Hey, Mom! The Explanation.

Here's the permanent dedicated link to my first Hey, Mom! post and the explanation of the feature it contains.

Thursday, December 26, 2019

A Sense of Doubt blog post #1773 - SNOW CRASH synop by Dan Hon CHs 12-14


A Sense of Doubt blog post #1773 - SNOW CRASH synop by Dan Hon CHs 12-14

Hi there. Did you have a good Christmas? Or is Christmas not your thing?

It's okay. No judgement. I liked mine. Watched Uncut Gems. Good movie. We like A24 movies.

So, more Snow Crash installments.

Arguably, Snow Crash is in my top ten favorite novels of all time, any genre, anything, any book, all the time. I love to give it as a gift. It's amazing.

Snow Crash is possibly the greatest touchstone for my epic work, 25 years in the making, a cyber-sorcery extravaganza that I have been thinking about a lot lately and have started to noodle about with notes and concepts during my extended break.

EVERYONE should read Snow Crash, though not enough people have done so. It's an important book as well as being a ton of fun, a great read, and chock full of great ideas.

If only I could write something that would inspire folks to put those compliments together in a sentence about it.

Thus, discovering that Dan Hon, whose newsletter I have read for years after Warren Ellis recommended him, also loved Snow Crash and was writing a chapter-by-chapter extended synopsis -- a daunting task as there are 71 chapters in the book.

Dan Hon lives in Portland, as I just discovered as well. I would love to meet him for coffee or tea. I almost attended a con he said he would be at last year, but I couldn't make the time. Also, it was the same weekend as Rose City Comic Con, which I missed entirely this year to attend a wedding.

In any case, on a related note, I am contemplating my third or fourth re-read of the book via the audio book soon, possibly with my next choice. I often hesitate to re-read books I have read before either in sight form (traditional reading) or listening to audio. And yet, re-reading via listening is a great way to re-read. I have re-read most of Scalzi's recent works before listening to the new installment. And I am strongly considering a re-read of about 40 hours of Anne Rice Vampire books before reading her most recent as well. Despite hesitancy, and because of teaching, I listened to Middlesex twice this year.

Originally, in November, when I posted his previous synopses I just posted links to all but the last three. I have since returned to that post and pasted in all the text of each synopsis and re-formatted for clarity. All that content can be found here:

A Sense of Doubt blog post #1733 - snow crashing 1-10 by Dan Hon
The following content is the remainder of his synopses so far for the book.

Enjoy.

Or more like, I will enjoy as I am probably the only one looking at this content that enjoys it.

1.1 Snow Crashing - Part 14, Chapter 12

Previously, on Snow Crashing, in numerical order!
  11. Part 11: Chapter 9, cont. - s07e09: Snow Crashing (Part 11, Chapter 9)
  12. Part 12: Chapter 10 - s07e11: Snow Crashing

