Thursday, March 31, 2016

Snow Crash

Reading even a portion of Snow Crash was a fascinating and somewhat dizzying experience. I use the latter descriptor due to the fact that Snow Crash is by far the most bafflingly quintessentially cyberpunk piece of media I've ever encountered, even as somewhat of a parody. A key feature of Snow Crash's world is the Metaverse, a virtual space in which users can perform a range of augmented reality tasks, not unlike a futuristic version of the game Second Life. The Metaverse ultimately proves dangerous as the titular drug, Snow Crash, transmits both a computer virus through the Metaverse and harmful side effects in real life, as well as more easily spreading the Sumerian language, which serves, effectively, as a programming language for human beings. The implication of this may be that Stephenson is condemning reliance on technology or, more likely, that Stephenson is suggesting humans and machines are not so unlike one another.

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