In nineteen fifty-three, a Californian science-fiction writer named Ray Bradbury published a short novel called Fahrenheit four-five-one.

The plot, the part everyone remembers, is that books are illegal and there is a fire brigade whose job is to burn them. The hero, Guy Montag, is a fireman who begins, slowly, to read.

That is the part everyone remembers. Bradbury said, until the day he died, that everyone was wrong. The book is not about censorship.

Listen to what he wrote about Montag's wife.

Mildred wears small radios tamped tight in her ears. He calls them Seashells. They play her an electronic ocean of sound, of music and talk and music and talk, all night. She falls asleep to them. She wakes to them. She does not remove them.

The walls of her living room are three vast television screens. She calls the people on them her family. She tells her husband she would like a fourth wall, so the parlor will be complete.

When Montag tries to read aloud to her, she does not understand. The words have no place to land.

The Mechanical Hound paces the street outside.

In two thousand and seven, a journalist asked Bradbury if Fahrenheit four-five-one was a warning about Senator McCarthy and the censorship of the nineteen fifties. Bradbury, by then eighty-six years old, told him no. He had spent fifty years listening to that wrong answer. The book was about television. It was about people being turned, in his exact phrase, into morons by it. The fire brigade was just what came after.

In nineteen fifty-three, the average American household did not yet own a television set.

Today, Apple's AirPods will cross one hundred billion dollars in cumulative revenue. The wall-sized television in the average American living room is bigger than the longest bookshelf in the house. Boston Dynamics' robotic Spot patrols warehouses and police auxiliaries. The average American adult now reads, in any form, for less than fifteen minutes a day.

Bradbury's seashells are in your ears, perhaps, while you watch this. His parlor walls are mounted on yours. His Mechanical Hound has the contract for the next-shift patrol.

He told us. He told us a hundred times. The book burning was never the point.

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