CHAPTER 12 - SNOW CRASH

Aside from Hiro’s sword fight, the last thing that happened was Y.T. and Hiro’s escape from The Clink’s parking lot, barreling at high speed straight into a Mr. Lee’s Greater Hong Kong.
We’re up to Chapter 12 now, which is all about the doggie.
There are a few things that I still don’t quite understand about the doggie, which is Ng Security Industries Semi-Autonomous Guard Unit #A-367. The first of which is that it appears to use some sort of nuclear radioisotope thermoelectric generator because during the course of the chapter, we learn that when doggie can’t move quick and pass air over it, doggie gets super hot and super uncomfortable and super sad.
Eldest kid happens to know a little bit about RTGs because both he and youngest kid are obsessed with the Mars Science Laboratory rover Curiosity, because it has a big butt on its end, which is its RTG power source.
Curiosity’s RTG produces around 2,000 watts of heat, efficiently converted to around 110 watts of electricity, from 4.8kg of plutonium-238.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
I’m not sure if I first thought doggie #A-367 was a virtual dog and not a real one, but the description of it going for porterhouse steaks and blood-drenched Frisbees certainly makes it feel like doggie is a Real Dog using some sort of metaverse interface.
The point we’re supposed to get here is that dogs are super good guard dogs and they’re super loyal. They’re also, as Y.T. would describe them, sweet! There is a little bit about how the metaverse environment presents itself to the dogs, because they’re networked. There are other doggies, and each doggy can bark to the other doggies.
Look, you can tell I’m not a dog person, and honestly, I don’t mind. Cats are better.
Anyway, doggies protect yards and, “when a neighbor doggie barks at a stranger, pictures and sounds and smells come into his mind along with the bark,” which means doggie will recognize that stranger if that stranger ever comes into his yard. Doggie also “helps spread the bark along to other nice doggies so that the entire pack can all be prepared to fight the stranger”, so one question I have is: do the dogs have to bark to spread knowledge about the stranger, or does it just help that knowledge be accepted more easily in their doggie brains? Clearly they’re all wired up to their, uh… ears, so there’s nothing from stopping their interface from just dumping it straight in there.
We get a first-doggie perspective of what happens so we have an understanding of doggie’s upgraded sensors and cognitive ability. Doggie sees two people come in, which makes him excited and he can a) tell their hearts are beating quickly; b) sweating and c) smell scared. All this is good and well these days - techniques like optical flow mean that we can guess heart rate from humans just from facial video, never mind guessing heart rate and emotion via wifi. (You’ll note I said guessing and not measuring, of which more later, in the non-Snow Crash bits of this newsletter).
Doggie has access to the millimeter-wave detection system because he can see that “the little one is carrying things that are a little naughty, but not really bad,” but not compared to the big one, but the big one’s okay because he belongs in the yard. So doggie also gets some sort of scoring mechanism and categorization of relative safety of items, as well as access to the IFF/ID system.
But! It’s all exciting, so the barking starts. And then the jeeks come into the yard: doggie can tell they’re excited, but also “saliva floods his mouth as he smells the hot salty blood pumping through their arteries” and really what I think Stephenson is trying to get across here is that intelligence and consciousness are much better when they’re embodied. Otherwise, why not just use dumb, not-alive robots?
We get a clash where doggie’s experience includes that upgraded understanding, because doggie looks at them and sees that they are carrying “three revolvers, a .38 and two .357 magnums; that the .38 is loaded with hollow-points, one of the .357s is loaded with Teflon bullets and has also been cocked; and that the shotgun is loaded with buckshot and already has a shell chambered, plus four more shells in its magazine.”
This is funny, right? Aw look at the little doggie that has detailed understanding of firearms. Much like how the Terminator has detailed files on human anatomy in Terminator 2 (1991).
This is, honestly, a lot for the little doggie and if there were any doubt that there were a real live doggie in there somewhere, we learn that the doggie gets excited, angry and “a little bit scared, but he likes being scared, to him it is the same thing as being excited. Really, he has only two emotions: sleeping and adrenaline overdrive.”
And then it all kicks off: one of the bad strangers raises their shotgun, doggie barks out and then “launches himself from his doghouse, propelled on a white-hot jet of pure, feral emotion.”
We switch back to Y.T. so we can get a good human look at what happens. There’s a doggie door in the side of the franchise building - it’s just slammed open with a clunking noise from the inside by “something with the speed and determination of a howitzer shell” and these days I wonder if a more apt and Tactical description might be a depleted uranium slug flung forth from a railgun.
Y.T. is only barely aware of this because everything appears to be happening very quickly - the jeeks have started shouting but “no one has had time to get scared yet”, it’s more of a surprised shouting.
And then the doggie door slams shut again. Actually, we get a bit of a cartoon stereotypical description of the door twanging shut, oscillating, and the impression Y.T. is left with is a “train of sparks that danced across the lawngrid… during this one second event, like a skyrocket glancing across the lot.”
We get a bit of rumor and foreshadowing, that the Rat Thing runs on four legs, so maybe the sparks were the robot legs digging into for traction.
Meanwhile, the jeeks are all in the progress of falling over, collapsing. They’ve all been disarmed of guns and knives, but there’s no blood anywhere. Another rumor, that the Rat Thing shocks you to get you to let go of something (which… I don’t know if that makes sense? Isn’t too much shock going to make you clench on to something?)
Y.T. is concerned that the jeeks have guns, but Hiro must have seen this before and grins in what I think is a mean, out-of-character manner (a carnivore’s grin), and reminss her that guns are illegal. He knows that the Rat Thing has them now.
As Y.T. politely removes the taxi and puts it back on the street, she thinks about what it might be like to sleep with Hiro (it’s not explicit, but she thinks about climbing into the back seat and taking out her dentata), before deciding this isn’t the place and reflecting that “anyone decent enough to come help her escape from The Clink probably has some kinds of scruples about boffing fifteen-year-old girls.”
Hiro and Y.T. have a bit of an awkward discussion. First noting the nice gesture of re-parking the taxi, albeit with shredded tires. Then about Y.T.’s boyfriend flaking out on assisting her jailbreak. And finally Y.T. offers that they could work together, reinforcing that she’s independent and entrepreneurial and, frankly, a bit more mature than Hiro in these areas. It gets weird though - Hiro doesn’t dismiss her out of hand (she expected him to laugh), which gets him points. Most people would be patronizing to a fifteen-year-old with this kind of offer. But he mentions that he’d already been thinking about it (look, on the internet people don’t care about how old you are just what you can do), but he admits that he’s not quite sure how it would work.
This temporarily impresses Y.T., but she still can’t trust him. It feels more like he’s stalling or dissembling, that he’s doing that adult thing where he didn’t dismiss her outright, but he’s just humoring her in a different way. Now she feels like he’s going to try to get her into bed.
As she turns away, the spotlights blam back on and Y.T.’s been punched in the ribs with a grenade thrown at her by one of the jeeks, and we learn that Y.T. can smell chick-punchers a mile off. It looks like a hand grenade too, “a well-known cartoon icon made real”. Hey! A mention of an icon! Like, also in a computer! But made real! Maybe there’s something in that…
And then, boom. Y.T.’s off her feet. She’s been knocked over by a Rat Thing, which got her out of the way of the grenade and thrown itself over the grenade to protect her, much like Steve Rogers before he got his super soldier serum and showed how smart he was by getting the flag down from that pole.
But the Rat Thing may have made the ultimate sacrifice for Y.T. It has stopped moving, “which is part of their mystery that you never get to see them, they move so fast. No one knows what they look like.”
