Shaping the future

My initial reaction to Snow Crash was a general distaste for Stephenson's vision of the future, a seeming implausible chaotic and hyper-commercialized USA with only four major brilliances: pizza, music, movies, and micro-code. After a few more chapters, I began to take step with the darkly comedic exaggerations of our nation's more Byzantine archetypes (check out Demolition Man, Hackers, Idiocracy). While dystopian and oppressive on levels, the city-state politics and world-wide connection to a universal knowledgebase began to represent itself as surprisingly free. With societal concerns as fore-front, Stephenson blends in a surprisingly large number of technological insights, many of which surprised me considering the book's 1992 publish. Virtual drugs, volumetric displays, avatars, and digital worlds are vividly imagined, along with super tools like a digital globe (and here, of course) and librarian. Even “infoastronomy” is discussed, along with the more central concept of viral corruption. What really strikes me about the characters is that none of them are truly in control of their lives – they are users instructed and willing to obey interface and protocol. Even the hackers don't wholly understand the compiled, and they certainly don't have the ability to peer into the source (though Hiro has some admin rights). In many ways, Snow Crash appears prophetic – while most of its technological ideas were certainly conceived by 1992, the Internet had yet to revolutionize the way people communicate. We are all users, and some of us know more than others... but no one knows everything. In a global computing sense, we normally have more control than are officially permitted, but never as much as is theoretically possible.