snow crash 30+ years later

i pulled snow crash off the shelf a couple of weeks ago. i’d been meaning to re-read this but … other things.

i have to say, this has not aged well. it’s still an amusing and fun read, but it’s definitely grounded in the milieu of the late 80s early 90s. this novel had left a real mark on me as a form of technological world building. including serious dalliances with VRML and multi-player games. my 20s were composed of way too many late nights getting the limited rendering capabilities of the dimension X toolkit going on primitive 3D accelerated hardware.

that said, chunks of this book haven’t aged well (the creepy relationship between raven and YT is #1 with a bullet.) and others were remarkably prescient. the franchise-ification of pretty much everything incredibly wealthy monopolists who are more powerful than governments and chock full of crazy ideas and have hordes of acolytes. there’s still a lot of good stuff in here.

the hoopla of the facebook 2 meta transition and the ready availability of VR headsets and hardware made it easy to forget in hindsight that the big thrust of the book was not the metaverse. it was more or less a useful sideshow and a model for how networked interaction might take place.

the far more interesting bits in the book were the discussions regarding language as a virus and transmission mechanism. the sumerian/babylonion discussions were bonkers and probably the most interesting diversions of the many that were in the book. the exploitation of language and media to assume power is really what’s at the core of this and this little nugget really hit the mark.

Basically, anyone who reads the National Enquirer or watches pro wrestling on TV is easy to convert. And with Snow Crash as a promoter, it’s even easier to get converts.

“Rife’s key realization was that there’s no difference between modern culture and Sumerian. We have a huge workforce that is illiterate or alliterate and relies on TV - which is sort of an oral tradition. And we have a small, extremely literate power elite the - people who go into the Metaverse, basically-who understand that information is power, and who control society because they have this semimystical ability to speak magic computer languages.0

you can see this playing out in the acquisition of TV networks and movie studios and then there’s that whole twitter thing. increasingly, it’s not just information that’s critical, it’s attention. this is the coin of the realm.

probably less than an hour after i finished reading snow crash, a link to the following rolled in front of me. it’s a threads thread on biblical plagiarism. it really looks like big hunks of the memorable bits of the old testament were lifted directly from sumerian myths.