Apart from Y.T. and Hiro who, I would expect, now have some Valuable Intel in that weird world where knowing tips about things is also a world where that knowledge can be (and is?) sold to a buyer, easily enough where people talk about it as a way to either make or supplement their income.
Doggie, it turns out, is Rottweiler-sized. It’s covered in armor, “overlapping hard plates like those of a rhinoceros.” It has a tail, “incredibly long and flexible, but it looks like a rat’s tail with the flesh eaten away by acid, consisting of segments, hundreds of them neatly plugged together.”
Doggie is wounded. It is curled up. Legs are spasming, uncoordinated. Although it is all metal, “even someone who is not an engineer can tell that it has gone all perverse and twisted.”
It tries to get up, but can’t. It’s being described like an animal in pain.
Y.T. has more empathy, curiosity and, it seems, a teenager’s attitude to life and safety, decides to approach the doggie. Hiro warns her not to, reminding her of the rumor that it’s got animal parts, “so it might be unpredictable” and I’m like: in what world are computers predictable?! This doesn’t matter to Y.T. because she likes animals.
As she gets closer — closer than anyone has ever been — she sees that it’s not all armor and muscle. Radiators are blooming from it, little wings fractalling off, with her Knight Visions letting her know they’re hot enough to bake pizzas on, so let’s say between 450-500f / 230-260c. The thing gets hotter and hotter until the little wings are almost red hot. Hiro starts to get concerned and reminds us that Rat Thing is radioactively powered by an RTG - “a radioactive substance that makes heat. That’s its energy source… …it keeps making heat until it melts”.
Y.T. is smart: she realizes that the wings are radiators, has seen them before, like the metal vanes that run up the outside of a window air conditioner, or the radiator on a car, and cars explode when they sit still and the radiator doesn’t cool them down. She wonders if the Rat Thing will blow up…
… but then she notices “a black glass canopy” like on a fighter plane. This windshield or facemask has a hole blown through it. Again, an impulsive inquisitive teenager with scant regard for safety, Y.T. sticks her hand inside, and red stuff comes out. It’s blood. Her first thought in this late-capitalism hellhole is that she can make money off this knowledge. Her second thought is that this thing is going to die, it’s burning itself alive.
She tries to pull it along, but it feels like she’s grabbing a dog by the front legs. She can tell, definitely now, that it’s alive in the way it’s reacting to her.
And at this point I’m reminded - how much volition does Rat Thing have? It’s described as a semi-autonomous guard unit. Is it hard-programmed, or soft-programmed? It clearly still has feelings and wants and desires, but do those reinforce existing behavior? Was there ever a chance that it wouldn’t rush out to deal with the grenade, and would that behavior be overridden? Presumably so, you don’t want a guard unit that’s not going to guard.
Y.T. is annoyed at Hiro. She points out that she took the initiative to propose a partnership and he shot her down with a non-commital answer. As she drags the Rat Thing back toward the doggie door, she also notices that it’s incredibly light and I have to admit my lack of dog knowledge makes this confusing. I mean, maybe it’s relatively light compared to what she expected? May I remind you that Curiosity’s 4.8kg RTG produces 2,000 watts of thermal power. I guess an adult rottweiler would be 50-60kg, so maybe the whole Rat Thing weighs about 20% of that, after the, uh, dog mass has been stripped? Less a brain in a jar and more a dog-brain in an RTG-powered exoskeleton? Boston Dynamics’ Spot weighs 25-30kg for comparison.
Anyway, Y.T. gets the doggie back to the open doggie door. Either someone or the system knows what she’s doing (otherwise the door would be closed?). It looks like she gets inside, has a look around white, robot-polished floors inside the franchise and I had initially assumed that the doggie door went to a doggie house, but I guess there’s just a hutch inside the franchise “which looks like a black washing machine”. There’s a thick cable coming out of it going into the wall, and the hutch door is open, which again, it sounds like no-one has seen before.
Rat Thing gets what seems like a liquid nitrogen bath once she’s put it back in, the not-washing machine slamming shut once the tail—that feels alive when she helps it in—is inside. A roomba comes out to clean up the mess (“a janitor robot, a Hoover with a brain”) and wipe up the blood.
Now that we’re inside, we get to learn a bitmore about Mr. Lee’s Greater Hong Kong.
There’s a poster (not today’s ubiquitous widescreen high-res displays, but an actual printed poster, framed and with a photo and everything), with a standard greeting written in badly-translated English. Again, with parents who emigrated to the U.K. from Hong Kong in the 1970s, reading about Greater Hong Kong unshackled from “Red China” is a bit weird and difficult. But, we learn that the franchise is organized under Three Principles, open to all ethnic races and anthropologies:
  1. Information, information, information
  2. Totally fair marketeering!
  3. Strict ecology!
You too could gain Hong Kong citizenship, with the usual fee of HK$100 neglected. And, hilariously for 2019, to apply you need to fill out a coupon (below) or dial 1-800-HONG KONG to apply with the help of wizened operators. So a Metaverse exists, used by presumably hundreds of millions of people, you can put information into the CIC’s Library, but… people don’t really use it for transactions.
There is a standard disclaimer of liability and so on.
And then we shift back to doggie for an important piece of character development and foreshadowing.
We learn a bit more about the RTG and get Hiro’s theory confirmed: he was very hot in the yard and felt bad, and “whenever he is out in the yard, he gets hot unless he keeps running”. He got hurt and had to lie down. He’s howling that he needs help, and the neighbor doggies are passing along his request. Again - it’s not clear if he needs to do this (he’s already getting help, the washing machine knew to cool his temperature), but maybe it just helps him be more doggie and not a sort of Alex Murphy-alike terrified cybernetic organism and have a doggie psychotic break. Regardless, a vet’s car comes along, and now it’s doggie’s job to tell all his friends about the bad strangers and, most importantly, about the nice girl who helped him and took him back to his cool house. Y.T., it appears, has earned doggie’s loyalty and is a Very Good Human Yes Indeed.
Over back in human land, Y.T.’s noticed that the Mafia are keeping an eye on her; there’s a black town car parked outside. Hiro apologizes - the deal is they keep their own things going, but they’ll split 50/50 any intel that Y.T. digs up. He reminds her that she can call him anytime (how 1990s!) and that she has his card (how… I guess people still have cards. Still.)
Y.T. gives Hiro a tip about Vitaly, Hiro’s storage-unit-mate because we’re reminded he’s into Music, Movies and Microcode, and off they split.
Last in this chapter, we see Y.T. transition from Real Y.T. to dutiful suburban daughter Y.T. She’s got a change of outfit stashed in a McDonald’s having harpooned an Audi, whose brand still exists, to skate there. Above a suspended ceiling tile she’s got her clothes and transforms, swaps out the whole ensemble, “even a fucking purse”. This is where she keeps her RadiKS coverall (and presumably all of the stuff in the pockets?). She is being every teenager who has led a life (or presumes that they are leading a life) their parents know nothing about.
In her neighborhood, it’s illegal to ride, so she carries her skateboard. She flashes a passport to get in (no ambient facial recognition, no RFID, remember it’s barcodes and laser scanners everywhere). At home, her mom is slumped at work in the den nursing a bruised arm from her weekly Fed polygraph test and I am not entirely sure where this comes from, other than later on in the book. I guess this is just the extrapolated intrusion into private life, the next step along from drug tests.
Y.T. grabs a beer and a hot bath, and that’s the end of chapter 12.
OK, a brief note! There are 71 chapters in this book! I am only one sixth done! This is going to take forever but I suppose it is a good thing to start something and stick with it. At this rate, one chapter a week, it’s going to take me another year or so until we get finished. I do not think, though, that we are going to do a binge. This seems doable. Unless I think too hard about doing this every week for a year. I mean, there will be birthdays of children during this process.

