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Last week we wrapped up our mini-series on quietly influential books from the 1990’s. We initially considered including Snow Crash, but its influence was thrust into very public spotlight in 2021. Snow Crash achieved fast success in the science fiction genre after its 1992 publication and became a well-known, beloved novel amongst technologists. It went mainstream in October 2021, when Facebook announced its name change to Meta. Mark Zuckerberg bet the company’s future on the Metaverse, a term coined by Stephenson in Snow Crash.
Stephenson has gone on to write many other books, but Snow Crash remains one of the most influential. Many technologists were inspired by the book’s concept of humans controlling avatars in a parallel digital universe where they could be and do things that were out of reach in the “real world”. When Zuckerberg staked his company’s hundreds of billions of dollars of market value on implementing this concept, rumors resurfaced about him mandating Snow Crash as required reading for some at Facebook in years past. Journalists who then flipped through the book’s pages for conspiracy theory fuel could find some, like the below excerpt:
“…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.”
However, given our interests at Citizen Scholar, it would be a mistake to reduce Snow Crash’s significance to a one-liner about the Metaverse and move on. Stephenson crafts an interesting story following the subtly named hacker Hiro Protagonist through a dystopian United States of the future. Southern California has seceded from the Union and, like much of the rest of the world, has been divided into private sovereign entities controlled by organized criminals and sleezy corporations.
Many people, especially “hackers”, escape from their bleak realities by running to their desktop computers and visiting the Metaverse. In the Metaverse they can be physically flawless, have sword battles and own luxurious homes. Hackers in the Metaverse are very cool and interact with extraordinary digital beings; the richness of the detail that Stephenson envisioned thirty years ago must be the main reason why he inspired so many technologists.
The primary story arc that takes place between a dystopian physical future and the Metaverse begins when Hiro’s friend is harmed by a new Metaverse drug called Snow Crash. Stephenson uses the resulting storyline to explore not only the implications of the Metaverse but also his ideas about linguistics, romance, the formation of ideas and how social issues could evolve in the future.
After finally reading Snow Crash, it’s clear to us that it isn’t the plot itself that has created so much emotional attachment to this novel. Stephenson has had roles as a professional futurist and as an advisor to Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin because of the exciting, prophetic vision he laid out for the Metaverse. Stephenson didn’t just make the Metaverse seem cool; he made hackers seem cool – in 1992. The hackers in Snow Crash are sharp and witty; they engage in physical combat with compelling villains and in romance with alluring female hackers who are at least as sharp and witty.
We hate to be cynical, but on this point, Snow Crash can be to techies what Wolf of Wall Street is to college students who aspire to work in finance. A story meant to be a cautionary tale intoxicates the audience more with the glamour of the hero’s journey than with the warning baked into the hero’s struggles. We can empathize with people who this happens to, as other works of art have had similar effects on us. If one’s perspective leads them to more readily put themselves in the hero’s shoes, he/she is bound to view the lifestyle as neutral or positive and the story’s warning as independent of the lifestyle itself. Without giving too much away, our key takeaway from Snow Crash is its warning about the manipulative and destructive potential of addictive technology that influences the flow of information. If you’ve read Snow Crash, feel free to let us know your thoughts about this in the comment section! Even if you haven’t read the book, we’re eager for thoughts on how the Metaverse can be developed responsibly.
All the best,
The Citizen Scholar Team
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Discussion #35: Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson