Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson – A Little Knowledge is a Dangerous Thing

Science fiction often works by taking dangerous potentials lurking in current trends and then magnifying them out into a possible future. A lot of famous mid-twentieth century science fiction – Brave New World, Nineteen Eight-Four, Fahrenheit 451, imagined what would happen if government gained excessive power over people’s lives. Maybe by the 1990s some were taking this message rather too seriously. 1990s America saw a strengthening of sentiment hostile to government. Conservative groups, such as the ‘Citizens for Sound Economy’ stated an aim for smaller government and less regulation. Then came the Tea Party of the 2010s, and the Republican Party of the 2020s, parts of which appeared to want not just smaller government, but no state institutions at all. Interestingly, the world of 1992’s Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson, imagines the consequences of these people getting their way. With organised crime stepping into the power vacuum, it’s not a pretty picture. The rich live in gated communities, the poor in ghettos. The police are a private enterprise protecting those best able to pay. And of course, the cruelly ironic effect of ‘freeing’ yourself from stabilising institutions, is an increased risk of some deranged individual coming along and imposing a personal dictatorship. And this is where the next part of Snow Crash’s magnified threat comes in.

The book’s vision of a technological future has computer users hanging out in a digital world called the Metaverse – and yes, this was the first use of the term. The story centres on a virus, called Snow Crash, which makes a kind of species jump between digital and biological realms. A powerful business mogul wants to use this ambivalent infection to control people and take over the world.

Now, the Snow Crash virus presented in the book is complicated and not very believable. It’s variously a computer virus that enters the brain of computer programmers via the optic nerve, a biological agent spreading through blood products, and a linguistic trigger transmitted by certain patterns of words. It may have originated in the Sumerian civilisation, or maybe outer space.

I felt that the Snow Crash virus was interesting not so much for its bewildering details, but more as an illustration of the sort of viral misinformation that has become such a problem since the 1990s. The book has the nature of an influential meme, which typically takes kernels of truth – in this case drawn from computing, linguistics, history and biology – and spins them into conspiratorial delusion. The result is beguiling nonsense. I felt that Snow Crash is a book relevant not so much for what it says, but for what it is, a conspiracy novel in a similar vein to The Da Vinci Code. Snow Crash shows how much people are drawn into the kind of fantasy that uses bits of truth as a springboard into a more fantastical situation, explaining the apparent machinations of those that would control us. Truth can be boring, a bit bureaucratic, making you feel small and insignificant. It is tempting to leave truth and work-a-day bureaucracy behind, taking back control by explaining everything in terms of an overarching conspiracy. But no good will come of it.

I found Snow Crash somewhat chaotic in both plotting and ideas. It is, however, one of those books that catches a moment in the evolving chaos of people and their doings. It is a commentary on, and an example of, the present difficulties we now face.

I’ll give the last word to Alexander Pope:

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing
Drink deep or taste not the Pierian Spring
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
and drinking deep largely sobers us again