Snow Crash

"This cyberpunk classic, exploring virtual worlds and societal structures, fits Naval Ravikant's interest in technology's impact on human experience and the future of decentralized systems. Its themes of information, power, and identity align with his broader philosophical explorations."

"This is a fascinating book, published in 1996, and it’s a cyberpunk vision of a technological future, in the vein of William Gibson. The author creates an extraordinary vision of an all-encompassing virtual environment in which we will interact though avatars, but at the same time he describes the back doors, and the fact that there is a control hierarchy: there is an underworld and an overworld, as it were, of the social engineering that goes into the development of these spaces. Ultimately, the people who create them are the gods of these worlds, because they have the technological know-how and prowess, and they exploit the system for their own gain. While it’s a work of fiction, again I think it’s relevant when you look at things like Google and Facebook, Amazon and Twitter and all of the contemporary social environments. There’s a reason why Rupert Murdoch spent such a phenomenal amount of money to buy myspace, and it’s because he then had ownership of the infrastructure, which gave him the power and the control over the hundreds of thousands of millions of people that were using his technology. That’s why I like Snow Crash so much: because it exposed that phenomenon of what they were thinking and what they do, and the pure data that they have access to. Perhaps not in an explicit way, but certainly that’s how I read it. Exactly. Yet it’s so ironic, because the entire dotcom industry preaches transparency. That, in and of itself, has created a movement throughout the whole business sector where people are now demanding transparency. And yet it seems that the transparency that has changed and revolutionised the workplace and the culpability of companies is not necessarily what the people who ushered it in are themselves practising. They believe they have the right solution – we can clean it up later, but for the moment it’s the best solution. Interesting concept, but when you’re dealing with so much data – especially in the case of Google – and so much private information, it can truly become dangerous."

"A general overview of the plot is that there’s a computer virus that can also jump into being a biological virus but only for people who are hackers, people who natively speak binary computer code. The computer virus creates a ‘snow crash’ which is like white noise, a static image on computer screens. But it’s actually not white noise, all the black and white dots in the snow crash are representing binary 1s and 0s and if you speak binary then your brain is automatically interpreting those 1s and 0s, which is running code on your brain and hijacking your mind. Again, it’s a totally ridiculous science fiction buy. But it’s not too crazy. A thing like that almost certainly can’t exist, but it’s not so far out of the realm of what the brain does. As a neuroscientist, it doesn’t make me want to throw the book on the ground. “Our experiences of the world are not necessarily a true reflection of the world.” The technological aspect is interesting and amusing. The CIA has become a for-profit company in the future. One of the things I like about Snow Crash is that it’s not really a dystopian future, it’s just a mildly annoying future. People are making bad decisions, there are lots of really silly people, the world is kind of ridiculous in terms of where it’s gone. The Mafia has become a semi-respectable business organisation. Nothing is too outside the realm of plausibility and everyone is still fallible. I love it. There’s two answers to this. The first is that it’s trivial to say the Internet is changing our minds because everything is changing our minds. This conversation you and I are having? I am rewriting your memory right now, and vice versa. That’s having a physical effect on the neurones in your brain, new synapses are being formed. That is precisely what memory is. That is what the human experience is, our brains are rewiring with every experience that we have. So in a very trivial sense it’s true, but it’s not really meaningful. The second is that supposedly Socrates was going around lamenting how the written word was ruining people’s memory because you no longer have to keep track of conversations when you can write down the information. So two thousand years ago people were arguing that writing was fundamentally eroding our culture and our sense of personhood. And yet, here we are. I believe in the fundamental adaptability of humanity. We find a way to make a good out of whatever situation we find ourselves in. So, there’s a lot of garbage on the internet, but at the same time it’s an incredibly powerful tool for science and medicine and research and art. I tend to not buy into that fear-mongering. It frees us up for doing other things, right? In one of my classes I try to teach my students Google-fu, because I don’t think people need to be memorising every single detail, every single fact, about whatever it is they may be learning. You should have broad-swathe understandings of how different concepts relate to one another, both temporally and conceptually. But I can pull out my smartphone and look a fact up in ten seconds. Not having to remember every single detail we learn frees us up to be at a higher level, more creative. That said, I still believe that there are things that you just fundamentally have to know…"

"I also love Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, which 25 years ago foresaw a virtual-reality metaverse that might supplant the internet."