Snow Crash — Dinaburg Writes

by Neal Stephenson

Back before the smartphone obviated the grace of momentary boredom, I stayed overnight at my sister’s house and entertained myself with her overstuffed physical bookshelf. I was only there for a day or two and didn’t want to leave with a chunky copy of Dune or something similar crammed into my bag, so I picked up I am Legend. In those halcyon days, I am Legend was only a novella—If you’re unable to carbon date this anecdote from “before smartphone ubiquity,” then think about this as pre-2007 Will Smith movie version—so I ended up finishing it before I had to leave. With this surplus of time and no twitter yet to doomscroll, I actually read the errata.

And it always stuck with me, the author basically saying, “I wrote this when I was 23. The intensely horny aspects of this story seemed like the most important thing in the world back then, but I am embarrassed by them now and they would have been cut if I wrote this as an adult.” This has always stuck with me because it validated that I was not, in fact, just a prude, but that even the author thought those parts were jarring, non-additive and, most importantly, not fun to read.

Remembering this particular erratum helped me solidify my thoughts on Snow Crash; given its resurgence during the dawn of various metaverses (metasverse? Metaversae?), does Neal Stephenson feel some way about some of the linguistic choices that absolutely clang against a modern brain? Because Snow Crash is a 1992 manifesto for “cringe is good, actually.” It is amazing to me that a book where half of it is the goofiest satire ever written—Hiro Protagonist, pizza delivery by the Mafia, neurolinguistic hacking, religion as virus, the ultimate SoCal skateboarders union—and the other half is prescient current hellworld reality—Google Scholar, Google Earth, Chatbots and Digital Assistants, Google Glass—is seen as some sort of “How-To” manual for technocrats, dystopian futurists, and would-be VR world-builders.

Snow Crash’s Metaverse is neat, I guess, but it is not the core of the story. It’s not even the first VR “location” to be called the Metaverse! Why is it a bedrock text??

I’ll cut to the chase—I didn’t like this book very much. I think the author is incredibly talented and like a lot of his more recent novels, but this one kept missing for me. It is cited with reverence by a certain class of aging computer-savvy hacker-adjacents, but for a “beloved classic of the genre,” it sure is heavy with casual slurs and a real woof moment with its 15-year-old-girl-has-sex-with-adult-man plot point. I’m not sure how the extreme satire doesn’t dent the image of Snow Crash’s Metaverse as prescient holy text in a world before google parent-company Alphabet based their whole pitch deck on Hiro’s gargoyle-lite always-online surveillance gear, but here we are.

This techno-1990s alt-history this has forked off into had a lot of wild things going on, but a lot of the ideas presented were already floating around the ether. We are not before the cultural meme—“That’s my expression. I made it up. An expression like that is just like a virus, you know—it’s a piece of information—data—that spreads from one person to the next.”—and not even before early graphical MMOs: Habitat was out there, somewhere, an online hangout room powered by Maniac Mansion’s SCUMM engine. It was basic, but still enough to be codified by researchers at The First Annual International Conference on Cyberspace in 1990:

The essential lesson that we have abstracted from our experiences with Habitat is that a cyberspace is defined more by the interactions among the actors within it than by the technology with which it is implemented. While we find much of the work presently being done on elaborate interface technologies -- DataGloves, head-mounted displays, special-purpose rendering engines, and so on -- both exciting and promising, the almost mystical euphoria that currently seems to surround all this hardware is, in our opinion, both excessive and somewhat misplaced. We can't help having a nagging sense that it's all a bit of a distraction from the really pressing issues. At the core of our vision is the idea that cyberspace is necessarily a multiple-participant environment.

VR wasn’t exactly new-new, no matter what it was being called.

Same goes for calling the in-world representation an “avatar”—Habitat did it, sure, but I’ll grant that few beyond those cyberspace researchers even knew it existed. More importantly to America-centric video game nerdos, the player character in the Ultima series changed from The Stranger to The Avatar in 1985’s Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar. Side note: how sick would it be if player characters in online games were called “strangers” instead of “avatars”?

These facts do not diminish or even impact the qualities of Snow Crash as a novel. But I find it strange that the book is a touchstone for virtual reality when it is a simple adventure story that incorporates aspects of technology and VR culture that already existed. Even after reading it, I’m still asking myself ‘Why Snow Crash?’

I struggle to see what having the Metaverse in this novel does beyond being a nod to Tron and a way to get ancient Sumerian on the table in an interesting way.

“Did the Sumerians believe in magic?”
The Librarian shakes his head minutely. “This is the kind of seemingly precise question that is in fact very profound, and that pieces of software, such as myself, are notoriously clumsy at. Allow me to quote from Kramer, Samuel Noah, and Maier, John R. Myths of Enki, the Crafty God. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989: ‘Religion, magic, and medicine are so completely intertwined in Mesopotamia that separating them is frustrating and perhaps futile work….[Sumerian incantations] demonstrate an intimate connection between the religious, the magical, and the esthetic so complete that any attempt to pull one away from the other will distort the whole.’ There is more material here that might help explain the subject.

One can imagine asking Siri a similar question. “I have found the following on the web for ‘Sumerian Magic.’ Check it out.”

The “threat to the mind in Virtual Reality is a threat to the body in Reality” layer of the plot is there, and I can respect the in-book Metaverse serving as a clear delineating mark for how information can act as a “mental virus that spreads in the mind like a physical virus throughout the cells.” That metaphor needs a clear and simple realm in which to play, but I struggle to see a need, plotwise, for the three-dimensional immersive world—aside from Rule of Cool and all that. Like, the binary virus is spread through 2D “scrolls”—they’re computer screens. Don’t really need to embody the metaverse for that imagery to stick.