1.1 Snow Crashing - Chapter 13

Last time, in chapter 12, Hiro and Y.T. learned about the Rat Thing at Mr. Lee’s Greater Hong Kong, and we saw our first glimpse of Y.T.’s home life and her mother.
Chapter 13 starts with us back in The Black Sun. Hiro’s killed the Nipponese businessman and our attention is brought to the fact that he’s an empty polygonal shell: “no flesh, blood, or organs are visible through the new crossections that Hiro’s sword made”, as if the other avatar was “a complex inflatable doll”.
You can kind of see how it makes sense to not model the inside of an object unless there’s a reason for it. The Black Sun is mainly a place for socializing, so why bother expending designer and programmer time on modeling interiors that aren’t going to be seen?
I also just noticed that in this book, we talk about programmers, not developers. The concept of programming is central to the plot and the concepts Stephenson explores, so even if Snow Crash were written now, I don’t think it’d make sense to use describe people like Hiro as developers.
Stephenson also uses this to remind us that avatars are a metaphor. There is nobody, nothing there; the ghost has left the shell. “It reminds all The Black Sun’s patrons that they are living in a fantasy world. People hate to be reminded of this.”
Well! We did learn back in chapter 7 that part of the reason why The Black Sun has been so successful is because Juanita thought faces were important. (That part was also followed by Stephenson pointing out that Juanita was the only one who thought faces were important, a minority in an “all-male society of bitheads that made up the power structure of Black Sun Systems”, her views dismissed as trivial and superficial and this being a symptom of the “virulent type [of sexism] espoused by male techies who sincerely believed that they are too smart to be sexists” and I am not quite saying that Stephenson is sexist himself here. What I will say is that over the course of his career and the books of his I have read, his books haven’t felt completely *un*sexist, and more that he appears, in my reading, to be quite comfortable with what I see to be his own non-male character tropes.
Back to the issue of people not liking being reminded they’re in a fantasy world. I get where Stephenson is coming from this; he wants us to understand that The Metaverse is an escape from the hellish, polluted, corporatized physical world. I don’t think though, that we ever see anywhere else in the book evidence that there are people who have completely retreated from his capital-R Reality, save for one person in particular. But Stephenson does say that the patrons don’t like to be reminded that they are *living* in a fantasy world.
I suppose there are people now who also feel like they are living in a fantasy world, but I don’t feel like the problem is necessarily that serious? Yet? There’s the issue of being immersed in some media or activity and being pulled out of it. That irritation has applied to such things way before the advent of virtual reality. At least in Stephenson’s telling of the Metaverse though and this strange future world where one can apparently make a living by selling “intel”, I guess it might be possible to spend quite a lot of time in the Metaverse. But again, this is just a simple thing, like... somebody being beaten in a swordfight, an occurence that is either common or notable enough for there to be a leaderboard. (Although that leaderboard may exist only because of Hiro).
The dead not-body is dealt with by Graveyard Daemons. The daemons were a direct result of Hiro having invented sword-fighting algorithms, and it’s implied that Hiro’s sword-fighting algorithms were also directly responsible for the first ever avatar “death”. Turns out the original Metaverse specification described avatars as indivisible and atomic - “the creators of the Metaverse had not been morbid enough to foresee a demand for “[cutting someone up and [killing] them”.
So Hiro’s sword-fighting algorithms invited a kludge to deal with the results of a successful sword-fight, described as a kludge (I suppose Stephenson has enough taste to not have described them as a hack), otherwise the Metaverse would “over time, become littered with inert, dismembered avatars that never decayed.”
Now, look. It has been a very, very, very long time since I have played something like tinymush or tinymoo, old-time multi-user text-based dungeons. The latter, tinymoo, was something very much like the Metaverse in that users could program it themselves, create rooms, and create programs that defined objects and actions and so on. So, this is a bit like that, but I’d find it hard to believe that there wasn’t an existing garbage collection mechanism that couldn’t be extended to deal with discarded Metaverse objects. But that doesn’t serve the story or help us learn about Hiro, so here we go: Graveyard Daemons.
This is Hiro’s hack for dealing with losing a sword fight:
First: the loser gets disconnected from the Metaverse, which again, is not like dying, and is only annoying, but is “the closest simulation of death that the Metaverse can offer”. Nowadays you’d have something like permadeath where the real-world user would lose all the attributes accrued to the avatar, so if it were possible to have possessions in the Metaverse (e.g. the space that Hiro has, and the hypercard etc), you’d potentially lose those, too. This is pretty much just like being /kicked from IRC. I don’t have many newer metaphors or explanations, I’m afraid.
Second: there’s a cooldown. You have a few minutes before you can log back in. This is not for a game design or moderation reason, which is why these things exist now. It is because the dismembered avatar “cannot exist in two places at once” which is dumb, and just a Metaverse rule.
Third: the avatar is disposed of by the aforementioned Graveyard Daemons, a new feature invented by Hiro. They appears as small black not-ninjas and quietly and efficiently emerge from invisible trapdoors, “climb up out of the netherworld” and “within seconds, have stashed the body parts into black bags [to] vanish into hidden tunnels beneath The Black Sun’s floor.” This is a tunnel system that only the Graveyard Daemons and Hiro can use, and I’m sure that ability is going to come in useful later. I mean, it should.
This is a lot of hacking! One would think that if the Metaverse defines an avatar as an indivisible atom that things like “walls” or “floors” would similarly be so. But remember, Hiro can mess the Metaverse’s rules (“code”), in The Black Sun, at least, because avatars can be sliced in half. So everything else can be sliced and divided, too.
Fourth: the Graveyard Daemons take the dismembered avatar to “an eternal, underground bonfire beneath the center of The Black Sun, and burn it”. When it’s all burned, the avatar vanishes, the two-places-at-once rule can again be satisfied and the owner can sign in again, “creating a new avatar to run around in” and hopefully more cautious and polite the next time around.
There’s a lot going on here in that last part. I suppose the eternal underground bonfire will be a nice reminder to the people who’ve read Fall; or, Dodge in Hell recently. And, really? A bonfire? Fires can be pretty expensive to render! All those particle effects and everything! But... that fire would only be visible if there were something to look at it, no? Unless... the entirety of the Metaverse is being simulated in realtime (again for the Fall;... fans), in which case no wonder your world is helplessly polluted, you idiots are computing a whole of bunch of inefficient crap.
