http://archive.ncsa.illinois.edu/prajlich/forster.html
EDIT: Looks like that link is a little overloaded right now... This one works: https://www.ele.uri.edu/faculty/vetter/Other-stuff/The-Machi...
The original short story is breathtaking for both its foresight and salience. It belongs with those titans of dystopia, 1984 and Brave New World. In some ways, it is perhaps even more relevant to today's world, given the rise of all encompassing distributed computing juggernauts like Google and Facebook. These systems have gotten so big and so complex, it seems beyond the capability of any individual to rein them in.
One time he was working in an old house and found a very old mimeographed copy of that story hidden in the walls. He took this to suggest that the story or the author were somehow subversive or secret and became really motivated to read it. It is the only thing I'd ever known him to read, much less seen him at it with my own eyes.
I think for him that was like an unlikely collection of perfect circumstances because he loved the story and his experiences around it. I suspect in his mind he had been exposed to some sort of forbidden knowledge and that pleased him greatly.
I fail to see how it's ironic, given that the original story was about a button-pressing utopia. The utopia wasn't so simplistic and purile as people having things read to them, or watching movies instead of reading, but instead, people refused to do proper research, trusting written accounts from people several times removed from the original texts, like some obscene all-encompassing version of 'telephone'. People who were, ultimately, afraid of curiosity.