Cybersec Canon Ep 12. Snow Crash. Ch 1-5. Strange Future - Advanced Tech, Poor People, Escape to Metaverse
The future depicted in Snow Crash is kind of bleak where it's not easy to make ends meet and even pizza delivery is a dangerous job. But it has Metaverse and you can be an avatar and escape into it.
“Videotape is cheap. You never know when something will be useful, so you might as well videotape it.”
~ Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. (p. 40). Kindle Edition.
Thoughts
I’ve started reading Book 2 in this series - Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. I’ve read it before, just like the last book, The Cuckoo’s Egg. It feels exciting to revisit a well-known book and take my time with it. I’m thinking of reading 5 chapters at a time, pausing, writing something when I get time (hopefully in a two-week cadence), and then continuing. As I progress, I’m highlighting parts on my Kindle, and I’ll choose one of those highlights to write about, just like I did before.
When I read the quote, “Videotape is cheap. You never know when something will be useful, so you might as well videotape it,” I remembered how we used to bring extra SD cards on vacations in case our camera ran out of space. That actually happened to me a few times. Now, with smartphones, we don’t have to worry about that anymore. Storage is much cheaper than it was 10 or 20 years ago. Because of this, people take a lot more photos, which can fill up their phone storage quickly. Smartphone companies have solved this by offering cloud storage, so your old photos are backed up and it feels like you have endless space. Of course, you pay a monthly fee to Apple or Google for this convenience.
So when friction is removed, people end up creating or consuming far more than they need. If energy becomes cheaper, you might as well record the entirety of your daily life, just in case you need to revisit some moment later. But how much cheaper can energy get? I think, even if we harness a lot more solar energy than we do now and make nuclear energy cheap, and if energy costs are low, usage will exceed production. If people are able to find ways to consume energy so fast, think of AI agents and robots. They could help build incredibly complex systems (like the cars and skateboards in Snow Crash) that consume a lot of electricity super fast. It all seems a bit too much for an ordinary person to handle.
Brief Summary
Chapter 1
In a near distant future, the world is run by corporations. We’re introduced to a deliverator who delivers pizzas to homes. He has a fancy car. When he is about to pick up the next pizza, the franchise is on fire due to being operated by a new immigrant. So when he gets the pizza to deliver, he is already late.
If a pizza is delivered late, it’s a big embarrassment for Uncle Enzo, the owner of the chain. He has to visit the customer’s home to apologize in person, and the customer gets a free pizza.
Chapter 2
As he rushes to deliver the pizza, a courier on a skateboard attaches themselves to his car using a long string to hitch a ride.
Trying to shake off the courier, the deliverator ends up crashing into an empty swimming pool.
The courier turns out to be a girl named YT. She offers to deliver the pizza on time. The deliverator thanks her and gives her his card, which says ‘Hiro Protagonist’.
Chapter 3
Hiro and his friend Vitaly live in a rented storage container that’s 20 by 30 feet and has a door, which makes it nicer than the bunk beds others have. Even though their real-life living situation is basic, Hiro spends time in a virtual world called the Metaverse. There, he owns a big house in a prime spot because he and his friend bought the space early on.
He was a coder in the past and had helped write most of the initial portions of the metaverse. He now owes the mafia a car (since it crashed earlier and got totaled), and he now makes money by providing intel to the large digital library.
Chapter 4
YT maneuvers herself through the burbs expertly and delivers the pizza almost in the nick of time, much to the disappointment of the family, who were expecting to celebrate by getting a free pizza.
Chapter 5
Hiro walks around the Metaverse and sees people walking around. He gets into a pyramid-shaped building named “The Black Sun” that others are not able to enter. He is able to since he knows the owner, Da5id, and he was one of the people who designed it. He is met by a stranger who tries to sell him a drug named Snow Crash, which is a hypercard. A hypercard is a digital card that, if his avatar takes it in the metaverse, data gets transferred from the card to his system. He ignores and moves on.