Snow Crash

Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson is a fast-paced, dystopian cyberpunk novel that combines high-tech intrigue, ancient history, and biting social commentary. Set in a near-future world dominated by corporate-controlled city states, the story follows a hacker and swordsman, Hiro Protagonist, as he uncovers a conspiracy involving a new digital drug called Snow Crash that threatens both the virtual Metaverse and the real world, because it kills users who consume it in the metaverse by frying their real brains.

In Snow Crash, much of the population spends a large portion of their time in the metaverse. Escaping from the shitty day to day life into a pompous online existence, where they can be whatever they want to be. Hiro and a friend of his named Y.T. partner up to be more effective together. She is delivering pizzas while he investigates the origins of Snow Crash in return. To me, one of the coolest things in the book is the description of the skateboard that Y.T. uses to get around the city. She is grabbing onto cars with a sort of electromagnetic hook to slingshot around from car to car gaining absurd speeds.

Hiro and Y.T. eventually discover that Snow Crash is linked to ancient Sumerian language, which functions as a sort of programming language for the human brain. Priests used to mind-control people into obedience by using this language and the drug/virus aims to exploit this idea to hack the minds of users, threatening both digital freedom and human autonomy, forever.

They also learn that all of this is part of a conspiracy led by L. Bob Rife, a powerful telecommunications magnate who aims to control humanity.

In the end they try to stop him from doing so, leading to a showdown on Rife's private floating city full refugees living on floating slums that are built around a giant private yacht, called "the Raft". One of Rife's agents, Raven, is running around the world of Snow Crash fucking shit up. He's an assassin working for Rife, known for being a bit bonkers, driving around with a personal nuke strapped to his motorcycle.

In summary, Snow Crash is an interesting sci-fi novel, painting a uniquely dystopian world, exploring concepts like the Metaverse in a very unique way. The idea of a "mind virus" that can be used to control people is very intriguing. We have propaganda, and disinformation and I wonder if something like true mind control might be possible with more advanced technology and am afraid by the dangers that something like this poses. Neil Stephenson makes us think about ideas like this, warning of the dangers of a collapsing society that flees into the metaverse and the susceptibility to control through means of ideas and language.