(2016-09-04) Snow Crash Revisited Grokking A Satire Of Mimesis - Hackernoon

Snow Crash Revisited: Grokking a Satire of Mimesis. The first thing to grasp when reading Snow Crash is that it is a satire, a work that deliberately looks at the world through the lens of exaggerated, humorous motifs aimed at providing insight through magnification of salient traits. Snow Crash owes as much to the early Kurt Vonnegut as to William Gibson, with whom it is too easily associated under the label “cyberpunk.” Stephenson all but declares this intent in the well-known opening scene of the novel, a combination of ultra-high-speed car chase and pizza delivery that, we soon learn, has become the specialty of the Mafia in a bizarre future that reads as if Domino’s has come to be serviced by Mad Max.

As the novel progresses, the satire embraces not only the content of the narrative but its form. Stephenson notes in the book’s afterward that Snow Crash was originally conceived as a computer-generated graphic novel, and indeed, with its dual point of view and shifting timeframes, it reads a bit like hypertext, complete with expositional segments reminiscent of Wikipedia articles.

Stephenson envisions ubiquitous data collection monetized via search in the form of a Central Intelligence Corporation, a privatized successor to the CIA. In our world, this niche has been filled by Google. However, Google in its essence is not like such a privatized CIA, but rather something much stranger, so strange that Stephenson wasn’t able to imagine it. Like a computational Ouroboros, its data collection is not only fully automated but fed by the eager participation of its users.

The example of Google points to a broader blind spot of Stephenson’s. For all his prescience concerning technology, he largely misses the rise of tech companies that began in the late 1990’s

In the world of Snow Crash, there are no tech companies reminiscent of Google or Facebook; the technology seems to be produced, rather implausibly, by the patchwork of territorial franchises that sprawl over the landscape. Stephenson seems oddly disinterested in the dynamics of commercialization that have actually brought us the technologies he envisioned.

The governing metaphor of the novel, literalized within the narrative, is that of the virus. Stephenson posits biological viruses with pervasive neurological effects that change their hosts’ cognitive functions.

As a metaphor, Stephenson’s conceit corresponds to a real cultural dynamic that requires no viruses, namely, mimesis in the sense of Rene Girard.

Whether a new paradigm slowly arises as a mutation of existing forms or is the deliberate design of a few, to succeed it must exercise an attraction for a critical mass within a population, often beginning with a minority elite. Its tropes will then elicit mimesis among the broader population, often culminating in herd behavior. (sociogenic)

Of course, the Metaverse is one of the novel’s technologies that has not yet come to fruition. Early web-based attempts, such as Second Life, were interesting but less than transformative. Shared virtual reality holds out the possibility of a platform that provides not only individual immersion but social presence from remote locations. If that were achieved, the mimesis of Snow Crash might become viral indeed.