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Saturday, November 16, 2019

A Sense of Doubt blog post #1733 - snow crashing 1-10 by Dan Hon




A Sense of Doubt blog post #1733 - snow crashing 1-10 by Dan Hon


I LOVE this book, and so I was excited that local Portland writer and media critic DAN HON started writing a chapter-by-chapter commentary of Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. It looks like he's going to finish it. I plan to re-publish them all. I have not yet become a paying subscriber to his content, but I might. I like what he does. And he does live very near to me.

Here's the first ten. All following text from DAN HON, whose newsletter you can subscribe to here:

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1.1 Snow Crashing (11): Chapter 9

For those of you who’re catching up, a long time ago, when we used to be friends, I had started writing a chapter-by-chapter commentary about Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crashing. Here are the parts, in order:


1.0 Snow Crashing - CHAPTER ONE
If you were going to read Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash again, which you should, because seminal science fiction and all that, never mind business plan and direct inspiration for a stupendous number of things that we now have to live and deal with on a daily basis, then you might re-read it substituting all the stuff that didn't exist when Neal Stephenson wrote it with all the stuff that does exist now.
So here's the first installment of a bunch of observations about Snow Crash followed by reckons.
Deliverators don't exist and they certainly don't belong to an elite order. Probably one of the Swiftian parts of Stephenson's observations about the trajectory America was on, not least of which because he was pretty much right about nailing what America was good for: music (mostly, the role of YouTube in proliferating the odd bit of international music like Gangnam style notwithstanding and the constant import of new European genres), movies, microcode (software) and high-speed pizza delivery. Apart from the drones, of course.
Stephenson needed a bad-ass protagonist (ha), though, and a high-speed pizza delivery freelancer feels like the sort of step-up, adult job that a washed out ex-microcode whiz would take, rather than be a kourier. These days it's not the deliverators that get the props in culture and the delivery environment isn't as much a warzone as Stephenson imagined, but instead in, er, the food delivery vertical, it's the startup founders of companies like Grubhub that get the attention. Where we might be seeing a weak signal of a new Deliverator is in the Uber and Lyft drivers of the present - mob run companies (just you wait) who emphasise customer service, quantification and big data ("graphed the frequency of doorway delivery-time disputes, wired the early Deliverators to record, then analyse, debating tactics, voice-stress histograms" - sound familiar to you?) who at some point might emphasise personal security and shit-hot rides to get you from A to B before the light stops blinking to ensure top ratings and continued employment.
And, of course, the Deliverator these days drives a Tesla S - moving people from place to place, pickup and delivery points not inferred by phone number but by a system of geospatial positioning satellites, plotting a glowing route on a heads-down Android display in a car that packs, well, lots of potential energy in the metaphor of the day.
All that's missing is Uber getting into the personal loan business - just watch for that shift where startups like Uber, Lyft or TaskRabbit start offering payday loans or short-term personal loans in exchange for 'employment'.
Despite having more advertising than ever, it appears that we don't have that persistent background visual noise of loglo. Powered screens aren't that prevalent yet,and billboards still rule the day in outdoor advertising, installations of children pointing at planes up in the sky near Heathrow notwithstanding.
Burbclaves? Got them, but they got hollowed out by the mortgage crash. Didn't see that one coming. People living in storage units? Give it a couple of years.
Hiro's business card is pretty interesting. No doubt a Moo Card his would probably *still* have a phone number on it, but lose the "universal voice phone locator code". Lose the P.O. box, too. But the address on half a dozen electronic communications nets? Try just one: his email address. And the address in the metaverse? Just the one URL. For all the talk we see later in the novel of hypermedia, one missed observation is that Hiro's business card only needs one pointer, one URL, for anyone to find him.
We don't have Sukhoi/Kawasaki Hypersonic Transports, but we do have Boeing 777s (and 787s and Airbus A380s), mainly because it turns out that one of the most powerful forces in the universe is not one of the nuclear strong forces but either a) NIMBYism or b) the cost of jet fuel. Slower and bigger and quieter and more fuel efficient is our thing now, not faster and more crushing-it, when it comes to air transport.
And when it comes to Hiro's computing setup - well. A featureless aluminium wedge maybe, one softly glowing with a stylised Apple with a chunk bitten out of it, and just about doing without a power cord. But for the fat bandwidth connection? Gigabit ethernet, totally - not a fiber optic socket, but just some of your regular Cat-6 because seriously, wireless doesn't cut it. And naturally, he's got the VR headset Valve are convinced we'll all be using in five year's time.
Hiro's main "job", though, as freelancer stringer for the CIC. Now that's weird. It's almost as if Stephenson needed to retcon some sort of job for the overqualified underutilised information worker who just kind of hangs out and picks up on useful information. The weird part is that the CIC pays for it, which is some strange alternate universe where organisations use a centralised information system and pay for stuff. Hiro's universe hasn't been attacked by a race to the bottom in the content and information market - despite the loglo everywhere Stephenson needs to find a job for someone like Hiro who merely finds information but then doesn't do anything useful with it. Hiro doesn't analyse, he just uploads. These days, of course, Hiro would be a blogger and maybe have a nice little Adsense business on the side. Or a writer for Buzzfeed.
[1] Some of you have objected to buying things from Amazon. So I'm going to start including regular links to Powell's and Wordery where possible, too.
1.0 Snow Crashing 2 - CHAPTER TWO
Okay, so the last installment of Snow Crashing turned out to be pretty fun to write, so here's some more.
The Street and The Metaverse are probably the most stupendously (perhaps temporarily) wrong things for Stephenson to have gotten. It may well be that right now our grasp for VR has just caught up with the reach we hold in our imaginations with renewed interested in VR from companies like Valve and Oculus, but the vision portrayed in Snow Crash is so of the era that it's been rightly seminal.
What he got right, kind of: like the web, Stephenson hopes that the protocol is open and hammered out by a working group, but the reality we're in is that something like the Street these days wouldn't have its protocol hammered out by just the one working group - that'd be too easy. We'd have the W3C weighing in, various HTML working groups, plus Khronos weighing in with whatever was happening with WebGL these days. Because the best way to implement VR would be in some ungodly combination of WebGL, HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
I can't work out whether Stephenson is being smart with the Street and the Metaverse or if he missed a fundamental point about networks and computing infrastructure which is that scarcity isn't really a problem. There's only one Street, and the equivalent scarcity is in replicated physical proximity to the Street, whereas in our world it's having a memorable dot com domain. Or, you know, that attention is scarce and typically congregates. The dumb thing that everyone knows and really should know better by now is that simulated physicality scales only as well (if not worse) as real physicality: ie. not very well (thanks for the reminder, Kim Pallister). Now, to be working at a company directly figuring out how to mass scale VR and have it adopted as fast as mobile phones or tablets? Along with defining all-new UI affordances when we can barely figure out how to design multi-touch surfaces? That would be a job...
Of course, Snow Crash pre-dates the web and envisages a hyper-capitalist future where capitalism has sort-of failed and income inequality has made things bad, if not downright terrible, for a lot of people. So in the world of Snow Crash, you actually have to do the equivalent of apply for *planning permission* and get permits and bribe inspectors and observe zoning laws to build in the Metaverse. Not so in our world, where no one is really in charge of the internet, or the web. Sure, Stephenson allows for those applications to be made to the Global Media Protocol Group - the equivalent of having to apply to the W3C, I suppose, if you wanted to build a website, and another form to fill in if you wanted to use "HOMEPAGE / SCROLLING/ PARALLAX / LAZY LOADING" and then pay them - and those fees being held in trust for further development of the Metaverse.
