How This Novel From the 1950s Explored the Future (And Made Scarily-Accurate Predictions)
What is it like to be in a high-tech, futuristic world where books and knowledge are strictly banned? Maybe you’ve heard of this plot before from Fahrenheit 451, a dystopian novel written by Ray Bradbury in 1953. In the novel, the main character Guy Montag works as a fireman. Everything was normal until he brought a book home one day and started his life as a fugitive. Fahrenheit 451 not only tells a captivating story, but it also reflects on the 1950s society while presenting an intriguing worldview of the future.
Fahrenheit 451 implied more about the ‘50s society than television. The world presented in the novel was at war - a war without a clear enemy. Bombs were being dropped on cities as fighter airplanes roamed across the sky. From a historical context, these events all point back to the Cold War. People lived in fear of bombs and bullets that never came, a fear that was subtly inserted in paragraphs and sentences throughout the story.
From another perspective, consumerism flourished with the economy during the 1950s, and great advancements were seen in technology including the television. It became extremely widespread, and by 1955, half the families in the U.S. had a black-and-white TV at home. Undoubtedly, it became a new source of addiction. Fahrenheit 451 also referenced various social issues in the large “TV-walls” popular for homes. In the story, Montag had spent almost all his salary on three TV-walls for the living room. But his wife Mildred, who did nothing but sit in front of the TVs all day, wanted a fourth wall so she could be completely enclosed by them.
“He saw her leaning toward the great shimmering walls of color and motion where the family talked and talked and talked to her, where the family prattled and chatted and said her name and smiled at her… Leaning into the wall as if all of the hunger of looking would find the secret of her sleepless unease there.” (Bradbury 161)
This event mocked the society of brainlessly following trends, while it also revealed a truth: the community of people indulging into the virtual world were slowly losing themselves in it. They devoured the media and drowned in technology, just to fail on filling the emptiness in their hearts, one time after another. Human connection was no longer valued, and Montag’s family was just one small fragment of the world that contributed to it, the exact same as others.
Unfortunately, time doesn’t make this concept irrelevant. Same applies to the internet we are all so dependent on, and addictive apps such as TikTok. And there’s still more of it; the design of the TV-walls are surprisingly similar to the VR headsets we have today. Not only did Fahrenheit 451 predict the invention of VR technology, but it also predicted the reality of the Metaverse. In the novel, Mildred interacts with her virtual - in other words, fake - family inside the TV-walls, who are all smiling and waving at her - oddly alike to the potential applications of the Metaverse, a concept of a completely virtual world.
Fahrenheit 451 also predicted smaller advances in technology such as the invention of airpods. They were called seashells and were used as a tool of long-length communication among characters. Mildred used it to listen to music as she lay awake at night, with “the thimble radios tamped tight, and an electronic ocean of sound, of music and talk and music and talk coming in, coming in on the shore of her unsleeping mind.” (Bradbury, 42)
Looking from a different angle, maybe the development of modern technology was somehow inspired by the creative imaginations and predictions from the past. No matter what, it’s still very interesting to see how imaginations and ideas are becoming a part of our reality. But let’s just hope that the novel continues to stay fictional instead of becoming a prophecy for the future of humanity.
Works Cited:
https://thefrailestthing.com/2018/06/15/were-reading-fahrenheit-451-wrong/