Threads: Are We Living in Fahrenheit 451?

The Rise of Threads and the Fall of Literacy

Before I even start typing, I can sense your objections. What are you talking about? People haven’t stopped reading.

And you would be right. But also, wrong.

Reading is not a banned activity as it was in Ray Bradbury’s 1953 classic Fahrenheit 451. After all, #booktok is now a viral hashtag on TikTok, which, as of 2023, is the most popular entertainment app in the world. That must mean something, right? It’s not like the entire hashtag is one giant marketing tool for Colleen Hoover’s dull prose…

Reading is not forbidden, but reading as an activity has been in decline for some time, especially among the youngest of us. But before I move on…

What really is reading?

Reading is basically an exchange of ideas between individuals, specifically between one or more authors and their readers: the entirety of humanity. It is, first and foremost, an instrument to kindle and incentivize dialogue, to spread stories and ideas, to prompt the reader to think and experience things outside of their ordinary world, or to re-think and re-elaborate things that they are already familiar with, but that they may not fully understand.

Writers and thinkers are born and die, but their ideas live on through their printed legacy: their writings. Therefore, it follows as a logical conclusion that writing and reading make humans immortal.

In 2017, during my second year of college, I welcomed a few classmates into my apartment for a film shoot, and, upon noticing the heavy stack of books that laid in front of my bedroom window 24/7, I began to frantically remove them from the frame. One of my classmates commented: “You still read books in 2017?”.

Even among my most “literary” acquaintances, reading feels like a sporadic activity, and, particularly, like a form of consumption that is often given up in favor of the much less intellectually demanding use of social media. As somebody who always preferred books to any form of short media content, I understood this as simply being a fact of life. I lived, and still live, in complete unawareness of the latest “trends” on apps like TikTok, because I never use them, and when I do, what I see is usually dull and uninspiring (that is, when it is not absolutely cringe).

After Threads was launched, I noticed an Instagram post by one of my acquaintances which said that “the last time they had got so much dopamine was when they downloaded TikTok in 2019”. I opened the app on Google, without signing up, just to see what the hype was all about.

I still don’t know what the hype is about.

Threads seems no different to me than all other social media platforms, where millions of strangers and some celebrities share random thoughts, selfies, memes, or any other type of “lite” content that is meant for immediate and effortless consumption. The majority of such “content” provides, in the best of cases, a quick laugh, and, in the worst of cases, even more, bottomless cringiness.

But whenever I voice my critical opinions about specific social media platforms or “trends”, I tend to feel like a displaced “boomer” rather than a late Millennial-early Zoomer, somebody who can be easily discarded as “out of touch”, a “nerd” stuck in a time warp, an alien among people of my same generation.

And yes, Threads being the app that it is — or rather, the app that Twitter was — most of its content is delivered through writing. But simply putting a few words together is not necessarily writing.

While the act of reading progresses, the activity of reading as a means to exchange valuable and well-thought-out ideas is dying. It is enough to look at the statistics: Medium is reported to have approximately 100 million monthly visitors. By comparison, TikTok has over 1 billion. And the newborn Threads has accumulated over 100 million active users since its launch five days ago, officially making the Twitter-copycat-app the fastest-growing app in history.

The expressions “short-form content” and “non-intellectually demanding” are what characterize social media and its most viral content. It’s a type of content designed to deliver the maximum amount of “happy chemicals”, such as dopamine, in the shortest amount of time. A bit like mainstream porn.

But there is an obvious downside to this: because the content is often superficial and leaves little to no legacy behind it, those happy chemicals quickly dissipate, leaving behind an even bigger void that needs to be urgently filled by more short-form content consumption. In other words, whereas the real exchange of ideas leaves one enriched for (ideally) the rest of their lives, short-form, shallow mainstream content is doomed to leave one longing for more and remaining forever dissatisfied with their method of consumption.

There is a major difference between the reality we live in and that of classical dystopian literature: we are not being pressured to not engage in activities such as reading, but we are pleasantly persuaded to. The tool of seduction is, after all, a much stronger tool than coercion, because it is welcomed by the intended victim: it infiltrates their minds with consent, thus creating the illusion that this is a free choice when it really is a clever game of persuasion. The same goal is obtained, but its effectiveness is reinforced by the fact that the victim does not feel like a victim, they do not realize they are being manipulated and that their choices are not genuine, and thus feel free to indulge in the fun new toy they’ve been gifted.

Eliminating the element of brute force and coercion and introducing, instead, the promise of pleasure, is probably one of the greatest re-discoveries of 21st-century social and political tyranny. It was the same tool employed by Louis XIV of France to strip the French aristocracy of any remaining political authority: by indulging them in lavish court life, he managed to establish one of Europe’s strongest absolutist monarchies. People weren’t stripped of their rights, they willingly gave them up.

And yes, I do believe that knowledge is a right and one of the most empowering ones. Preventing someone's access to sources of knowledge and information is an immoral act, and whilst this is not being accomplished by force, it is being accomplished nevertheless.

By providing people with shallow and meaningless entertainment, someone is skillfully taking our attention away from things that truly matter. As our minds become more and more accustomed to one-line jokes and 1-minute short-form content, our collective identities become more and more similar to a monolith, a one-block mass sharing the same stale ideas and little to no critical thought.

Ideas that should spark conversations and even controversies are left on shelves, the idea of thoughtful thinking given up in favor of immediate and effortless consumption.

So, while books are not being banned — or, at least, the majority of them aren’t — and reading is not a forbidden act, the art of exchanging ideas or of educating ourselves about humanity’s undying legacy is slowly atrophying, becoming more and more “outdated” or simply “less alluring” than it once was. Naturally, not everybody is abandoning books and articles for Threads or similar apps, but the statistics undeniably tell us that the majority is.

You don’t always need fire to destroy something. Sometimes all you need is a distraction.

Want to keep reading? Check out these similar articles:

Sign up for Medium through the author’s affiliate link and get instant access to unlimited articles, or show the author your support and appreciation by buying her a coffee!