And then there's the bit where Stephenson breaks down the economics of the Street in ways that I think are completely alien to the VC and growth fueled universe that we live in right now. In the universe of Snow Crash, there's a total human population of around six to ten billion people - matching up to what we have now. Of those, perhaps a billion have enough money to have a computer, and of those only a quarter of them bother to own one, and then a quarter of those have hardware powerful enough to render the Street. That's a TAM of sixty million, plus, he says, but you get to add another sixty million who visit from public terminals. Only a hundred and twenty million total users! At any given time, he says, the Street is populated by double the population of New York City, giving a daily active user count of about 16 million which, by today's standards, is a bit shit. EVEN if those 16 million are, as Stephenson exposits, the 1%.
I don't know about you, but something tells me that the economics in Stephenson's toy universe are a bit off. He never really goes into *why* the Street's simulated physicality was such a big deal and my guess (acknowledging that this is fanwanking territory into the motivations of fictional characters in designing an ultimately global, yet fictional, social multimedia protocol) is simply that a bunch of geeks, just like Hiro, did it was cool and because, er, they read about it in Snow Crash.
Which again leads me to this: what sort of VR are we going to build, if the short hand of Gibson and Stephenson are what we have to hand? It's clear that Stephenson fundamentally didn't get that the *most* important thing about hypermedia was the links. Otherwise we wouldn't have motorcycle chases in the metaverse (but for he wanted to write a particularly unfilmable pulp action screenplay). It's all bits in the stream, so you apply a matrix transformation and suddenly what was here is over there. You don't even have to click your heels three times.
It makes me think that Stephenson and Hiro are trying to point something out about humans actually *liking* scarcity.
1.0 Snow Crashing 3 - CHAPTER THREE
I remember thinking that millimeter radar sounded so cool when I first read about it in Snow Crash. And then it started turning up, I think, in movies like Robocop and Total Recall as the technology that would show firearms on active security scans. Right now, millimeter-wave radar hasn't yet made the jump to consumer technology, and you're most likely to encounter it when you go through a security scan at an airport. So while YT's RadiKS Mark II Smartwheels use sonar, laser rangefinding and millimeter-wave radar to identify mufflers and other debris, the only place where you'll encounter the whole package right now are self driving Google Cars. Practically, though, that's a gnarly engineering problem. The smartwheels consist of hubs (presumably where your computing and battery/kinetic energy generation lives) and extensible spokes with contact pads - all makes sense, until you think about how small that package has to be. Perhaps the board is all ruggedised battery and computing power, and the wheels pull data from sensing built into the board.
In when forecasting the future, you have wildcards: the sudden availability of high-k ambient temperature superconductors would definitely qualify. (As an aside, I used to enjoy reading Peter Cochrane's[1] annual forecast reports out of British Telecom). As it stands, I'm not aware of any radical advance in materials science that's going to make cheap and mass-produced superconducting electromagnets anytime soon. Suffice to say that for them to filter down to harpoons for skaters they'd already have made an impact for someone like Elon Musk.
There's a wonderful description of the fire hydrants at The Mews At Windsor Heights: brass, robot-polished (another aside as to how the economy works in Snow Crash's toy universe - perhaps they're cleaned by relatives of Rat Thing designed out of Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong?), designed on computer screen with an eye toward elegance of things past and forgotten about: that is, artisanal fire hydrants designed to maximise property value, brand-perfect, maintained without needing any human touching.
Later, YT takes a shortcut through White Columns, a sort of capitalist-endorsed racial segregation through property values, a future not entirely unenvisagable if the religious discrimination legislation had passed in a variety of US states over the last month: WHITE PEOPLE ONLY, they say, NON-CAUCASIANS MUST BE PROCESSED. So, not strictly *denying* service to non-caucasians, just... processing them. This is another opportunity to remind ourselves about the other big thing that Stephenson - and a lot of other people - missed. Ubiquitous wireless data, or even the concept of wireless data at all, just doesn't figure in Snow Crash's toy universe. YT has a visa to White Columns, but it's encoded as a barcode on her chest, and a laser flicks out to scan it as she rides past. No RFIDs here or Bluetooth iBeacons or short-range wireless coms - it's as if she literally has a QR code pasted to her chest, ready to be read by anyone.
I'll leave this Snow Crashing installation with this one quote, though: "the world is full of power and energy, and a person can go far by just skimming off a tiny bit of it."
2.0 Snow Crashing 4 - CHAPTER FOUR
And we're back with more Snow Crashing so it's a VR-tastic episode today. I think, at last count, we're up to around Chapter 5, after having covered YT's RadiKS SmartWheels and her interaction with the mob upon delivering their pizza. There was a part about the identifying LASERs flickering out to touch and read her barcodes and visas at White Columns and not using wireless technology, which a reader helpfully pointed out was potentially more to do with lacking a good literary way to describe spooky wireless action at a distance. And yes, LASERs are cooler, especially when you capitalise them the way they're supposed to be.
In Chapter 5, we're back on the Street, and Neal Stephenson has just introduced people to the concept of avatars for the first time, for which: look for a corresponding input deal on the Oculus side (we've got the output technology down, now we need the sensing technology. Apple's already picked up PrimeSense, so maybe the hardware's already commoditised). There's so much more inReady Player One about avatars, all it's used for here it feels like is a little bit of worldbuilding to ready us for the universe we're going to be spending narrative time in. Indeed, "you can look just like a giant talking penis" seems to describe most of peoples' Second Life experiences at some point. There's an interesting point here where Stephenson says that Hacker types don't go in for garish avatars because they appreciate the computing power required to accurately render a realistic talking human face than a human penis, to which I would say: my how things change. You wouldn't believe the realistic talking human penises you could render these days with all those TFLOPS.
Again, there's something intrinsic about three-dimensional embodied environments that kind of messes with everything we've been used to in general interaction with computer interfaces. Stephenson points out that you can't just materalise anywhere - that's rude (in which case: we're going to spending the next 18 months working out what is, and isn't rude), but we can take cues from our massively multiplayer 3D FPSes - and we know that those quickly solved those concepts - in combat multiplayer instances, at least - in the form of (re)spawn points, not least of which because even if it's *not* rude, it's disorientating. We get a sense of the economy here, with Stephenson describing Metaverse "tourists" as those with off-the-shelf avatars - but there are those who "bought" the Avatar Construction Set(TM) a piece of third party software, as well as those who "run down to the computer games section of the local Wal-Mart and buy a copy of Brandy", the latter of which is (even still) eminently possible and realistic these days.
I guess the big difference between the Metaverse envisaged by Stephenson and OASIS as imagined by Ernest Cline is that the latter has had about twenty five years worth of exposure to the idea of the hyperlink. In the Metaverse, indeed, in the entire toy universe, the concept of linking and hypermedia appears to only exist inside a discrete object: the hypercard. Now, Stephenson's done his homework here and clearly played with, well, Hypercard, but what's so utterly alien now is that all of this hyperlinked information exists inside--and only inside--a container object inside a fully realised 3D virtual world. It's as if the web was chopped up into bits and then you had to use a piece of semi-sentient software to use it, the Librarian, to browse it. That's just weird.
And that's where the physicality of the Stephenson's Metaverse falls down: it doesn't embrace the link. You can't teleport. The Metaverse is a single globe (so we're told), and you have to physically travel from one place to another. There are, I don't think, no places that are bigger on the inside than the outside. We get all of the adverts of course, one Hiro steps onto the Street, but we also hear about amusement parks, and they're places that you have to *go*.
How weird.
2.0 Snow Crashing 5 - CHAPTER FIVE
So, we've now got a bit about hacking, the production of software and The Black Sun. As it ever was, "when Hiro learned how to [code], a hacker could sit down and write an entire piece of software himself. Now, that's no longer possible." Now, we don't know too much about what Stephenson's talking about here. Because writing an entire piece of software himself, even fifteen years ago, wasn't exactly possible - there was definitely a whole bunch of reliance on libraries and other supporting infrastructure in the stack. So, assuming Hiro wasn't doing everything from the OS upwards and pulled in networking libraries rather than hand-rolling his own TCP/IP stack, Stephenson means Hiro was writing the application code single-handedly. Which, even now, is still possible. We're just building on top of an ever-more abstracted stack. I don't think Stephenson meant that Hiro was coding an OpenGL implementation on his own, for example.

