Discussion #35: Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson

Welcome to Citizen Scholar! Since launching seven months ago we&#8217;re reaching people all over the world, so we thank you for your support. If you enjoy our writing on civic virtue and individual excellence, we humbly ask you to share Citizen Scholar with your family members and friends who may enjoy it. The content of the audio and text formats are identical and meant to accommodate your preferences. Please let us know if you have any feedback - we&#8217;re always looking for ways to improve!<br/><br/>Last week we wrapped up our mini-series on quietly influential books from the 1990&#8217;s. We initially considered including Snow Crash, but its influence was thrust into very public spotlight in 2021. Snow Crash achieved fast success in the science fiction genre after its 1992 publication and became a well-known, beloved novel amongst technologists. It went mainstream in October 2021, when Facebook announced its name change to Meta. Mark Zuckerberg bet the company&#8217;s future on the Metaverse, a term coined by Stephenson in Snow Crash.<br/><br/>Stephenson has gone on to write many other books, but Snow Crash remains one of the most influential. Many technologists were inspired by the book&#8217;s concept of humans controlling avatars in a parallel digital universe where they could be and do things that were out of reach in the &#8220;real world&#8221;. When Zuckerberg staked his company&#8217;s hundreds of billions of dollars of market value on implementing this concept, rumors resurfaced about him mandating Snow Crash as required reading for some at Facebook in years past. Journalists who then flipped through the book&#8217;s pages for conspiracy theory fuel could find some, like the below excerpt:<br/><br/>&#8220;&#8230;there&#8217;s no difference between modern culture and Sumerian. We have a huge workforce that is illiterate or alliterate and relies on TV &#8211; which is sort of an oral tradition. And we have a small, extremely literate power elite &#8211; the people who go into the Metaverse, basicall