59 pages • 1 hour read
Snow Crash
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Themes
Memetics and Viruses
Memetics posits that ideas can spread like a virus. In the modern day, for example, one field of memetics studies how memes go viral. Snow Crash presents a similar idea in which an idea, belief, or religion acts like a virus, literally and metaphorically. In Snow Crash, data can be transferred by viruses. These viruses come in many forms, from religious texts to computer code to certain words uttered in certain languages. These viruses jump from subject to subject, changing their DNA, their minds, or their behavior. Da5id views a bitmap image of the Snow Crash virus, and he immediately has what appears to be brain damage, only being capable of speaking in what is allegedly ancient Sumerian. When the Pentecostal Christians begin speaking in tongues, they are demonstrating the way the virus has altered their behavior. They have been injected with a physical virus, while Da5id was exposed to a digital virus. The effect is the same, corrupting and rewiring the brain of the infected person to achieve a political end.
In the novel, memetics and viruses evolve out of Rife’s need to control others. A person exposed to the virus loses control of themselves, surrendering to Rife’s viral rewrite of their mind. The scope of Rife’s vision means that he reaches simultaneously into the past and the future. He funds a huge team of archeologists to study the Sumerian language and relics, providing him with insight into the history of human culture that can then be weaponized. At the same time, he uses cutting-edge technology such as the Metaverse to ensure that his virus is deployed as far and as wide as possible. Rife’s vision for the virus encapsulates the circular nature of human history and technology. The Metaverse may be new and exciting, but it is as susceptible to ancient viruses and manipulation as anything else.
Rife’s understanding of viruses is not universally accepted. Hiro fights to stop Rife’s plan because—as an individualistic hacker who does not work well with others—he resents the loss of control over his life. Meanwhile, the Mafia fights against Rife for ideological reasons. The Mafia rejects viral control of information through memetics, preferring instead to build personal relationships. According to Fisheye, this helps the Mafia avoid the trap of self-perpetuating ideology. They are avoiding the very idea of a memetic virus, which is technically a machine for self-perpetuating an ideology across many people. Juanita also fights against Rife, though she is admittedly fascinated by his ideas. As a devotee and critic of religion, she is compelled by Rife’s plan to spread belief through a virus. She admires the virus on an intellectual level, even if she does work hard to stop its spread. Juanita’s relationship to the virus suggests that virus is not a pejorative word. Juanita never sways in her desire to stop Rife, but her fascination with memetics and viruses suggests that viruses—like all technology in Snow Crash—exist beyond a moral dichotomy. Instead, the morality of a virus or technology is determined by the way it is deployed by any given human being.
Corporatization and Commodification
In Snow Crash, a terrible economic collapse greatly accelerated the corporatization of the United States of America. The regulations that once governed the economy, as set and policed by the government, have been abandoned. The state itself has been reduced to a shadow of its former self, to the point where it is a vestigial, bureaucratic absurdity that exists only to warn citizens of the inefficiencies and annoyances of public institutions. In the government’s place, a series of corporations have sprung up. Now, seemingly every public function has been replaced by a private equivalent. Corporations operate their own private statelets known as Burbclaves, where they set the laws and enforce them ruthlessly through private security. Many of these Burbclaves are ethnically segregated and policed by racist violence. The first appearance of anything resembling the police is accompanied by the assurance that they now accept every major credit card, rather than any hollow promise to protect or serve citizens. Everything in this dystopic vision of America’s future is governed by capitalism’s relentless drive toward profit, so much so that every last cent is squeezed out of the citizens to ensure maximum profitability at all times.
The corporatization of America has seen a number of traditionally secretive, illegal organizations emerge into public view. Criminal gangs such as Colombian narcotics dealers or the Sicilian Mafia now own and operate their own legitimate businesses and Burbclaves. Ironically, they have been changed by this process. Rather than turn the economy into a criminal venture, the criminal organizations have been turned into capitalist institutions. The Mafia now specializes in pizza delivery, complete with a bureaucracy and a customer service department. They have commercials and customer loyalty, illustrating how the Mafia has been forever changed by their exposure to the rigors of unfettered capitalism. In Snow Crash, capitalism is so powerful and all-consuming that it has irrecoverably altered traditional criminal organizations and forced them to compete in a free market of violence, extortion, and public relations. Rather than making corporations more criminal, the change in social dynamics has made the criminals more corporate.
The corporatization of the United States occurs during a time of great technological advancement. Hiro is a young hacker who was involved in the creation of the Metaverse. This virtual reality world was originally intended to offer people a way to escape from the corporate hellscape that their country had become. Rather than live in small apartments and be subjected to commercials and exploitation all day, people could enter the Metaverse and be exactly who they wanted to be. The original dream of the Metaverse has died, however, as it has followed a similar trajectory as the criminal organizations. Rather than freeing people from the shackles of corporate capitalism, the Metaverse has simply given them a whole new world in which they can be exploited. The dream of having complete freedom to set and define an identity in a virtual world has been co-opted by the existence of real estate values, the need for expensive technology to run certain avatars, and the creation of individual, private virtual enclaves that segregate the wealthy from the impoverished. Like the Mafia becoming more corporate when trying to go legitimate, the capitalist world has forced the horizonless, freeing world of the Metaverse to become just another prison in which economic forces can oppress and exploit the masses.
Family Values
Though Snow Crash deals with dystopias and virtual realities, a genuine affection for family emerges as a key theme. Despite many of the changes brought about to the world through technology, the family unit remains an important source of human connection. In fact, in an increasingly alienated and sprawling world, the family is more important and threatened than ever. This is evidenced by the refugees on the Raft, whose boats cling together on the difficult journey. They separate themselves into small family units, and when Transubstanciacion returns to his home, the care and affection showered upon him stand out against the cold, technical culture depicted in the novel.
YT makes a similar display of returning to her family. Early in the novel, she differentiates her two lives. She is a skateboard courier by day, but when she returns home to her mother, she changes her clothes, her demeanor, and her speech patterns. She clearly delineates between the dangerous outside world, where she is alone and isolated, and the domestic world where she has a loving relationship with her mother that she does not want to endanger. By the end of the novel, however, these two worlds have blurred so much that YT drops the pretense. Like Transubstanciacion, she greets her mother as her true self. After everything she has been through, all she wants is to return home to her family.
Hiro is mostly alone, but he recognizes the need for family in the world. In his most desperate moment, family becomes one of the only ways in which he can achieve a seemingly impossible goal. Raven is racing toward a concert to detonate a Snow Crash bomb and infect hundreds of thousands of hackers as part of his plan for revenge against America. Hiro knows that fighting or outracing Raven will be hard. Instead, he reaches for empathy. He describes how their backgrounds are very similar, to the point where their fathers shared a life-defining experience in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp during World War II. Hiro wants to use family to create a sense of empathy in Raven, which is clearly lacking. Hiro weaponizes one of the most strident, heartfelt emotions—a familial bond—trying to explain to Raven how they are essentially brothers from different places. However, Hiro’s plan fails. Raven’s mind is so warped by destructive nihilism that he cannot entertain the notion of empathy in his life. While Transubstanciacion and YT experience the benefits of family, Raven is so alienated and hateful that he rejects empathy, family, and any form of humanity.
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