These days, says Stephenson, "software comes out of factories, and hackers are, to a greater or lesser extent, assembly-line workers." Which is probably true for a lot of software (and certainly *explains* a lot of software out there) but at the same time doesn't take into account (or does, kind of) the view that people like Jobs had about the virtuoso hacker. The one-in-a-thousand, who is literally head and shoulders better than the rest. This worry about going back to get a regular job preys on Hiro's mind - he's scared of becoming an assembly line worker, or worse yet, a manager, but it's clear (especially later on in the book) that he is the prototypical *ninja developer*. He could probably have whatever job he wanted, and Juanita makes that clear later on. Hiro, it seems, has Issues he has to deal with. And so we get back to him remembering that he owes the mob the cost of a new car, and that he needs to get back onto his day job of selling information.

And then we're at the Black Sun, the club, a squat black pyramid, "not an architectural masterpiece", something where Hiro and Da5id went in for simple geometric shapes, or in the parlance of Second Life, the cheapest Prims they could get their hands on. And then another interesting thing: there are *millions* of people milling about on the Street and "the computer system that operates the Street has better things to do" than do the collision detection calculations. Which, you know, seems weird for a place that's so defiantly wedded to physical representations of things (no teleporting, remember), but purely for reasons of expediency decides not to bother with it in terms of the interactions of peoples' avatars. So, just another place where Stephenson doesn't look too prescient in the face of Moore's law. There's a pretty cool throwaway line in terms of the misogynist display (it's a boys' hacker club, of course, so there are airbrushed Playboy pinups) being updated at 72fps, and just like that, Hiro's in the Black Sun.
2.0 Snow Crashing (6) - CHAPTER SIX
It's been over ten episodes since I've done a Snow Crashing! So here's a new one, which is exciting, because in this installment we get our introduction to Snow Crash, the drug.

So I think there's something interesting about black-and-white-rendered photocopy dude, the guy who's stood in the throng at the entrance to the Black Sun. For starters, Stephenson asserts that "Street protocol states that your avatar can't be any taller than you are," which strikes me as a) completely missing the point of VR in the first place, and b) ridiculously unenforceable. Much easier to make everyone the same height, or only within a user-definable range, than to actually stipulate that your height in a virtual representation may not exceed *your actual physical height*, which instantly renders everyone going through puberty on the 'street with an interesting problem.

Anyway: photocopy dude who's slightly taller than everyone else in the crowd for a reason that doesn't stack up *manages to grab Hiro's attention*. Which is another way of saying: look at the attention economics of this place. This isn't a crowded inbox and Hiro's not clicking on a phishing scam. This is someone who has to, in a way, be physically present in order to project presence, an interesting enough presence at the right time, at the right place, to attract Hiro's attention to get him to try Snow Crash.

Snow Crash, as Stephenson tells us, gets its name from computer lingo - describing a low-level hardware failure so bad that it makes the electron gun in your CRT skitter wildly across the screen, giving you the colour that the sky above the port's turned to. Unfortunately, time hasn't been kind to Snow Crash: we're not really using CRTs anymore, and even in Hiro's world, he's not using CRT's either, really: the goggles that he's using are using RGB lasers to paint directly onto his retinas.

There's a bit of a disconnect too, in that Hiro's weirdness detector goes all the way up to eleven because of photocopy dude's "utterly calm solid presence" that nonetheless is affixed to an avatar that "[breaks] up into jittering, hard-edged pixels". And then we get to the next exciting bit, because Stephenson has just introduced us to Hypercards.

The card that pusher hands to Hiro is a Hypercard - as Stephenson explains, a hypercard is "an avatar of sorts" - by which we're explained it's an avatar in the way that it exists in the metaverse and it's a representation of information, just the same way that an avatar is a representation of a human. The hypercard is a representation of data, such data being anything that can be digitised. What's interesting to me here is that Stephenson's clearly played with Hypercard-the-real-software, and the description of Hypercard in Snow Crash means that what he took as being transformative about it was the packaging of multimedia. A Hypercard in Stephenson's world is a stack - a set of digitised information that can be thought of as a collection and navigated. Back then, the notion of linking sounds like it wasn't as clear: mainly because you're linking between resources inside one meta-resource as opposed to resources located on different parts of the network. Which is why Stephenson was *so close* to describing something like the internet because he had what a lot of people consider in some ways to be a grandparent to the web with his hypercard analogue, and also a global telecommunications network with stupendously low latency and high bandwidth. But all that was missing was the humble link anchor.

2.0 Snow Crashing (7) - CHAPTER SEVEN

It's been a while since I've done a Snow Crashing. The last one was back in episode 64[1], where we covered the hypercard stack given to Hiro by the Snow Crash pusher outside the Black Sun. Now we're at the start of chapter six, and YT is about to introduce us to the metacops and the end-game of privatised security and policing.

In Stephenson's vision of corporatised America, everything that can be done by a corporation instead of government is done by a corporation. It's obvious that he's satirising; Snow Crash, written in 1992, is a whole five years later in our universe's timeline than Robocop, which was released in 1987. MetaCops Unlimited are simply the latest expression of the horror that is privatised security in America's future.

When Stephenson describes the MetaCops Unlimited cruiser and the badge on its door, he calls out the copy that's emblazoned on it: "DIAL 1-800-THE COPS / All Major Credit Cards", for which we're able to ascertain: in the future, there are no short codes, voice calls are still primacy, and credit cards are still the preferred method of moving bits of money around.

Of course, the *real* end-game here is the Libertarian Police Department, neatly skewered in the New Yorker[2].

This is our opportunity to learn a little bit about FOQNEs again - Franchise-Organized Quasi-National Entities; the geo-political makeup of the Snow Crash universe includes Burbclaves (of which The Mews At Windsor Heights is one), FOQNEs like Caymans Plus, The Alps and Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong, and then of those, the very-special FOQNEs, like Metazania and New South Africa which are Stephenson's shorthand for violent, aggressive strongholds where white men like to shoot things. These days, I suspect that FOQNEs would include Alex Jones' INFOWARSLAND, Glenn Beck's Independence, Peter Thiel's Seasteading Institute and Reddit's Mens Rightslandia. I wonder if Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong (it's nice to see the reminders that, when Snow Crash was written, Asia was in its ascendancy in consumer electronics, and it would be Hong Kong, not the Valley, that would inspire a robotically defended sovereign nation).

There's a nice line when Y.T. approaches the gates at White Columns and doesn't get scanned and Stephenson takes to its logical conclusion what it means to have a quasi-national entity operating on a smaller-than-city level. The security of the city state, reminds Stephenson, means that "just about everything, like not mowing your lawn, or playing your stereo too loud, becomes a national security issue."

We get a demo of non-violent takedown weapons - in this case, a kind of goo gun that is able to stick Y.T. to the gate with a football-sized set of super-sticky fibers. Such weapons are needed because city states are so small in this future; they're abutted next to each other such that "innocent thrashers [are] always a three-second ride away from asylum in a neighboring franchulate." And so we learn that the FOQNEs, like all good quasi-national entities, have treaties and extradition agreements with each other


2.0 Snow Crashing (8) - CHAPTER EIGHT

We've hit chapter seven in our journey through Neal Stephenson's Snow Crashing and this time we find ourselves in the Black Sun, in the Metaverse. (Last time, Y.T. had just ended up in The Clink due to inadequate provision for female guests at The Hoosegaw).

Stephenson is really going for the VR concept here with the Black Sun. We've got space (the Black Sun, a bar, is as big as a couple of football fields so curiously even in virtual space we're still measuring distances with real-space sportsball terms), but just to fuck with us a bit, the tables are hovering in the air because why bother drawing legs when you're simulating gravity in the first place. Everything in the Black Sun is matte black - because hey, why bother tracing out where all those rays are going to go, and also, I'm not sure if anyone's actually done this before, but I bet it looks really weird and potentially nausea inducing. Readers with an Oculus Rift feel free to rez in a Black Sun-like environment and tell me if being surrounded by a mass of matte-black light absorbing material is indeed weird.

