a way to unwind from what the entire world was living through: the COVID-19 pandemic. Downloads skyrocketed, sending millions of users into a dopamine spiral that hasn't stopped. Thanks to content creators with an almost surgical talent for editing, many of us burn through hours without noticing the world moving around us. But TikTok isn't the real problem. Before TikTok, there were already other platforms fighting for their place in our daily lives, keeping our eyes glazed and our thumbs scrolling while the screen quietly scorches our retinas.

Because of this, right now, millions of people would rather open their social media than a book. The most alarming part isn't that they choose one over the other, it's that they don't feel like they're missing anything important. And, as always, there was already a writer who saw this coming and warned us in precise, deliberate prose: what would capture our attention in this moment wouldn't be censorship — which is already a reality in several countries with a sharp authoritarian drift — but apathy.

Today, we don't need book burnings. We have more efficient options: the fifteen-minute summary, the explainer video, the content that promises knowledge without the inconvenience of effort. We have lost the ability to hold a complex idea long enough to truly understand it.

As I've written in previous columns, reading isn't just reading. It's a cognitive exercise. It's inhabiting another mind, following other people through a structure that doesn't resolve itself in thirty seconds and that doesn't hand you ready-made images: it asks you to build them yourself. When we stop reading, we don't just lose the chance to enjoy a good story. We lose the chance to think.

There was no need to predict social media in the last century. The simple existence of television was enough for Bradbury to see ahead, because the underlying human behavior was already there: the compulsion to consume speed. We use our phones to solve everything, so much so that it would be a perfect irony if you were reading this column on your phone right now. Seventy years later, the question still hangs in the air: are we losing the ability to read deeply without even realizing it? This, by any measure, is the fault of art.

• This is an English version of the article No necesitamos quemar libros by Josh Landon for Delfino.cr

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