Ah, it’s been a long time for me as well and I think I may have picked that idea up somewhere and must have found it attractive enough to supplant the obvious part…
The book is clear that people stopped reading books on their own, then came to distrust them, and then pressured the government to outlaw them. It wasn’t top-down like you might expect in an authoritarian society.
TBH, the book is a lot of “old man yells at cloud”. Bradbury wasn’t even that old at the time he wrote it, but it comes off that way.
One thing I think makes a good point is porches. Just a place for you to hang out and signal to your neighbors that it’s OK to start up a random conversation as they walk by. Most houses aren’t built these days with porches that are particularly usable for that, and setback requirements in zoning often make them legally impossible to add.
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