The Black Sun's environment appears to be the equivalent of a mod - different rules apply here, so you've got collision detection and clipping; "only so many people can be here at once, and they can't walk through each other. Everything is solid and opaque and realistic" - to the extent, of course, that the real world isn't composed of solely matte surfaced objects that rest solidly in the air with no visible means of support. But yeah.

We get an introduction to the term Daemon - you're reading this on something that has a bunch of them operating in the background right now, and if not right now, then they'll wake up for a couple of microseconds and do some stuff and then go back to sleep. Don't worry: they're there. Anyway: now that we have a different sort of user interface, here's an opportunity for us to treat daemons as "[serving] imaginary drinks to the patrons and run little errands for people". I'm not sure if I'd still call these things daemons these days rather than scripted behaviour - but regardless, these are bits of pre-programmed behaviour, sometimes at the behest of a user.

We also get reference to cartoon-physics. Da5id has modded the environment so that people can get "hit on the head with giant mallets or crushed under plummeting safes before they're ejected" which whilst not entirely describing cartoon physics the way we're used to it now (ie exaggerated scroll and bounce, rubber banding) the way that Stephenson describes that cartoon physics evokes the same kind of effect - we expect people hit on the head with a giant mallet to comically compress and rebound before being thrown out, or for the safes that are dropped on them to amusingly squish them rather than implement a more accurate (and potentially computationally expensive) simulation of what happens when an avatar body gets hit with a few hundred pounds of force.

There's a throwaway line here - that if your personal computer is infected with viruses "and attempts to spread them via the Black Sun, you had better keep one eye on the ceiling". We don't really get to see what the virus/malware ridden world of the Metaverse looks like - there certainly aren't that many backdoors and not really that much hacking that goes on (other than, you know, the giant bit of bio/informational hacking with the Snow Crash virus itself). But we don't really get to see what type of viral behaviour a host might exist in a virtual environment, which would've been interesting.

We do get a little bit of hacking here though: Hiro invokes Bigboard - by mumbling the word, which seems a bit weird that he has to say it out loud - and it's a backdoor exploit that essentially lists all the current users of the Black Sun and displays them on a flat map in front of him. Bigboard is just another reflection of how Stephenson is kind-of-but-not-really treating space in the Metaverse like space in the real world. With most contemporary massively multiplayer games that are situated in a virtual environment, we still get a sort of chat channel/party line that lists everyone who's in the immediate environment - World of Warcraft comes to mind. In the virtual worlds that we've built in the intervening time since the release of Snow Crash, it feels rare that you have to eyeball all the player characters to find out which ones they are, especially when you're talking about a social setting.

By scanning through BigBoard we see the social focus of the Black Sun: movies, music and the Japanese, with the odd smattering of People Who're So Powerful They're (Practically) Sovereign Nations. This is also the first time we see Sushi K, who'll pop up later on.

When Hiro heads over to Da5id's table, there's a line that's resonated with a whole bunch of people: "Softare development, like professional sports, has a way of making thirty-year-old men feel decrepit."

Now we meet The Girl. I'm not quite sure if Juanita - portrayed in the Black Sun as a low-rez black and white avatar and talking to Da5id - ever does talk to another woman in the book about something other than another guy (it's possible she talks to Y.T. later on) but at the very least, Juanita has her shit together. She has her shit together in the way that a lot of young male geeks feel older women have their shit together - she's outrageously smart and intimidating to Hiro and that's part of what attracts him to her. Juanita and Hiro met in freshman class at Berkeley, and later when they're both working at Black Sun Systems, inc. Stephenson writes perhaps one of the most insightful pre-Reddit diagnoses of casual sexism to have been committed to page:

"It was, of course, nothing more than sexism, the especially virulent type espoused by male techies who sincerely believe they are too smart to be sexists."

In Snow Crash, Hiro's the one who has to do the growing up. Bouncing around as an army brat from base to base, it's only when he revisits his memory of Juanita and how he reacted (or rather, didn't) to her when he met her at school, and then years later, in employment, that he realises that he's the one whose expectations needed recalibrating.

Anyway. Juanita has a painting of her late grandmother in her office at the Black Sun - where Hiro and Juanita have their real jobs - and we learn that Juanita had gotten pregnant at a young age, that her grandmother had been able to intuit and tell; to "condense fact from the vapour of nuance" and that Juanita's big deal, her epiphany, was that whilst writing yet another query interface for a DoD grant she remembered that moment with her grandmother and tries to work out how to present information in the form of faces - because that's what humans are wired to recognise.

There's a difference, we learn, between Juanita and Hiro. Juanita and her family know where they are - where they stand, with "a certitude that bordered on dementia". Hiro, by contrast, never knew - never knew if he was black or Asian or plain Army, never knew whether he was rich or poor, educated or ignorant, talented or lucky or even where his home was until he moved to California, which was "about as specific as saying that you live in the Northern Hemisphere".

We learn a lot more about the world of Snow Crash. That Da5id's parents were Russian Jews from Brooklyn, that Da5id went to Stanford and then started a company when he graduated "with about as much fuss as Hiro's dad used to exhibit when opening a new P.O. box when they moved." The rest of the sketch of Da5id's character is Valley stereotype - he's certain of everything, so much so that Juanita eventually divorces him and Hiro leaves the company. Juanita's circumstances allow her to hang on and to allow her stock to vest and cash out so she's rich now (how things never change), whilst Hiro cashed out early to put his mom in a nice community in Korea.

Hiro might not have a lot in the real world, but he has a lot in the Metaverse and he looked after his mom. And at the moment, he seems perfectly fine about that.

Part of what makes this interesting is the context - this is the vision of the future that we thought we were getting, and simultaneously, it's more or less the future being built right now - or at least tested - by startups like Oculus Rift and products like Sony's Project Morpheus. There's a lot here that's being learned in terms of what sort of environments make sense to our old, physically evolved brains. In terms of the people building Oculus Rift, I'm at roughly 30k feet right now, but my guess is that the ratios haven't changed that much. Juanita's an outlier at Rift, and her female colleagues are much more likely to be working in outreach, marketing and HR than in areas such as helping people understand the nuances of communication - somewhat ironic, for a virtual reality company bought by the world's biggest social network.
SNOW CRASHING - CHAPTER NINE

