Snow Crash

by Neal Stephenson

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.

While Snow Crash is one of the most prophetic novels of the 20th century, he often missed the mark. Case in point.

When you are wrestling for possession of a sword, the man with the handle always wins.

Tech heroes today look more like quiet coders, venture capitalists, and startup founders. Not sword swinging hacker ninjas.

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

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.

Highly disturbing that every male that comes in contact with YT sexually harasses her. She’s 15 years old and the men are all adults.

To condense fact from the vapor of nuance.” Condense fact from the vapor of nuance.

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.

Ninety-nine percent of everything that goes on in most Christian churches has nothing whatsoever to do with the actual religion. Intelligent people all notice this sooner or later, and they conclude that the entire one hundred percent is bullshit, which is why atheism is connected with being intelligent in people’s minds.”

This Snow Crash thing—is it a virus, a drug, or a religion?” Juanita shrugs. “What’s the difference?”

“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.”

“Moses and others believed that the River Jordan was the border of Israel, but the deuteronomists believed that Israel included Transjordan, which justified aggression to the east. There are many other examples: the predeuteronomic law said nothing about a monarch. The Law as laid down by the deuteronomic school reflected a monarchist system. The predeuteronomic law was largely concerned with sacred matters, while the deuteronomic law’s main concern is the education of the king and his people—secular matters in other words. The deuteronomists insisted on centralizing the religion in the Temple in Jerusalem, destroying the outlying cult centers.

when the metavirus showed up, the number of different viruses exploded, and people started getting sick a whole lot. That would explain the fact that all cultures seem to have a myth about Paradise, and the Fall from Paradise.”

according to the Sumerians, there was no concept of good and evil per se.”

UNTIL A MAN IS twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world.

Lagos believed that for this reason, Sumerian was a language ideally suited to the creation and propagation of viruses. That a virus, once released into Sumer, would spread rapidly and virulently, until it had infected everyone.” “Maybe Enki knew that also,” Hiro says. “Maybe the nam-shub of Enki wasn’t such a bad thing. Maybe Babel was the best thing that ever happened to us.”

nam-shub of Enki was the beginnings of human consciousness—when we first had to think for ourselves. It was the beginning of rational religion, too, the first time that people began to think about abstract issues like God and Good and Evil. That’s where the name Babel comes from. Literally it means ‘Gate of God.’ It was the gate that allowed God to reach the human race. Babel is a gateway in our minds, a gateway that was opened by the nam-shub of Enki that broke us free from the metavirus and gave us the ability to think—moved us from a materialistic world to a dualistic world—a binary world—with both a physical and a spiritual component.