Fahrenheit 401: Digital Deletion Is Incompatible with Democracy

book burning
(C) pcorreia on flickr

Quite understandably, book burning has a bad reputation. It is a scout badge for history’s nastiest antagonists – Nazis, Stalinists and the Taleban have indulged in it – and biblioclasm also provides the central motif for Ray Bradbury’s dystopian masterpiece Fahrenheit 451 (the temperature at which book paper burns), in which perversely named ‘firemen’ are tasked with obliterating burning outlawed books and occasionally the bookish. Continue reading “Fahrenheit 401: Digital Deletion Is Incompatible with Democracy”