It has been a while! That list one was in December 2014, where I finished off Chapter 8, which ended with Juanita giving Hiro a hypercard. 2014! Hypercards!
I’m just going to take a moment to remember how different everything was back then.
Sigh.
Anyway, I thought it’d be fun to continue doing this because it’s content and honestly every day these days feels like it provides another reason to point out the problems with basing your product strategy around a science fiction book.
So, on with chapter 9!
Juanita’s just given Hiro the Babel (Infocalypse) hypercard which let’s just note some gamedev artist has spent a lot of time on, because it turns into a ‘realistic, cream-colored, finely textured piece of stationary’.
Now, we have to remember that all of this is happening in The Black Sun - Hiro (his meat body, the meat sack, the meat puppet, the thing in the real world) is still in his 20-by-30 U-Stor-It in Inglewood. Because when Juanita gives Hiro the hypercard, “the world [Hiro’s metaverse experience] freezes and grows dim for a second. The Black Sun loses its smooth animation and begins to move in fuzzy stop-action”.
This is because Hiro’s “computer has taken a major hit; all of its circuits are busy processing a huge blous of data — the contents of the hypercard — and don’t have time to redraw the image of The Black Sun”.
And this is super interesting because again, Hiro’s in a networked virtual environment, but... it’s not like there’s really a concept of servers? I mean, there’s a description of The Black Sun and there’s the protocol that describes the Street and the Metaverse and everything, but there’s this thing going on where what Stephenson is describing is Juanita sending Hiro a file and not giving Hiro a link to a network resource.
Snow Crash was published in 1992, 8 years after 1984’s Neuromancer and I’m reasonably sure that Neuromancer does have the concept of Case traveling from network resource to network resource. Maybe less so the links and addresses and so on.
I think this reflects something about the nature of 1987’s Hypercard. Networking was still not a thing that really happened outside of labs or Jerry Pournelle’s mansion, so for Stephenson, Hypercard stacks - a computer file that is an organized collection of information with *internal* links - are totally fine, but the idea that those links are distributed over multiple separate computing resources just isn’t really there yet.
And look, another thing: it’s clear that Hiro’s computer (as powerful as it is, as small as it is, as jacked-in to the network with its fiber-optic cable which, let’s be clear, is probably the most ridiculous thing about this entire book because in what world is it ever likely that Comcast or whomever would have run enough fiber for you to get access to it in a storage unit) is running some contemporary Android because seriously, how janky is that interface? Whatever app implementing the Global Multimedia Protocol Group’s Street protocol is a pretty shitty one for I guess having whatever thread block the main UI rendering thread?
I mean it’s a bit like having Juanita email Hiro a giant attachment and your mail client in the background is suddenly all HEY EVERYONE HOLD ON A SECOND, GOT A BIG ATTACHMENT COMING IN FROM JUANITA.
But you know, this also still makes sense because of the Hypercard reference, right? This is all about the Mac: Windows 3.1 doesn’t even exist yet and the contemporary Mac OS is System 7, which came out in 1991 and had “limited support for multitasking”.
Co-operative or pre-emptive multitasking would totally have futzed with smooth rendering of The Black Sun, so either Hiro’s running on Android or for some reason he’s into vintage computing and running his client on Mac OS 9.
Anyway! Hiro’s super impressed that Juanita has emailed him a really big attachment because he thinks it must have half of the Library in it, which is a bit like saying it would have half of Wikipedia in it, but also all the video content that the CIA has. 2015’s Wikipedia text dump with all edit history was 10TB uncompressed, and in 2014, Wikimedia’s dataset (images, etc.) was about 24TB. (I invite my friends at Wikimedia to write in and tell me exactly how big Wikipedia is these days).
So, say Juanita just emailed Hiro a 50TB uncompressed file, (data, without the Librarian executable!) around 5TB compressed. I get unzipping it, that makes sense. 5TB makes 40,000 gigabits, so let’s assume Hiro has a gigabit Comcast fiber connection - it’s still going to take ~666 minutes for him to get Juanita’s email, and even if he’s got 10GigE, that’s going to take over an hour.
So, uh, Hiro gets Juanita’s giant email, his computer unzips it and we get the throwaway reference to a Librarian (ooh, more later) before Juanita mentions Da5id and strokes Hiro’s ego for being smart. Oh, and she warns Hiro to stay away from Raven and Snow Crash, which is a bit like Ripley warning her crew not to do stupid stuff. You can guess what Hiro will do, right?
Exit Juanita.
Hiro “orbits back around to the Hacker Quadrant” which I can now no longer read as anything but “hangs out at the Orange Website” where Da5id’s messing around with hypercards on his table (“business stats on The Black Sun, film and video clips, hunks of software, scrawled telephone numbers”) and I have to admit it’s time to be a little bit jealous of operating system architectures in Hiro’s world. Stephenson’s describing combinations of packages of structured data (“scrawled telephone numbers”) as well as something that could be a spreadsheet but probably isn’t (“business stats on The Black Sun”) and honestly probably videos he’s downloaded from Youtube. Are the “hunks of software” the code, data, or executables? Who can tell!
Da5id mentions that “there’s a little blip in the operating system” whenever Hiro comes in which makes him think The Black Sun is going to crash, and... now I guess we’re talking about servers? Now we get some insight that there’s a server running an OS somewhere and that The Black Sun is an application running on that server. We have a network! (I am presuming here that there’s not one OS that runs the entirety of the Metaverse).
Hiro admits that it’s probably BigBoard, because it “has one routine that patches some of the traps in low memory, for a moment” and then yes, we’re totally in the System 7/DOS era of computing and also, I guess Hiro wrote BigBoard in C? Which makes sense because Da5id has entirely reasonable feedback for Hiro which is along the lines of, hey, that hack was fine but could you please update it and god now I’ve got some strange Facebook vibe going on about code history.
Hiro doesn’t really take this well when Da5id asks him to update his hacky little utility - “It’s fucking hard” for him to be a freelance hacker anymore, “you have to have a big corporation behind you” and at this point we get an insight into Stephenson’s vision of a capitalist future - apparently everyone is still an employee! Because in the late-stage capitalism we’re living in right now, it’s super trendy for corporations to shed FTEs for contractors. (Side note: does this mean employees in the Snow Crash universe have employer-sponsored health insurance? Everything’s privatized so sure, and there’s the implication Hiro would have to pay out of pocket if he visited a franchised clinic...)
Anyway, they end up having a conversation (I keep wanting to type @Hiro and @Da5id) about Juanita, for which let's just keep an eye on because of Bechdel Reasons. Turns out Hiro was fired by Da5id several years ago and we get another example of how Hiro isn't that great at reading people because he didn't realise he was being fired until three-quarters of the way through the conversation. To be honest this says as much about Da5id as it does about Hiro, and just goes to show that tech startups are, generally speaking, shit at HR. Who wants to hazard a guess as to whether Juanita had to step in as the mother hen of the Black Sun?
Well, the two hackers keep talking for a while--trying to figure out why Juanita stopped by-- and it turns out that she's worried about "a really large guy with long black hair" peddling something called Snow Crash. That guy's hanging around outside, and Da5id got a hypercard from him (another email attachment!), this one that says:
SNOW CRASH
tear this card in half to
release your free sample
Hiro's all "omg Da5id did you seriously let your mail client receive an email from a black-and-white-person", and Da5id shrugs away this insult to his opsec; saying he's running antivirals and all that business because of all the hackers who pass through The Black Sun.
They talk about the hypercard and the concept of it likely being a spam ad ("probably an animercial"), but they do agree that it's a particularly rare occurrence to get a drug that wouldn't be able to hurt you.
