Cyberpunk and Snow Crash

This weeks readings were quite interesting to me and I really did enjoy them..surprise! The book Snow Crash starts the story of a pizza delivery guy. I was very confused at the beginning since as a reader it just starts talking about weird things like "The Deliverator." It took a while but the more pages I read the more I started to kind of understand what was going on. The book is set in a future that we could really be near. The protagonist Hiro is a true life nerd but wishes to be more in his metaverse. He says that he works for a place that is run by the mafia which is quite interesting because I can't say that in my wildest dreams I would have ever said that the mafia runs pizza joints. It's weird to think that people do get totally lost in this whole make believe life that they can have for themselves though. It intreguies me to think that maybe if I wanted to I could be a totally different person in a different universe (i.e. the internet) I could. I personally find it a little scary because of the fact that I would never want to be so convinced that I was someone else that I became that person. This makes me think about the whole "Clark Rockefeller" guy that kidnapped his own child and now claims to be someone he really isn't. Whether he is truely insane and can't remember his real self or if he is just a really good liar no one will ever know. I watched an interview with him and he was so set on being a Rockefeller that when he was asked questions about his true identity of Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter he simply didn't know what they were talking about. Isn't it scary to think that someday this could happen to everyone. People could get so confused about who they really are with all this metaverse stuff that the whole world could eventually never have a "real" person around.

I think this reading really did do a good job of showing what a cyberpunk is. In the cyberpunk reading it says "classic cyberpunk characters were marginalized, alienated loners who lived on the edge of society..." This sounds exactly like how Hiro was described in the reading. I hope that some day our lives don't all revolve around a metaverse...but I guess only time and technology will tell.