Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 is deservedly known as one of the most significant, influential, and culturally important dystopias ever written in English. Set in a not-so-distant future – as viewed from 1953, when the novel was published for the first time – the book offers a grim picture of a heavily censored society. It imposes one limitation upon another on the spread or even preservation of knowledge and even creates a special organization of firemen, in which the protagonist Montag initially works, to burn books. Concerns about technological progress – in particular, film and television displacing the written word – is one of the central themes of the book. Looking from the age of the Internet, one may argue that Bradbury was wrong because technology facilitates access to knowledge instead of suppressing it. However, the author could have easily written the same novel today with only some alternations. Bradbury would have likely replaced government enforcement with private companies and stress the distracting elements of technology more, but the picture of the world where people care little about knowledge would remain largely the same. In the world of Fahrenheit 451 , the main enforcer of the dystopian social norms is the country’s government that puts measures in place to suppress printed books and the knowledge they contain. It does so to ensure a complacent and satisfied community of easily governed subjects who would not question the power of the state. Admittedly, it was not the government that originally created this new dystopian state of things. As Beatty – the book’s main exposition vehicle – mentions, the new world “didn’t come from the Government down” but happened through the simple dynamics of supply and demand (Bradbury 55). However, it is the government that ensures nothing threatens this new state of things. The government controls school education to stamp out the roots of free-thinking, and the government creates the firemen as “official censors, judges, and executors” in charge of humanity’s artificial peace of mind (Bradbury 56). Thus, while the government in Bradbury’s book did not initiate the changes described in the novel, it is the principal force in upholding them ad ensuring that things stay the way they are. If he wrote the book today, Bradbury would have likely demonstrated this responsibility as delegated to private companies. Concern for private businesses is already a prominent feature of the government depicted in Fahrenheit 451 , as evidenced by Beatty’s exchange with Montag. If a given book demonstrates the harmful effects of smoking, and “the cigarette people are weeping” because of its potential effect, the government is sure to intervene on their behalf (Bradbury 57). At the time of social media, when much – if not most – communication is done online, it would be much easier the companies to take care of themselves in this respect. Social networks would happily censor the opinions that the company perceives as harmful and delete the accounts posting them. As a result, a 21 st -century Clarisse would have a hard time reaching Montag, or anyone else for that matter, because the time’s greatest mode of communication would be inaccessi