Nothing much happens at first: a "stark naked Brandy" avatar turns up, but it's not even the default, a cheap knockoff from Taiwan, much like a contemporary knockoff Chinese toy on Amazon, most likely shot through with lead and other contaminants. I think the default these days would be an egg avatar, right? Not even a Brandy or a Clint, just an asexual egg. I mean, I say "egg" now and most of you know what I mean, right?
The avatar shows Da5id a scroll for him to look at, but all it looks like is "Just static. White noise. Snow." and I think we're supposed to remember what analogue TV snow looks like, and the seminal sky above the port.
They both think it's boring: "A fixed pattern of black-and-white pixels, fairly high resolution. Just a few hundred thousand ones and zeros for me to look at", so we're only really talking about a relatively tiny PNG these days - and Hiro reckons the same, just a thousand bytes of information. Da5id doesn't get it and thinks it was buggy - why would someone show him binary information? - and Hiro points out that "all information looks like noise until you break the code" which I don't know about you, but is very late-night undergrad dorm room talk.
Turns out, though, that the Brandy whispered something into Da5id's ear, some language he didn't recognize, "just a bunch of babble" and we get an italicized Babel in the text, and it's not like we're being pointed to a Chekov's tower waiting to fall over due to some sort of building code violation.
Anyway, their topic of conversation moves on. Sushi K is playing tonight, and the way they're talking about him, he's got some sort of amazing avatar, which I feel these days is either like having a brilliant personal website or more likely, having a great skin in Fortnite. I mean, remember: Fortnite is basically The Black Sun at this point. A whole bunch of people are in it together and they go see concerts. I still reckon it's much more likely that Fortnite becomes the Metaverse than Facebook or Oculus trying to intentionally create the Metaverse.
There's a bit of a weird thing about how Sushi K's hairdo (it's a Rising Sun) is subject to "height and width regulations" on the Street, but how Da5id "allows free expression inside The Black Sun, so the orange rays extend all the way to the property lines" and that, again, sounds like the modern equivalent of a sort of 4chan-esque libertarian whatever-goes, the rules outside don't apply in here approach. I'm also not entirely sure what to think about the Street's regulations? I mean, there are analogous specs for, e.g. valid HTML that a browser will render, but it's not like anyone is going to tell you that you shouldn't have, I dunno, ads that are "too big" on your website.
Although now I come to think of it, perhaps the Street is more like Google's AMP. A thing that a whole bunch of people end up using just because it's there, and AMP does enforce some set of content rules, not just technical specifications. I suppose the Street also makes sense in the context of 1993 -- AOL started in 1991 -- and the other online services at the time were much more top-down. Or, they were a lot more like tinymushes or moos - programatically expressed object-oriented multi-user spaces, which did--or could--have rules by virtue of instances being top-down. Not like the web at all.
There's a bit of conversation about how Americans won't buy music from a Japanese person, and Da5id suggests that Hiro tell Sushi K, and charge for what I imagine in a story like this would be called "intel", as if there were some world, ever, where a random freelancer would be able to place monetary value on knowledge like that and that a buyer would exist and who would be willing to pay for such knowledge. I mean... am I being weird or is that just something super difficult to imagine?
As Hiro and Da5id talk, there's what feels to me a very Stephenson sentence: "they inject themselves into a stream of traffic", smushing technical language, something jargon-y with everyday experiences.
Hiro also says something that Da5id doesn't understand and I have to admit at first glance, I don't understand it either. Hiro thinks that Sushi needs to be "exposed to some actual biomass" -- and I won't explain what biomass is even though Da5id doesn't know, because I know you know -- but Hiro explains the underlying expression by saying that "the Industry feeds off the human biomass of America". Turns out Hiro just means that Sushi K needs to meet actual people and not be surrounded by a yes-entourage. A yestourage. Hm, maybe not.
It's at this point that Da5id's voice starts to sound funny, white noise creeping into his audio.
There is a sword bit. I have to confess, I don't really get the sword thing. I mean, I don't get the "swords are cool" thing, nor do I get the "sword fights are cool" thing. Anyway, Hiro gets to have a moment with a couple of Nipponese businessmen and I swear to god I don't think I'm ever going to be OK with typing "Nipponese". The moment hints that there's going to be a sword fight, and roughly at the same time, a bunch of bouncers (gorillas in tuxedos) start heading toward Hiro, shoving people around. We learn that the only thing that can do that is a daemon.
Well. Now shit is starting to go down! Da5id has disappeared! His avatar's turned into a "jittering cloud of bad digital karma" which again, I am confused about! I get that it's very cinematic and we get to imagine like something is corrupted. There is, I suppose, a pretty vivid description of something changing color, rolling around a color wheel "as though being strafed with high-powered disco lights" and "not so much an organized body as it is a centrifugal cloud of lines and polygons whose center cannot hold". Which honestly makes it sound a bit like Glitch Madden, or a day-one release of an Assassin's Creed series game. (SORRY UBISOFT PEOPLE).
I mean, I'm trying to figure out how this would work in practice and how it would work right now, and... I don't know enough about game or 3D engines to figure out how it might happen. It feels like it could happen as a local corruption with your GPU memory, but not over the network? My understanding is that for something like this to happen, the mesh and texture data that makes up Da5id's avatar would need to be generated on Da5id's local machine or, I guess, on the Black Sun's server, and then pushed out to each client. Which is a lot, I think! Traditional 3D environment multiplayer games don't work that way! But VRML does (did?), so... (Aside: VRML won't be invited until 1995, in another 3 years. Double aside: I always pronounced VRML as the letters, and then I met people who pronounced as Vermal, like Garfield's Nermal).
All of this doesn't bother the daemons because they are daemons and they're just doing their job. They are just like YouTube ContentID daemons! Turns out, though, that the daemons weren't after Hiro, who thought they were coming after him because his shitty Bigboard code finally crossed some line. They're actually coming for Da5id - they grab him and kick him out into the Street which is a big deal because "Da5id Meier, supreme hacker overload [sic], founding father of the Metaverse protocol, creator and proprietor of the world-famous Black Sun, has just suffered a system crash. He's been thrown out of his own bar by his own daemons."
Now. There are two things in my head here. Well. Three, now that I come to think of it.
The first one: gosh, imagine if Da5id Meier were Tim Berners-Lee. In our universe, Tim Berners-Lee is not really a supreme hacker overload [sic], he was an academic working at a multi-national prestigious and stupendously expensive physics experiment. But he did use a very cool and expensive computer! He's founding father of the hypertext transfer protocol (1991! 1 year before Snow Crash!) But! Berners-Lee does not run a world-famous website! Neither is it a bar!
OK, the second one: gosh, imagine if Da5id Meier were jwz! jwz is a self-confessed hacker! He worked on Netscape Navigator! He does run a bar! It does not make a lot of money! He, I don't think, has not been thrown out of a website?
OK, the third one and I am really sorry that these all happen to be white dudes, sigh, but that would be John Carmack, co-founder of id Software (Doom, Quake, other games where you shoot things) and now CTO at Oculus VR at Facebook. I mean, that one's pretty boring.
And that's Chapter 9. What did we learn? People still send email attachments and Comcast has finally run fiber to enough places that you can even get it at a storage unit. Also, never open attachments from strangers. Also also, the Street/Metaverse is weird and not like the web at all, but we knew that.