The things that actually drive the plot are way more “collapsed Soviet Empire weapons threatening the world” and “East Asian immigration scare on the west coast of the US” than the futurecasting of technological wonders. It a thoroughly contemporary novel for the early 1990s, in my opinion.

All that said, there are some neat artifacts to pull from Snow Crash: seeing the types of metaphors used for the internet before computers became blasé is amazing. As an example, I grew up with telephones. For me, they were not magical, nor did I really ever think about how or why the worked—they just did. Instant communication with someone far away? Probably pretty magical to people that didn’t grow up with it.

In that vein, the constant onslaught of the computer/brain analogies in Snow Crash are an interesting artifact because computers hadn’t hit saturation, yet. Computing was still mystical in 1992, and the people that used computers or were interested in them—the people most likely to be reading Snow Crash when it was contemporary—had to really understand the physical processes going on under the hood. So in 1992, machine language was attenuated by like, Pascal, but it wasn’t the eight-steps-removed of my current squarespace website from the on/off of the computer. So that metaphor works completely differently now—it is an era of hidden algorithms and “sentient” AI, where computers have gone from hobbyist niche to mainstream necessity. There are simply more layers between the hardware and the software, and people need to know much much less about how they work to get them to work. I don’t even use <a href=> </a> anymore for hyperlinks! I’m pretty sure most people don’t call them hyperlinks anymore, either. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Much like you don’t really need to be a mechanic to drive a car, anyone can poke at a screen and be radicalized by youtube. Or send an email or whatever.

To clarify this point, lets check the text and look at a couple of the passages that really dig into the “computer as human brain” angle:

“He believed that Babel was an actual historical event. That it happened in a particular time and place, coinciding with the disappearance of the Sumerian language. That prior to Babel/Infocalypse, languages tended to converge. And that afterward, languages have always had an innate tendency to diverge and become mutually incomprehensible—that this tendency is, as he put it, coiled like a serpent around the human brainstem.”
“If there was some phenomenon that moved through the population, altering their minds in such a way that they couldn’t process the Sumerian language anymore. Kind of in the same way that a virus moves from one computer to another, damaging each computer in the same way. Coiling around the brainstem.”

It goes further—the virus in Snow Crash only impacts the ‘hacker’ mind because only hackers can make sense of the ones and zeroes of binary code:

“Computers speak machine language,” Hiro says. “It’s written in ones and zeroes—binary code. At the lowest level, all computers are programmed with strings of ones and zeroes. When you program in machine language, you are controlling the computer at its brainstem, the root of its existence. It’s the tongue of Eden. But it’s very difficult to work in machine language because you go crazy after a while, working at such a minute level. So a whole Babel of computer languages has been created for programmers: FORTRAN, BASIC, COBOL, LISP, Pascal, C, PROLOG, FORTH. You talk to the computer in one of these languages, and a piece of software called a compiler converts it into machine language. But you never can tell exactly what the compiler is doing. It doesn’t always come out the way you want. Like a dusty pane or warped mirror. A really advanced hacker comes to understand the true inner workings of the machine—he sees through the language he’s working in and glimpses the secret functioning of the binary code—becomes a Ba’al Shem [kabbalist title translating to ‘master of the divine name’] of sorts.”

For better or for worse, Snow Crash is going to be—if it isn’t already—the populist touchstone for blockchain metaverses and facebook-anchored virtual realities. Recall that it is a scifi book written for computer-interested people when being interested in computers was not common. At all. Like, when the book was published, there were no photos online. Not a single one. We know the first one, and it wasn’t there yet. There weren’t even websites until 1991.

So I bet guessing that millions of people would be simultaneously online when there were about ten websites was pretty gutsy.

“In the real world—planet Earth, Reality—there are somewhere between six and ten billion people…perhaps a billion of them have enough money to worn a computer…of these billion potential computer owners, maybe a quarter of them actually bother to own a computer, and a quarter of these have machines that are powerful enough to handle the Street [Metaverse] protocol. That makes for about sixty million people who can be on the Street at any given time…add in another sixty million or so who can’t really afford it but go there anyway, by using public machines, or machines owned by their school or employer, and at any given time the Street is occupied by twice the population of New York City.”

If you pull conservative numbers for 2022, we have about 8 billion people on the planet and nearly 5 billion are online in one way or another. When I say computers have been mainstreamed, I mean mainstreamed in a way unimaginable even to the most “don’t kill the part that is cringe, kill the part that cringes” techno-satirists of the early 90s.

Should you read Snow Crash? I don’t know. The plot itself was silly adventure, with swordfights and missiles and crashing helicopters. But clearly some of the people coding our modern world have been inspired by the tech described in the book.

But Juanita never comes to The Black Sun anymore. Partly, she’s pissed at Da5id and the other hackers who never appreciated her work. But she has also decided that the whole thing is bogus. That no matter how good it is, the Metaverse is distorting the way people talk to each other, and she wants no such distortion in her relationships.

Perhaps it is worth reading the complete text to understand the satire, rather than just rip out the tech and overlay it one-to-one on our current society. Because if you trust our most prolific dawn-of-the-digital-age prophet to dictate our metaversal futures, it’s worth remembering that this, the holiest of texts, clearly states the internet is distorting the way people talk to each other.