This seems weird and funny to me because on the one hand we have the admonition that the death of the avatar in The Black Sun is a metaphor, but on the other hand, apparently those death metaphors are literally taken to a literal Metaverse place, are subject to an actual burning simulation begging the question of the verisimilitude of that burning: what, exactly, is burning? Are the zero-thickness polygonal avatars burning like paper? Like aircraft grade friction-stir-welded titanium? Whatever is burning, it definitely takes a few minutes, because the user can’t log in until the burning has finished. And the only person who can access the Pyre under The Black Sun is Hiro, of whom we have no reason to believe has a habit of jumping down into the tunnels to gaze, pensively, at the burning not-dead avatars.
Hiro may be a good programmer, but he’s certainly not a smart one, in my opinion. (For me, this brings back memories of the bank teller in sneakers: “You break into places and steal things to show that you can break into places... and people pay you for this?” “Yes, it’s a living” “Not a very good one...”)
Then, the user can “create a new avatar” which also implies, with the burning, that the avatar was literally destroyed. The account wasn’t deleted, but that... character was deleted? So we still don’t know if the character’s possessions were also destroyed and thrown into garbage collection. So if someone had spent a lot of time on their avatar, if someone like Sushi K had his amazing hairdo associated with that avatar... it’s gone forever? I have to create a new Nintendo Mii? That... sucks.
And then lastly, that after having their avatar destroyed and being kicked from The Metaverse and to have to wait for a cooldown, “he will be more cautious and polite the next time around”, a) Stephenson betrays his assumption that Metaverse users are male (too smart to be sexist, again?) and b) there are not enough laughing crying emojis for me to respond to this.
Hiro’s audience fades out and he loses his view of The Black Sun. Outside, without his goggles, he’s in the U-Stor-It, “holding a naked katana”. It’s much later, and there’s a bunch of people watching him out here too. And for some reason, Hiro is still holding a katana. Did he have to hold the katana when he was sword fighting in The Black Sun? This might have something to do with it being hard to control. If so, did he stop, take his goggles off, go and get it and then get back in? It doesn’t look like that happened.
Anyway, Hiro can’t see The Black Sun anymore because it was being lasered into his eyes via his goggles from his computer, and Vitaly’s ass is in the way. It is time for them to go, but not before Vitaly checks to see if Hiro won his sword fight (“Of course I won the fucking sword fight, I’m the greatest sword fighter in the world.” “And you wrote the software.”) Hm. I wonder if Hiro will turn out to be a good sword fighter in Reality.
Vitaly and his band (Vitaly Chernobyl and the Meltdowns, very in now in 2019 thanks to the HBO show) came over to Long Beach via a hijacked ex-Soviet refugee freighter and I wonder what sort of wall does not exist in this world. There doesn’t seem to be that much commentary on keeping refugees out (or that much appetite or time or effort expending in doing so) in this America. This America appears to be an uneasy truce sort of melting pot. They’re very into reinforced concrete to practice their art, and the L.A. River turns out to be a great place for that.
The crew get there using a really old VW Vanagon and I’m reminded that I don’t think there’s much discussion about the price of gas in this America, either. In any event, this is the kind of van that has been lived in, and there’s a very Stephenson narrative phrase I like here: “the ownership of the Vanagon is subject to dispute, because Vitaly owes Hiro more money than it is technically worth.” Anyway, the Vanagon is loaded up and we get a description of the U-Stor-It location being somewhere that’s a cross behind a refugee camp and low-income, culturally mixed housing. There’s kids, Mayan encampments, Buddhist shrines and white trash and a long list of drugs and their paraphernalia. And also, what looks like the delivery mechanism for a new drug, “little tubes, about thumb sized, transparent plastic with a red cap on one end”, interesting because the caps are still on them, notable to Hiro as “something he hasn’t heard of before, the McDonald’s styrofoam burger box of drug containers” and I can’t remember if we McDonald’s stopped using styrofoam packaging in our world because of CFCs and the ozone layer or because cardboard was cheaper.
The van gets loaded. Nothing much interesting happens, apart from an observation about the loading carts being “technically community property, but no one believes that”, and then they’re on their way to the venue. I mean, the L.A. River. And it’s LA traffic, so Hiro’s got some time to kill and it’s time to use his computer again.
Now, because Hiro’s in a car, he can’t connect to the network (not the internet!) by fiber (fiberoptic cable, no shorthand here), so “all his communication with the outside world has to take place via radio waves which are much slower and less reliable.”
There’s a lot here, too! Last time I expressed skepticism that fiber would be run to the U-Stor-It (although I suppose it could be pirated fiber that Hiro hacked access to in an act of altruism for his local neighborhood) given Comcast and co’s current strategy of internet not-provisioning. Second there’s the issue of exactly how much gigabit fiber would cost (again, a point in favor of Hiro pirating it), although I suppose if there’s anything Hiro’s going to pay for, it’s going to be internet access. And then finally: radio waves! Cell phones weren’t really a thing in the 1990s but pagers were (no, I do not have to explain pagers to you, you have seen Captain Marvel and that end-credits scene from that Avengers movie), and yes, they were pretty low bit-rate. But while we all don’t have fiber, there’s a fair amount of LTE coverage and 5G coverage, whatever that is, is rolling out across the U.S. You can get 300 mbit+ connectivity over LTE right now, so let’s just assume that Hiro isn’t pirating his Verizon Unlimited account and it’s his largest monthly expenditure. Or, the only other thing I can think of, is that Da5id is still looking out for his socially incompetent star programmer by accidentally not turning off his company internet benefits.
It doesn’t make sense for Hiro to go into The Black Sun because his ping and bandwidth are too low (apparently even if The Metaverse were rendered server-side and streamed to his computer a la Google Stadia, GeForce Now or... Netflix), but he can go into his office(!) because that’s generated client-side.
Hiro having an office is hilarious because Stephenson has gone all-in on throwing out command-lines and flat, 2D desktop metaphors. Hiro is all in with his Oculus or Vive or whatever, and can’t even open an Excel spreadsheet without goggling in to an immersive 3D environment.
AND! This first mention of radio waves is a prompt that social media or text communications pretty much doesn’t exist *at all* in this world. There’s no Twitter. No IRC, no Facebook, not even any text messaging. Hiro and Y.T. spend the rest of each other, I swear to god, making voice calls with each other. VOICE CALLS. Y.T. doesn’t have any problem *talking* to people on her phone. The Metaverse has done that thing that technology doesn’t really do, which is to completely supplant other methods of communication. I mean, Hiro doesn’t even really appear to get emails? There’s no Slack? There’s no DM to Y.T. (SORRY. I AM SORRY.) In the world of Snow Crash, email is finally dead outside of, I think, the Government.
Anyway, Hiro’s office is just like those space in The Matrix, which is to say: quite Nipponese. There is “silvery cloud-light filtering through ricepaper walls” so there’s some really serious ray-tracing going on here.
And here I’m going to stop, partway through Chapter 13, because we’re about to get introduced to Earth and the Librarian, and that’s a whole thing. And I’ve already written over 2,700 words.