1.1 Snow Crashing (13) - Chapter 10

It’s Chapter 10 and we’ve switched over to following Y.T.
We last saw Y.T. in Chapter 6, when she’d been picked up by the MetaCops, was on her way to the Hoosegow (“Premium incarceration and restraint services”) and then shipped off to The Clink because the Hoosegow is all out of room for females.
We open Chapter 10 with a little bit about Kouriers and how they all learn to shiv open a pair of handcuffs, and it occurs to me that the skating, ‘pooning couriers of the Snow Crash universe are pretty much at this point the zero-hours contractor UberEats and
“whichever food delivery service hasn’t gone bust” yet evolution of our universe only a few years down the road. They’re using skateboards (smart skateboards, admittedly), we’re still using scooters and electric scooters or, I guess in Hiro’s case, as a Deliverator, a car. Deliverators! Huh! Those... weren’t really a thing when I started writing this!
Anyway, there’s a throwaway line about “the longtime status of skateboarders as an oppressed ethnic group” which, yeah, I see how that was true and relevant at the time, but I can’t help but see that against the backdrop of 2019s incels and red-pill culture of people who *aren’t* really oppressed — comparatively speaking, or at least not in the manner in which they think — but who insist on seeing themselves as such.
Stephenson takes a while to describe Y.T.’s uniform in what feels to me (again, me: an under-read non-literary arts major who hasn’t done an MFA!) like the sort of science-fictional showing-not-telling that the genre gets shit for. I guess the alternative is for Y.T. to sit there and for us to peek in on her interior experience as she comments upon her uniform, so you know, ymmv. But - Y.T.’s uniform! There’s a lot going on here:
First - the uniform “has a hundred pockets” and I do not know if Stephenson was tapping into the justifiable rage against the lack of pockets in women’s clothing, but whatever: Y.T.’s uniform has oodles of them, and they are all purely for utilitarian purposes, e.g. putting things in, carrying them, and having them to hand when you might need them. Y.T. does not have a very large go-bag with her, as it were.
Stephenson enumerates the pockets Y.T. has upon her person:
  • “big flat pockets for deliveries”;
  • “eensie narrow pockets for gear”;
  • “pockets sewn into sleeves, thighs, shins”
I mean, that’s a lot of pockets and not a decorative one among them. I guess there’s probably decorative pockets too, but we’re really not into that mood at the moment, not with Y.T. in The Clink. It has to be said that the tone here isn’t that Y.T.’s freaking out or anything: it feels like she’s been in The Clink before, and also she’s got all the gear she needs to bust out. At the very least, we’re reassured that she knows how to get out of handcuffs, which, we’re reminded, are “not intended as long-term restraint devices.”
Back to Y.T.’s equipment, of which, like the pockets, she has A Lot. Most of the equipment is “small, tricky, lightweight” and, well, here’s the list:
  • pens
  • markers
  • penlights
  • penknives
  • lock picks
  • bar-code scanners (yes, I know, keep going)
  • flares
  • screwdrivers
  • Liquid Knucles (we’ll come back to this too)
  • bundy stunners (I have to admit I do not know)
  • lightsticks; and
  • a calculator (doubling as a taxi meter and a stopwatch, yes we’ll come back to this too)
OK, first! The bar-code scanners! This totally makes sense! Bar-code scanners are really high-tech and you totally need one if you are scanning documents to find out where they need to go, or tracking packages! How cute that there’s like a specific bar-code scanner, though, and how cute that there’s more than one! (Of course there’s more than one, even in Our Algorithm’s Year of 2019 we are not surprised about the continued existence of proprietary standards requiring non-open, proprietary hardware) .
Second! The Liquid Knuckes! I... think this might be branded Mace? There’s no mention of mace anywhere else in the novel, and the way Y.T. uses it later, it’s not a Taser (Wikipedia says that dates back to 1974) either. Mace was invented in 1965, so the liquid knuckles feels more like an iteration on the, er, popular self-defense product.
But really, let’s get on to the calculator, because it is “stuck upside-down to her right thigh, doubling as a taxi-meter and a stopwatch” and stop me if you are already thinking about that meme about all the things in the Tandy catalogue or whatever, and the fact that all those things are now done by your 2010 era smartphone. Yes, because on Y.T.’s other thigh is her “personal phone”.
“Personal phone”! It rings as the manager locks the door upstairs, so Y.T. “offhooks it with her free hand” and uses it to talk to her mother and reassure and lie in the way that all teenagers have done, ever, in the combined history of sexual reproduction and sentience and language. Y.T.’s mom is concerned that Y.T. used a nice avatar and where she was hanging out on the Street (a totally non-specific “this Arcade”) and I am not sure if there’s a contemporary equivalent of wear a nice avatar when you are on the internet, or doing internet things, these days. My kids are not old enough to be playing Fortnite or whatever or buying virtual hats, although my eldest is old enough to think that the Mii we made for his brother doesn’t look like him enough. Do parents care about what their kids dress up as in Fortnite? Is that even a thing?
Anyway, Mom dismissed, Y.T. “punches the flash button” which I did not know about and had to look up, and it’s not a real button but maybe a sequence of buttons you hit in the 1990s to get a “fresh dial tone in the space of about half a second”. And it’s this bit of specificity that I feel is another sign of the science fiction-y bits right, the escapism? Look at this future world where you can get a dial-tone so quickly! This is why people think SF is all shiny rockets and buttons.
But... it does matter, right? I am not saying this to be egotistical, but kn the type of observation that you can get a dial tone in the space of about half a second says a lot about the world and for some people, they’d infer a lot about the state of that world and how the people might behave in it. Or you could totally gloss it over as some sort of technological fetishism, “ugh, look at these people obsessing about how quickly you can call someone” but... this is describing a world where it’s really easy to get in touch with anyone with minimal friction (HA TAKE THAT NEXTDOOR).
Y.T. uses this phenomenally quick acquisition of dialtone to call Roadkill, her boyfriend, and I *think* she’s using headphones? I don’t think the whole thing is on speakerphone the whole time? The text does say that she “offhooks” her personal phone (cute!) with her free hand to answer mom, but that could easily just mean answer and not physically take a phone off the hook. If she *is* taking the phone off the hook, then... big pockets and strong velcro!
Y.T. calls Roadkill using an elementary Siri or OK Google because “the telephone remembers” and to me, this feels like an interesting choice. I know I’m obsessing a bit, but the detail about the dial-tone in half a second compares to a throwaway about how the telephone *remembers* but does not *recognize* who Y.T. wants to call, and so that’s not so much the Siri or OK Google, because younger readers may need to know, or older readers may remember, that voice recognition in the olden days was a lot more like specific matching against a waveform. (Apart from the fact that later on, Hiro will have a conversation with the Librarian). Anyway, I guess maybe the phone “remembers” what Roadkill’s, uh, phone number is?
Roadkill answers and we hear the roar of air “peeling over the microphone of [his] personal phone” and two things: one - it’s the phone’s microphone and not his headphones/mic so I guess Stephenson wasn’t envisaging headsets, or even boom headsets, or even Airpod style earbuds with built-in noise cancelling, and second, we’re still using the term “personal phone” like it’s a really big deal! I thought about this for a few minutes, and the reasons I can think of for the persistent reminder that Y.T. and Roadkill have *personal* phones is that they’re:
  • on their person, see?
  • a person’s phone and not a residence’s phone, in the days where a phone was attached to a physical location, did not move and you rarely had more than one phone per physical address
  • even if there were multiple phones at a residence (he says, remembering being jealous of tv shows with American teen characters who not only had their own phone in their bedroom but also their own phone line in their bedroom so as to not to have to wait for other people to GET OFF THE PHONE ALREADY or more accurately, the inverse, for the adults in the house to not have to yell HOW LONG HAVE YOU BEEN ON THE PHONE CAN YOU GET OFF NOW THIS COSTS MONEY (the latter part about it costing money was the non flat-rate nature of phone calls, local or otherwise, in the UK in the 80s and 90s))
Anyway. Personal phones! They’ll never catch on. They’re probably a bad idea.
Roadkill is a dork: he does not know that his job is to come assist (not rescue!) Y.T. Irritatingly, even if he did accept that it was his job to do so, he cannot because he’s on his way to Bernie with a super-ultra and that does not mean he is on his way to a Bernie Sanders rally, even in whatever year it is in this universe, it means he is on his way to San Bernadino with a super-ultra-high-priority delivery. I have not done the research but it feels funny that we have skater/kourier lingo explained to us, but not some of the other SFnal stuff.
So, struck out with her boyfriend, Y.T. tries calling Hiro on *his* personal phone and we start getting the sense that they might be personal phones because everyone has one? Does Y.T.’s mom have one? Does the manager of The Clink have one, or do the aforementioned MetaCops who busted Y.T. have them, too? (I feel like they do not, that personal phones are still not necessarily a luxury, but also that we haven't seen any evidence that they're something everyone has or needs in the way we have mobile phones in 2019).
Hiro says he's in a parking lot of a Safeway, and it sounds like he is: "in the background, [Y.T.] can hear the shopping carts performing their clashy, anal copulations"... which... I don't know what to hink about?
Y.T. asks Hiro to help her bust out of The Clink, and lets him know that she's been in there for ten minutes. Turns out Hiro knows a bit about getting out a Clink. He says:
"Okay, the three-ring binder for Clink franchises states that the manager is supposed to check on the detainee half an hour after admission."
