(Some scattered thoughts I originally posted on Friendfeed after learning Ray Bradbury had died, about Fahrenheit 451’s continuing applicability to the contemporary world, and how the Internet’s ability to save all information may be a double-edged sword, slightly edited)

Ray Bradbury repeatedly corrected people about the meaning of Fahrenheit 451. It wasn’t about censorship. It was about a culture deliberately burning its treasures because it didn’t think it needed them any more. I wonder if anyone ever got him on record about how he felt about the idea that e-books would take over everything and make actual printed and bound books obsolete.

While we don’t go around burning people’s books so that they’ll buy the e-book and/or Blu-Ray of the movie adaptation and/or subscribe to the MMORPG based on the book (that doesn’t really feature much of the book at all), the whole shift from letting people own physical copies to just granting them licenses to use the stuff—licenses that can be revoked at a whim, without any notification—seems like it could just be as pernicious. This version is obsolete, pay us another $16.95/$49.95/$59.95 to get the newest version/special edition/expansion pack, or never be able to read/watch/play this ever again! The same effects of burning, without all the carbon emissions.

But I guess the Internet is the thing that saves us. The same tech that can taketh away also giveth. While it’s easy to lock up IP with DRM and litigation, it’s also easy to distribute unlocked IP these days—both illicitly copied and originally created. No verbatim memorization required.

After reading all those William Gibson essays and remembering Montag’s musings in the end of Fahrenheit 451 about how (in essence) culture and art and specifically literature is a form of memory that humanity can use to learn from its mistakes, I wonder how robust the Internet would be at preserving our accumulated knowledge in the face of global thermonuclear war. I know that’s exactly what ARPANET was designed for, but it’s not like they could actually run a complete test to prove it.

But sometimes forgetting can be a blessing. Because sometimes I wonder if the Renaissance would’ve happened the way it did if people didn’t (temporarily) forget or lose the accumulated knowledge from the ancient Greeks and Romans, only rediscovering some of that stuff through the Caliphate. Would we still be using steam engines as mere toys, instead of actual power sources?

But the Web forgets nothing. (This is not strictly true, because the Web doesn’t really know everything, and stuff gets deleted and edited all the time, and archive.org doesn’t track every page and every change.) It’s easy to believe this is an unalloyed good, but then I remember something I read and blogged about like more than a decade ago, about a patient who couldn’t forget anything and I wish I had a better imagination and sufficient writing skill and perserverance to write a science fiction story about the cultural pathologies that will arise from this inability to truly delete anything from the Web.