1.1 Snow Crash - Chapter 13, part 2

Previously, on Snow Crashing, in numerical order!
  11. Part 11: Chapter 9, cont. - s07e09: Snow Crashing (Part 11, Chapter 9)
  12. Part 12: Chapter 10 - s07e11: Snow Crashing
  14. Part 14: Chapter 12 - s07e15: Snow Crashing
  15. Part 15 : Chapter 13, part 1: s07e17: Snow Crash’s Graveyard Daemons, and…
OK, so we’re at Hiro’s Metaverse workspace running locally off his “computer”, which he’s goggled into from a van moving slowly on some highway in Los Angeles and we’re about to be introduced to Earth.
I may as well just quote this bit:
There is something new [here]: A globe about the size of a grapefruit, a perfectly detailed rendition of Planet Earth, hanging in space at arm's length in front of his eyes. Hiro has heard about this but never seen it. It is a piece of CIC software called, simply, Earth. It is the user interface that CIC uses to keep track of every bit of spatial information that it owns—all the maps, weather data, architectural plans, and satellite surveillance stuff.
The easy bit here is to point out that “Earth” was the inspiration for Google Earth which is partly true but as always, not the entire story.
I found a blog post by someone who worked at Keyhole at the time and Earth has at least a few sources of inspiration. There’s the Star Trek tricorder (which I hadn’t heard of before) and there’s Snow Crash. But most persuasively to me is the combination of a hardware innovation from SGI (a clip-map texture unit) and a cultural artifact (the Powers of Ten film by Charles and Ray Eames). There’s also, in the background, the promise of the internet as a significantly more democratic platform to access information, namely high-resolution satellite data. The reasoning goes, Earth would be something that would be a brand new way for people to access something (a bird’s eye view of the entire globe) they would never in their lives have a chance of accessing otherwise.
This is borne out by Stephenson’s commentary:
Hiro has been thinking that in a few years, if he does really well in the intel biz, maybe he will make enough money to subscribe to Earth and get this thing in his office. Now it is suddenly here, free of charge. The only explanation he can come up with is that Juanita must have given it to him.
There’s so much here! First this idea that the information economy will actually be an information economy, where discrete packets of information will be bought and sold in some sort of market (which is how CIC’s Library is presented). This has clearly turned out not to be the case, and in my experience, it’s not that the raw information is valuable (e.g. Hiro and Y.T. learning about the Rat Thing), but in 2019 it’s the actionable insight and translation that’s useful. Fine, you might have some secret, proprietary/confidential information about Rat Thing, the kind of stuff that Uber might get taken to court by Google over. But that’s not necessarily useful on its own.
The second thing is that Hiro would make enough money from this information economy to be able to subscribe to Earth in the first place.
When we look at what actually happened, Keyhole was a paid-for piece of software that you had to buy and subscribe for (getting yearly updates) until Google acquired it in 2004 and gave it away for free. Even now, I don’t think it’s not entirely clear why Google gave the client away for free at the time other than a genuine desire to share a cool thing with people. With hindsight though, the data behind Earth, the satellite imagery, ended up being used in the nascent Google Maps service that debuted in 2005, itself an acquisition and relaunch after being worked into an web 2.0 AJAX-y web application - Google’s release of Keyhole happened in June 2005; Maps was released in February of that year.
So Stephenson got the subscription part right, but what he didn’t anticipate and what we don’t see in Snow Crash is the gradual encroachment of the ad-funded internet and the ad-funded “information economy”, whatever that turned out to be. For regular people, we pay for Google Earth through some sort of privatized life-logging service where Google gets to store and understand more of our location-based questions and needs.
There are other things that regular people do subscribe for - it’s not clear if the kind of work Hiro does would benefit from the sort of data financial analysts use (e.g. near realtime, high-resolution imagery of car parks to estimate retail traffic, crop productivity and so on), or if he’s the kind of person whose job can subsist on purely open source information (which, you know, is good enough to make pretty good conclusions about nuclear proliferation).
Anyway. Turns out that the BABEL / INFOCALYPSE hypercard, beyond containing Earth and Library information and a Librarian (which I could imagine as all running as sandboxed code on Hiro’s computer), also has the ability to modify Hiro’s virtual environment, or that Juanita’s explicitly been granted permissions on Hiro’s computer. At the very least, it feels like he’s running untrusted code that she’s just emailed or DCC’d to him because there’s now an office behind a sliding door - “apparently Juanita came in and made a major addition to his house as well”.
The Librarian walks in from the office and we get Standard Male Bookish Librarian (as opposed to Cat Lady Librarian, Sexy Glasses Librarian or the other librarian stereotypes). My point of reference here is Giles from Buffy.
There’s a few points that we get in our introduction to the Librarian that catch my attention:
Even though he’s just a piece of software, he has reason to be cheerful; he can move through the nearly infinite stacks of information in the Library... ... The Librarian is the only piece of CIC software that costs even more than Earth; the only thing he can’t do is think.
First, I can’t believe I missed out on Stephenson catching on to our trend of naming software/apps/services with the most generic noun possible: Earth! Microsoft Windows came out in 1985 and I can’t remember when the whole trademarking issues about just owning the word Windows happened. But having dumb generic nouns for things is certainly a thing now.
The second is that, other than the part about not being able to think, the Librarian functions as a search engine to the Library’s stacks. The idea again that you’d have to be able to pay for a search engine function, potentially separate from having raw access to the Library itself, is also super weird in 2019. The Library still feels more like a proprietary, private database like Lexis/Nexis (it is, after all, modeled on a merger of the Library of Congress and the CIA) with an add-on for a better, more natural, search interface.
In the next para, there’s throwaway references about the embodiment and presentation of the Librarian: he (not it!) is “eager without being obnoxiously chipper”; and also “clasps his hands behind his back, rocks forward slightly on the balls of his feet”. Given what we learned about avatar programming when we were in The Black Sun with Hiro (the parts about Sushi K’s hair, for example, and needing to be able to puppet an avatar to be able to sword fight in the Metaverse), I have a question about the source of this Librarian behavior. Who programmed it? Is it emergent? Why does it matter? Was there a team of CIC character animators and riggers working on NPC-like Librarian behaviors? It is not as if, say, Hiro starts having a conversation with the Librarian and then they get side-tracked into that one time the Librarian took an arrow to his knee.
The next part is our Librarian expository info-dump which is a classic Stephenson move, amusing in this instance because it’s literally an information dump from a) a large source of information; b) something that manages that information; and c) gets referenced later on a couple pages later.
Hiro starts off with a simple question “OK Google, Babel’s a city in Babylon, right?” to which the Librarian starts to respond: “It was a legendary city” before launching into what feels like a snippet/onebox answer, defining Babel as a biblical, breaking up its etymology, and then shifting into sounding a bit like a GPT2 auto-generated answer, with phrases like “it is probably also somewhat onomatopoeic”.
Eh, you know what, that gives me an idea: I’m going to give GPT2 Hiro’s prompt (“Babel’s a city in Babylon, right?”) to Talk to Transformer and paste in what we get:
Babel’s a city in Babylon, right?
The name comes from the Babylonian word babašu, which is a verb that means 'to write'.
But what if that was the first time you wrote? A good start:
> babašu > babaš
Babaš is a very simple compound verb, and the meaning isn't particularly interesting. It's an adjective that means 'writing' or 'writings'. It's a perfect match for Babel.
You know the expression, "Writing is the death of memory"? That's exactly how Babel's memory works. The characters are very different from how we expect them to be. But the words themselves are the same.
The name "Babel" can be found on various coins and monuments in Babylon, which makes it even more fitting. But even more interesting are the legends in which the city is mentioned. Many of the places we're familiar with in the Old Testament are named after the ancient city.
The most famous is Nebuchadnezzar's palace in Babylon, which was built...
Which, you know, is quite a bit like the Librarian! Good going, GPT2!
Anyway, this is the part where we learn a bunch about Babel that is important to the plot and also because Stephenson is interested in language and speech and so on. We learn, much like we might in a mid-90s educational CD-ROM, that Babel might have just been a tower “with heavenly diagrams carved into its top”, instead of one that actually reached into the heavens. And we start thinking about the story of Babel in terms of an “informational disaster” because the people “couldn’t talk to each other”.
Hiro using the word “disaster” turns out to set the Librarian off on a non-sequitur (which it’s a sucker for due to its internal structure), and that to me feels like Stephenson is also making a reference to the hypercard-like interconnectedness of all things. The Librarian cannot resist jumping from topic to topic and following those associations. It cannot not click on that little blue underlined link.
We then get a discussion about the Librarian’s provenance (“You’re a pretty decent piece of ware. Who wrote you, anyway?”) in which I slightly smirk at the word “ware”. The Librarian has the innate ability to learn and modifies its code, and that ability came from its creator. Hiro — or maybe Stephenson’s? — biases are on display here because Hiro thinks maybe he knew the person who coded the Librarian (“Maybe I know him. I know a lot of hackers”) and it turns out that the Librarian was coded by a researcher at the Library of Congress who taught himself how to code.
This is... amazing? Hiro lives in an information economy and it’s also one where a sufficiently motivated library researcher can teach themselves to code and create a piece of software that is ludicrously expensive and a natural language interface to the world’s biggest database. This person, Dr. Emmanuel Lagos, is some sort of uber-hacker, and we’re still talking about hackers, not coders or developers: but someone hacking together something like the Librarian.
I’m going to stop here - that’s about 2,000 words again(!) - and we’ll still have a few pages to go before we finish Chapter 13.

