Snow Crash

by Neal Stephenson

A bullet will bounce off its arachnofiber weave

This is America. People do whatever the fuck they feel like doing, you got a problem with that? Because they have a right to. And because they have guns and no one can fucking stop them. As a result, this country has one of the worst economies in the world.

There’s only four things we do better than anyone else music movies microcode (software) high-speed pizza delivery

who against all logic had decided that this was the place to take their personal Custerian stand against all that was stale and deadening in their lives: they were going to lie, or delude themselves,

warm and fuzzy in their Li’l Crips and Ninja Raft Warrior pajamas, which can either be flameproof or noncarcinogenic but not both at the same time.

Most people are not entirely clear on what the word “congress” means. And even the word “library” is getting hazy.

this is unnecessary but sounds cool.

The world is full of power and energy and a person can go far by just skimming off a tiny bit of it.

Software comes out of factories, and hackers are, to a greater or lesser extent, assembly-line workers. Worse yet, they may become managers who never get to write any code themselves.

Underneath it, in letters carved into the wall’s black substance, is the name of the place: THE BLACK SUN.

He has an utterly calm, stolid presence. It’s like talking to an asteroid.

So small, so insecure, that just about everything, like not mowing your lawn, or playing your stereo too loud, becomes a national security issue.

Kourier has to establish space on the pavement. Predictable law-abiding behavior lulls drivers. They mentally assign you to a little box in the lane, assume you will stay there, can’t handle it when you leave that little box.

Software development, like professional sports, has a way of making thirty-year-old men feel decrepit.

It was, of course, nothing more than sexism, the especially virulent type espoused by male techies who sincerely believe that they are too smart to be sexists.

Condense fact from the vapor of nuance.

“Hey, that reminds me. Your card said you’re into the three Ms of software.” “Yeah. Music, movies, and microcode.”

Technically speaking, the pond should be full of carp, but Hiro is American enough to think of carp as inedible dinosaurs that sit on the bottom and eat sewage.

“Yeah, you know, a monopolist’s work is never done. No such thing as a perfect monopoly. Seems like you can never get that last one-tenth of one percent.”

Besides, interesting things happen along borders—transitions—not in the middle where everything is the same.

You think they’re talking to you, but they’re actually poring over the credit record of some stranger on the other side of the room, or identifying the make and model of airplanes flying overhead.

“Sure,” she says. She says it in the chirpy tone of voice that she uses when she’s lying and she wants to make sure you know it.

You don’t respect those people very much, Y.T., because you’re young and arrogant. But I don’t respect them much either, because I’m old and wise.”

Government should govern. It’s not in the entertainment industry, is it? Leave entertaining to Industry weirdos—people

He is full of adrenaline, his nerves are shot, and his mind is cluttered up with free-floating anxiety—floating around on an ocean of generalized terror.

reading stories in the lights.

He’s not exactly thinking about this; he’s letting it ricochet around in his skull, waiting for it to come to rest. “Wait a minute, Juanita. Make up your mind. This Snow Crash thing—is it a virus, a drug, or a religion?” Juanita shrugs. “What’s the difference?”

“Actually, no,” the Librarian says. “No languages whatsoever are descended from Sumerian. It is an agglutinative tongue, meaning that it is a collection of morphemes or syllables that are grouped into words—very unusual.”

the Torah is like a virus. It uses the human brain as a host. The host—the human—makes copies of it. And more humans come to synagogue and read it.”

“He said it had certain things in common with a virus, but that it was different. He considered it a benign virus. Like that used for vaccinations.

For all practical purposes, that air conditioner is a part of Ng’s body. Y.T.’s driving around with the world’s only Freon junkie.

“Correct. Sumerian was used as the language of religion and scholarship by later civilizations, much as Latin was used in Europe during the Middle Ages. No one spoke it as their native language, but educated people could read it. In this way, Sumerian religion was passed on.”

“What are me?” “Rules or principles that control the operation of society, like a code of laws, but on a more fundamental level.”

“You may remember an unexplored fork earlier in our conversation that would have brought us to this same place by another route.

“Why, exactly, is Marduk handing Hammurabi a one and a zero in this picture?”

“It’s like, if you—people of a certain age—would make some effort to just stay in touch with sort of basic, modern-day events, then your kids wouldn’t have to take these drastic measures.”

the universalists believe that if you can analyze languages enough, you can find that all of them have certain traits in common. So they analyze languages, looking for such traits.” “Have they found any?” “No. There seems to be an exception to every rule.”

both schools of thought had essentially arrived at the same place by different lines of reasoning.”

‘Our speech interposes itself between apprehension and truth like a dusty pane or warped mirror.

“The machine language of the world,”

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:

no one says anything about it—which would be rude—but you feel a definite pressure,

If you want to write little notes or make phone doodles, you’re perfectly free to do that at home, in your spare time.

altering the flow of mighty rivers and then moving on because the place ain’t what it used to be.

In a few days, they’ll be in Eureka, then San Francisco, then L.A.—a

out a personal covenant between Uncle Enzo and every customer. This is how we avoid the trap of self-perpetuating ideology. Ideology is a virus. So getting this chick back is more than just getting a chick back. It’s the concrete manifestation of an abstract policy goal. And we like concrete—right, Vic?”

But every nuclear power has one aboriginal group whose territory they nuked to test their weapons.

a neurolinguistic hacker.”

a person who was capable of programming other people’s minds with verbal streams of data, known as nam-shubs.”

And they encouraged a sort of informational hygiene, a belief in copying things strictly and taking great care with information, which as they understood, is potentially dangerous. They made data a controlled substance.