Beyond Farenheit 451.

Fahrenheit 451 (1953) was a political novel in much the same way as George Orwell’s Animal Farm. Ray Bradbury’s most well-known novel was incendiary. Brave even, when all around were losing their heads over the perceived threat of the red menace and McCarthyism stoked the flames in the mass media, and was rewarded by even more attention and status in the media McCarthyites fed stories to.

You wonder what either writer would have made of the current bottom-up approach of some American states banning books like Huckleberry Finn?  Targeting books about race, gender, or identity, which wipes out books about black history or the holocaust of indigenous killings which presaged the American Dream. Anyone that’s gay is expected to look the other way—and certainly not write about it or expect to be published or read.

In a way, these are predictable. You could make a case that both authors saw clearly here.  

What neither could have seen was how books would be ripped up to feed the machine of Artificial Intelligence (AI).

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cp3rprx2wl4o

Second-hand book sales, mostly regarded as a positive, become insidious.  An American judge ruled that training AI software in this way was not a breach of copyright.

Machines consume books instead of people reading them. They are burnt in a new way as offerings to a new god.  

Data is purchased. But all the other free stuff is used too. Publicly available web data.

I’ve published 1725 posts on WordPress. Mostly about books and also football (Celtic). To begin with I’d get one or perhaps two ‘reads’. I’d no way of knowing if a person had read the post or just opened it by mistake, perhaps. My most popular ‘read’ posts were about someone I knew who had died, an obituary of sorts. Fitba next. Books last. Many times I’d be the only one who read my posts (I wasn’t a fan but somebody had to read them).  

Lately my numbers are up. After ten years, you’d call that natural progression. But the numbers signed up to my blog post has remained static. 157 members. Only three or four of the misguided read my posts regularly.

But some of my posts get over 1000 reads. Usually, that would be wonderful. If I could stretch my sore arm a bit more, I could pat myself on the back. Get in touch with agents and tell them, hey, I’m a bestseller. I’ve noticed a similar trend on the boards of ABCtales.

When I check out where I’m ‘read’ it becomes clear. China is where most of my ‘readers’ are. Followed by the United States, the United Kingdom and Hong Kong SAR China.

My work is being botonised and burnt in a new way. I’m sure yours is too. Read on (if you’re a real person).