1.2 Snow Crashing - Chapter 13, part 3

Last time, we were over half-way through chapter 13, having learned that the Librarian was a piece of complicated software hacked together by another librarian, Dr. Emmanuel Lagos.
Hiro dives in and asks for “every piece of free information in the Library that contains L. Bob Rife” in chronological order and is very emphatic about only including free information. I suppose that’s a reminder that we’re living in a full-on Information and Knowledge Economy, and that Hiro has No Money To His Name.
Because this is 1992, the kind of information that is in libraries and free happens to be “television and newspapers” which, ha! In 2019, television is not free unless it’s been ripped and stuck on YouTube or wherever and newspapers if they even exist anymore are increasingly behind paywalls too. We should remember though that these are information sources in The Library, an evolution of the library of congress, so maybe we should cut Stephenson some slack here? In 2019 there’d be a surfeit of information about Rife, and there’s a whole discipline of open source intelligence that covers what you can find out about something with the emphasis on publicly available information (and sometimes, not entirely free information, either. Just the kind of stuff that you can get reasonable access to without being a nation state).
While the Librarian’s busy doing that, Hiro takes a look at Earth and just the resolution and clarity of it tells Hiro “that this piece of software is some heavy shit”. In 1992, this type of information fusion would indeed by some heavy shit: we’ve got not just the continents and oceans, but weather systems complete with shadows and, in perhaps one of the only minor references to potential climate change, the “polar ice caps, fading and fragmenting into the sea”. There’s even an impressed bit about the terminator sweeping across off the Pacific. I don’t know if it’s the fact that it’s a realtime view of a terminator that’s impressive or that the terminator is even displayed. Any sufficiently privileged person who’s travelled internationally with a seatback display has probably seen the stereotypical world map with light/dark overlaid upon it.
Just like our Google Earth and other zoomable user interfaces, and in another reference to current attempts at VR head mounted displays, Hiro’s goggles notice his eyes attempting to focus further away, so his point of view zooms in to the thing he saw moving across the globe - it turns out to be a low-flying CIC satellite. This is one divergence from what Google’s Earth has delivered to us - as far as I know, our Earth doesn’t include any realtime data sources. Even Maps (sigh, I hate these nouns) when it purports to show realtime traffic doesn’t actually show realtime traffic. But Snow Crash’s Earth shows either a realtime merged satellite view that also shows something like a Planet Labs satellite, or a computed view.
Meanwhile, the Librarian has completed his search, presenting it as a hypercard. Again, the idea of a search engine isn’t really here, even though there are Daemons. In fact, the last time we heard about Daemons they were even presented as embodied software entities - the not-ninjas that creep out after a sword fight and drag the body away to be burnt in the eternal fires under The Black Sun. The Librarian is not a tool, not a background search process. It’s an interactive human interface, one that can be configured to be a bit louder (much like TARS or CASE can have their humor settings fine-tuned).
The hypercard is a reminder that this is a future where the web doesn’t exist and we don’t live in a REST-y document-centered information universe. The only real connection we have to cards right now, I think, are in design systems like Google’s Material Design or Apple’s latest HIG, where cards are a visual metaphor, but not necessarily one for information architecture.
In this way, Hiro’s hypercard results aren’t a set of pages to be… paged through, like Google’s results. They’re still discrete results (“snapshots of the front pages of newspapers” and “colorful, glowing rectangles [of] miniature television screens showing live video.” just presented in a different way, in a different container. There’s a cute phrase here and I’d have to check the etymology, but Stephenson describes the search results as “fingernail-sized icons” which I had actually typed as thumbnails before realizing what the author had done.
The description of the hypercard (not necessarily a hypercard stack though - we just see the one card at the moment) is something that feels like it’s straight out of Douglas Adams’ Hyperland, which I wrote about a good five years ago. Just the idea of motion video on something that looks like a card feels like peak early 90s ZOMG MULTIHYPERMEDIA.
In any event, Hiro is Freaked Out because the hypercard implies the presence of a shit-ton of full-motion video (honestly though, it’s only NTSC resolution, so it’s not like it’s that big), and because he’s “jacked in over a cellular link,” the Librarian “couldn’t have moved that much video into my system that fast.”
Also! The model here is that the video is in the hypercard. There are still no network-addressable resources. The hypercard is self-contained, a blob or package of text and binary information. Hiro is behaving as if there’s no way the hypercard contains references to video accessible in the Library. So the only possible explanation is that Juanita already collected all the video, anticipated the search Hiro would perform, and included it in the Babel/Infocalypse stack in the first place. Which she did. And which is the end, finally, of chapter 13.
OK, that’s it for this episode! Not an obscene number of words, and definitely under 2,500 make no mistake!

