Snow Crash

There are two things that interested me the most about Snow Crash - the importance of language and the world it portrays. 

The World - In our reality, by the time a child is three years old they know about 100 brand logos. In Snow Crash, this has gone to such an extent that after the collapse of the government, "franchulates”, or franchised city-states rose in its place. Everything is privatized from the police to prisons. This is another scary mirror to modern society where we already have privatized prisons that actually make money off of incarcerating as many individuals as they can. Most people spend most of their time in the metaverse, an alternate virtual reality. This is particularly troublesome for Hiro who is susceptible to the illness optically thanks to being a hacker. Since language is not only spoken, but written such as in coding. 

Language, it shapes our mind from birth. It has the power to let people communicate, but can also be destructive. This is the premise of Snow Crash, the idea that the metavirus is able to program humans with a primitive base language that we all share. Once infected, they spout incoherent syllables. It got me thinking and reminded me of an article I read on the deaf. What do they think in? Sign Language. If they aren’t taught sign language the mind has no real way to process thoughts or information. In the past, being deaf was also associated with being mentally handicap for this reason.