Snow Crash

by Neal Stephenson

When Hiro learned how to do this, way back fifteen years ago, a hacker could sit down and write an entire piece of software by himself. Now, that’s no longer possible. 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.

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

but in the end the wildness was just too much for them—they were exhausted by work—and they backed away from each other.

when you live in a shithole, there’s always the Metaverse,

They push through a fire door into another section of the U-Stor-It, which looks the same as the last one (everything looks the same in America, there are no transitions now).

HIRO STARES AT THE miniature TV in the upper left corner of the card. It zooms toward him until it’s about the size of a twelve-inch low-def television set at arms’ length.

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

The fringe crowd looks pretty typical for the wrong side of an L.A. overpass in the middle of the night. There’s a good-sized shantytown of hardcore Third World unemployables, plus a scattering of schizophrenic first worlders who have long ago burned their brains to ash in the radiant heat of their own imaginings.

a culture medium for a medium culture.

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

“Would it sound anything like glossolalia?” “Judgment call. Ask someone real,” the Librarian says.

“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.

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.

takes the elevator up to the 397th floor, and comes face to face with a receptionist daemon. For a moment, he can’t peg her racial background; then he realizes that this daemon is half-black, half-Asian—just like him. If a white man had stepped off the elevator, she probably would have been a blonde. A Nipponese businessman would have come face to face with a perky Nipponese office girl.