which kind of impresses Y.T., I think, because she accusingly asks how he knows this stuff and the answer, obviously, is that it's because Hiro must have more than a passing practical familiarity with Clink operating procedures.
Now, I feel that in an Extremely Online world, this knowledge about The Clink wouldn't *only* come from having a repeated on/off-again relationship with Clink franchises, but also because... it would have been posted somewhere already? I mean, like, maybe it would be online somewhere and keep being taken down via DMCA notices, but it would at least be on the (spooky noise) dark web? Or if not the actual three-ring binder PDF of the franchise manual, then at least the folk knowledge that Hiro is supplying to Y.T. For example, on Reddit, I'd imagine:
  • IAMA Clink Franchise Owner, AMA [ask me anything]
  • Ask Reddit: What's the worst thing that's ever happened to you in a Clink?
Or even a Quora: "How does The Clink make money?", or a Yahoo! Answers question (do they even exist, still?) "I need help busting my gf out of the clink", an Ask Metafilter "My sister got thrown into The Clink after trying to leave her abusive husband and I can't afford a lawyer. What... options do I have?" (with an appropriate DTMFA)
Later, when the manager comes to check on Y.T., we get another mention of her Knight Visions, which are pretty much night-vision (ha) goggles she's wearing and have been mentioned a couple times to protect her from bright light and also to see in the dark (in Chapter, we learned that they help her see all the way into the near infrared). In this case, they adaptively darken and help her from being blinded by the sudden light when the manager flicks them back on.
This is kind of interesting because so far, Y.T.'s been a) wearing them the whole time without worrying about battery life and b) we're in a world with wireless ("radio") network connectivity (more on that later, in Chapter 13), and c) the Knight Visions aren't A.R. goggles (but I guess the Gargoyle has them too). I'm getting ahead of myself here.
We get a throwback to when Y.T. was asked to take off her coveralls and we found out she wasn't wearing anything underneath, because this information about Y.T.'s body has really pissed off the manager and he had to decide whether or not to assault or rape her. We get the second mention of Y.T.'s dentata (I guess, like a Chekov's dentata) and that it can be "unpredictable" which, tbh, provided it's on the side of lethally unpredictable or unpredictable in terms of exactly how disabling, but definitely disabling, might just be fine?
Anyway, this is all beside the point because look: I am not a woman and have also never been a teenage girl or courier. I'm also pretty sure I have never worn a utilitarian, functional set of overalls with lots of pockets and zips. I have to admit though that my personal preference would be to wear underwear with this outfit and while it's not explicit that Y.T.'s *not* wearing any underwear at all, I think the implication is there, right? And look, I think there's no reason for this other than to make her a sex object? On the one hand, it's not like she isn't sexually active *and* has her own agency (she's got the dentata, and it's likely that her mother doesn't know about it). It's implied that she's slept with her current boyfriend, too. So, I dunno. I just think you'd get hot with all of that harpooning and skating and general youthful tomfoolery and it's L.A. and we don't really hear much about the moisture-wicking breathability of the coveralls, although we do know that it's "bulging all over with sintered armorgel padding". I just think you'd get... swampy?
Anyway, the manager gets pissed off and decides not to assault Y.T. and she observes the sheer idiocy of him being frustrated and angry at her, "as if he has a right to be" and pointedly, "this is the gender that invented the polio vaccine?"
Now that the manager's done his franchise-mandated check (of which also: does The Clink know? He's kind of slacking off anyway, so at this point he's at the very least being marginally diligent as his job), it's time for Y.T. to follow Hiro's instructions. She sets her alarm for five minutes and honestly, I do not know what to do with the description that she's "the only North American who actually know how to set the alarm on her digital wrist-watch".
I... don't remember this being hard, but I guess I do remember digital watches gradually becoming overloaded with functionality? And maybe they just got too complicated, or maybe it's like the joke about setting the time on a VCR? Also, people still have watches! Or maybe they don't!
We get a short list as Y.T. gets ready: she uses her shiv to get out of the cufflinks, uses a lightstick so she can see (no flashlight on her personal phone, or maybe it's easier and more disposable to carry a bunch of them), and a throwaway that she keeps the cufflinks on because she likes the look of them, the "kind of thing her mom used to do, back when she was a punk", presumably so we can get a later comparison about how far her mom has fallen.
She's supposed to be getting ready to make her move, so she checks out the emergency exit and fire alarm, the latter of which is has instructions in English and other languages, some of which look like Taxilinga. We've had a few references to Taxilinga so far and they feel like a reflection of America as the immigrant melting pot and driving people around being a fairly entry level job. So: no autonomous vehicles driving anyone around (which makes sense for the kind of story that Stephenson's trying to tell, I think) - it would even make sense that it would be cheaper in some way to have a bunch of freelance, unlicensed taxi drivers. Also: nothing like an Uber or a Lyft, here.
Y.T. makes her move when her wristwatch goes off. Punches the emergency exit, the alarm goes off and gets out into the open, where the parking lot has turned into a jeek festival. ("Jeek" is what we're calling people from Tadzhikistan). There's a whole bunch of taxi drivers there in the back, all starting at Hiro, who's also staring back at them and we're all set up for a standoff because the manager comes running around, also yelling in Taxilinga. He's also "got missile lock on Y.T.'s ass", and part of me is wondering how long it's been since Top Gun (1986, so 6 years prior) and the Gulf War (which "ended" in 1991, so 1 year before publication). "Missile lock" just sounds so outdated these days, almost as if it's not technical enough. There's more missile lock too, because the jeeks also have it on Hiro, and everyone looks like they're just about to draw their guns.
At this point, Hiro decides he wants to show off his sword, which is not the first time we'll see the phrase "How sweet!", and everyone gets a bit confused because this guy just brought a sword to a gunfight. (Raiders of the Lost Ark came out in 1981, eleven years before this book came out).
Everything happens a bit quickly, next. Y.T. gives the manager of The Clink "a brief squirt of Liquid Knuckles" which acts like mace-but-with-a-punch, and she dives into a taxicab, guns it around in a direction nobody's expecting, pauses for Hiro to dive through a window and starts driving. They need to find somewhere to go because now they've got a tail of about half a dozen taxis coming after them, so we get a rundown of some of the other quasi-nation state franchises: there's Nova Sicilia, which we've heard of already, and then there's New South Africa, which might work because they hate jeeks, but then Hiro's black ("or at least part black"), so New South Africa's out. And they can't go to Metazania.
Hiro suggests Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong (which... well, let's just not make any comparisons to contemporary events) because he's got citizenship. They come into Mr. Lee's hot, doing seventy-five, and because they're coming in so fast, the security system "didn't have time to rez her visa" and it's late, and I'm trying to remember what rez might mean in this context. Anyway: there's a bunch of spikes and they didn't have time to retract so the tires on their stolen taxi are trashed.
Because this is the 1990s and barcodes are a thing, Hiro gets "pinioned in the crossfire of a dozen red laser beams scanning him from every direction at once", and it is not 2019 when we've got semi-reliable facial recognition. Lasers and barcodes are totally in, though. I guess this fits in with the idea of Capitalism And Shopping Gone Mad! though because now everyone gets to be treated like a supermarket good that needs to be scanned. And the CueCat won't even be released for nine more years!
The franchise has successfully ID'd Hiro and Y.T. - they get greeted by name. At the same time, their pursuers have parked along the curb, guns drawn - in total, three revolvers and a pump shotgun, with Y.T. (or our narrator, I guess) observing that "any more of these guys and they'll be able to form a government" and look, living in America in 2019 that is just not a funny joke anymore.
There's something new here, because when the jeeks step onto the sovereign-ish territory of the franchulate, a bunch of lights come on because "the security system wants better illumination on these people" and... I'm not sure what that means because we already know Y.T. can afford Knight Visions, so what does this franchulate need? Turns out that Hong Kong franchulates are famous for their antennas - "they all look like NASA research facilities" because of their antennas. Some of them are satellite uplinks, but "some of them, tiny little antennas, are pointed at the ground, at the lawngrid".
This is because they're millimeter wave radar transceivers, which used to be a big deal until 9/11 happened and now every single airport has millimeter wave radar for taking a peek under your clothes, never mind some high schools. We're told that these systems "can see the fillings in your teeth, the grommets in your Converse high-tops, the rivets in your Levi's." The security system can't just see the guns, it can tell whether they're loaded and with what sort of ammunition, which is important, because guns are illegal in Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong.
And that's the end of Chapter 10. We don't get to find out about Rat Thing next chapter, instead we switch back to Hiro and a sword fight.
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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 1911.16 - 10:10

- Days ago = 1596 days ago

- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
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