1.2 Snow Crashing - Chapter 14

Last time, we just finished chapter 13 with the revelation that competent Juanita and Dr. Lagos had already collected all the Babel/Infocalypse information in the offline hypercard Hiro received, and we got our first look at what a hypercard interface looks like.
At the beginning of chapter 14, Hiro’s looking at the “fingernail sized icons”. I thought that was funny last time, because it’s a roundabout way of describing what we would now expect to be understood as a thumbnail, which Wikipedia reckons started to be used in computing terms in the 80s. In that case, Stephenson might be excused for not using the multimedia term.
The hypercard interface is pretty skeuomorphic, because there’s a “miniature TV in the upper left corner of the card”, which zooms in until it’s like a “twelve-inch low-def television set at arms’ length”. I say skeuomorphic because I feel like there’s an interface affordance here - the video that’s being displayed is 8mm footage from the 60s, so maybe this is a shortcut intended to help a user understand the age of the footage without looking at textually presented metadata, the equivalent of knowing a yellowed, curling photo in a photo album is probably “old”. It’s also interesting to note that Stephenson distinguishes the low-definition video image. On the one hand, because it’s on 8mm film it doesn’t necessarily have to be low-definition, it could’ve been re-scanned. On the other hand, it also implies that we’re in a world which has dramatically sharper, higher-resolution video and computer graphics (the latter, definitely, because of the Metaverse), than the video the reader might be used to.
In any event, a different implication is that the hypercard stack is very thorough. It’s a football game from when Rife was in high school in 1965. Hiro asks whether the Librarian can summarize the contents of the hypercard, which it can’t, but it can “list the contents briefly”. There were computational summarizers of text in the mid 90s, I seem to remember that Word 95 either licensed Grammatik for text summarization, or at least had similar technology. I’m pretty sure I used it on texts for school at least. Instead, the Librarian can do something a little bit like Google’s snippets, and can summarize in natural language metadata — structured data it either has, or can infer, about the contents of the stack (e.g. “the stack contains eleven high school football games”). Through this, we get a brief history of Rife’s high school and college academics, where he ends up majoring in communications.
We get another idea of how thorough the stack is, and by implication how sprawling the new Library of Congress is. The stack includes 50 hours of footage from Rife’s first job which includes outtakes. Imagine if every single broadcaster had sent all of their footage, including all the outtakes, to a central location for digitization and cataloging? In the world of Snow Crash, of course, you only get this information if you pay for it, so there’s at least a financial incentive. But even so, this means that at some point people figured out the benefits of centralization. There’s nothing in this world stopping individual entities like that broadcast network from making its archives available for money either. Even with our pseudo-centralized effective monopoly of Youtube as a searchable video provider, its metadata is crap and its monetization is a bit of a crapshoot. Imagine if NBC Sports had decided to stick everything on YouTube, with ads on, as a monetization strategy? The rights clearances in the first place don’t even bear thinking about.
Anyway, back to Rife: like many successful people in life, after his first job he gets a hand up from a wealthy relative (“a financier with roots in the oil business’), and we get a savvy comment that the Librarian can do textual analysis because most of the articles about this change in Rife’s career are “textually related”, so: press releases.
There’s a blip (a donut hole! (sorry, other oblique contemporary pop-culture reference) of five years, and then we dive into Rife getting seriously into Religion with a bunch of donations. We learn through reference that the Librarian is also always listening: Hiro is paying attention and thinks he spots the Librarian making a summary, but it isn’t; it’s quoting a summary that Dr. Lagos made to Juanita when the Librarian was around. So, you know. Be careful what you say around Librarian.
In this part, we get to one of the underlying themes of the book: linguistics, computational linguistics, neuro-linguistic programming and hacking the brain. Tucked away in a bunch of donations to ostensibly purely religious-sounding parts of Reverend Wayne’s sprawling Pentecostal religio-business empire are donations to a) an archaeology department (not so suspicious, especially in retrospect and given the behavior of Hobby Lobby’s antiquities activities), but then donations to b) the astronomy department and c) the computer science department of Rife Bible College — and those donations are the biggest (before this world’s hyperinflation).
In exposition land, we’ve learned that Rife effectively owns through bankrolling Reverend Wayne, and that more specifically Rife has a majority share in Pearly Gates Associates, which runs the Reverend Wayne’s Pearly Gates chain, of which I’m not going to comment about because we have megachurches these days and that feels like one of the least surprising things our world’s America.
Now we get in to full-on Stephenson narrator infodump, skipping outside the thread of Hiro’s experience. Rife buys his way into the Nipponese telecoms market, using an American PR campaign to exert governmental political pressure on Nippon, inducing it to open up the telecoms market to foreign investment. This is pretty realistic: it’s a bit like a company supporting the defunct Trans-Pacific Partnership trade round. These days I suppose it would be appearing on Rife’s on television network with yelling talking heads (what, like Fox News?) influencing the president to proclaim trade strategy by tweet and fiat.
Like many billionaires, Rife buys a yacht but (surprise) it’s surplus from the U.S. government and it’s an aircraft carrier - the U.S. Navy’s Enterprise - not a yacht. Buying a yacht might have felt a bit too no the nose even a few years ago, but I think we’re in full-on shameless billionaires-behaving-as-nation-states now. Not as if they might not have in decades past, but I think we’ve just effectively dropped all pretense. I mean, would you be surprised if Elon announced he was buying a surplus aircraft carrier for SpaceX? Or if Peter Thiel was doing so to breed young, female blood donors? Exactly. We pretty much expect this now.
In case you didn’t get the idea that Rife is a genuine evil lair-owning bad guy, we also learn that he’s had his mustache waxed in an evil mustache curl at the same time as learning that he’s busy encircling the world with fiber-optics, linking his cable TV network “throughout Korea and into China [and linking up to] his big fiber-optic trunk line that runs across Siberia and over the Urals”.
Cable TV! Remember that?!
There’s more overt evil genius allusion, where Rife out-and-out says that a monopolist’s work is never done “seems like you can never get that last one-tenth of one percent”, which I know, right? That last mile is always tricky. And with that, he’s totally doubling down on Trump-era Thiel.
We’re back into conversational exposition with Rife referring to the Ma Bell breakup, which, if it’s a common point with our universe, happened in 1982. Rife thinks it’s hilarious because the breakup was dealing with a voice comms monopoly, which means they were in the information business like Rife (“moving phone conversations around on little tiny copper wires, one at a time”. From Rife’s point of view, this was delightfully short-sighted because the government was dealing with an information horse that had already bolted from the server farm - Rife was busy setting up cable TV franchises while the government was dealing with POTS.
“But a Cable TV system isn’t the same as a phone system,” says the journalist interviewing him.
And here Stephenson steps in as the voice of Rife: yes, the cable TV system was local franchises, not hooked up with each other. But those local systems did end up being connected to each other by Rife, and then he had a global network - a private internet, which makes sense in the early 1990s: you had an esoteric academic network, you had privately run communities like The Well, and you had a crap-ton of privately-owned and just starting to be consolidated cable TV. But Stephenson’s big point that he wants to get across, as Rife, is this: a joined-up set of local cable TV networks is effectively a global network, just like the phone network. “Except this one carries information ten thousand times faster. It carries images, sound, data, you name it”.
I’m a little surprised that Stephenson doesn’t just go all-in on this exposition and change the order of Rife’s speech. Instead of “images, sound, data, you name it”, it would’ve been an opportunity for Stephenson to emphasize the idea that everything is data. In other words, Rife could’ve said something like: “Except this carries information ten thousand times faster. It’s all data: images, sound, you name it. A telephone network is just data, cable TV is just data.”
… and that’s enough for this part of Chapter 14. More next time!
Okay! That was quite long!
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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 1912.26 - 10:10

- Days ago = 1636 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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