Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash. New York: Bantam Spectra, 1992.

17 -- Hiro's calling card:

23 -- The dimensions of the Street are fixed by protocol, hammered out by the computer-graphics ninja overlords of the Association for Computing Machinery's Global Multimedia Protocol Group. The Street seems to be a grand boulevard going all the way around the equator of a black sphere with a radius of a bit more than ten thousand kilometers. That makes it 65,536 kilometers around, which is considerably bigger than Earth.
The number 65,536 is an awkward figure to everyone except a hacker, who recognizes it more readily than his own mother's date of birth: It happens to be a power of 2 -- 2(16) power to be exact -- and even the exponent 16 equals 2(4), and 4 is equal to 2(2). Along with 256; 32,768, and 2,147,483,648; 65,536 is one of the foundation stones of the hacker universe, in which 2 is the only really important number because that's how many digits a computer can recognize. One of those digits is 0, and the other is 1. Any number that can be created by fetishistically multiplying 2s by each other, and subtracting the occasional 1, will be instantly recognizable to a hacker.

23 -- The only difference is that since the Street does not really exist -- it's just a computer-graphics protocol written down on a piece of paper somewhere -- none of these things is being physically built.

24 -- In the real world -- planet Earth, Reality -- there are somewhere between six and ten billion people. At any given time, most of them are making mud bricks or field-stripping their AK-47s. Perhaps a billion of them have enough money to own a computer; these people have more money than all of the others put together. Of these billion potential computer owners, maybe a quarter of them actually bother to own computers, and a quarter of these have machines that are powerful enough to handle the Street protocol. That makes for about sixty million people who can be on the Street at any given time. Add in another sixty million or so who can't really afford it but go there anyway, by using public machines, or machines owned by their school or their employer, and at any given time the Street is occupied by twice the population of New York City.
That's why the damn place is so overdeveloped. Put in a sign or a building on the Street and the hundred million richest, hippest, best-connected people on earth will see it every day of their lives.

31 -- The world is full of power and energy and a person can go far by just skimming off a tiny bit of it.

64 ff. -- Hypercards

101 -- "The tower is described, literally, as 'its top with the heavens.' For many centuries, this was interpreted to mean that its tope was so high that it was in the heavens. But in the last century or so, as actual Babylonian ziggurats have been excavated, astrological diagrams --pictures of the heavens --have been found inscribed into their tops."
"Oh. Okay, so the _real_ story is that a tower was built with heavenly diagrams carved into its top."

103 -- ff The documentary on L. Bob Rife

108 -- [L. Bob:] "If I was running a car factory, I wouldn't let workers drive the cars home or borrow tools. But that's what I do at five o'clock each day, all over the world, when my hackers go home from work....
"See, it's the first function of any organization to control its own sphincters. We're not even doing that. So we're working on refining our management techniques so that we can control that information no matter where it is -- on our hard disks or even inside the programmers' heads. Now, I can't say more because I got competition to worry about. But it is my fervent hope that in five or ten years, this kind of thing won't even be an issue."

110 -- L. Bob again: "Most countries are static, all they need to do is keep having babies. But America's like this big old clanking, smoking machine that just lumbers across the landscape scooping up and eating everything in sight. Leaves behind a trail of garbage a mile wide. Always needs more fuel." [Compares America to the Cretan minotaur.]

111 -- L. Bob expounds the miracle of tongues.

118-19 -- Hackers vulnerable to a nam-shub because they have "deep structures" embedded in their brains.

177 -- You can't get hurt looking at a bitmap. Or can you?

178 -- "No surprises" is the motto of the franchise ghetto, its Good Housekeeping seal, subliminally blazoned on every sign and logo that make up the curves and grids of light that outline the Basin.
The people of America, who live in the world's most surprising and terrible country, take comfort in that motto. Follow the loglo outward, to where the growth is enfolded into the valleys and the canyons, and you find the land of the refugees. They have fled from the true America, the America of atomic bombs, scalpings, hip-hop, chaos theory, cement overshoes, snake handlers, spree killers, space walks, buffalo jumps, drive-bys, cruise missiles, Sherman's March, gridlock, motorcycle gangs, and bungee jumping. they have parallel-parked their bimbo boxes in identical computer-designed Burbclave street patterns and secreted themselves in symmetrical sheetrock shitholes with vinyl floors and ill-fitting woodwork and no sidewalks, vast house farms out in the loglo wilderness, a culture medium for a medium culture.
The only ones left in the city are street people, feeding off debris; immigrants, thrown out like shrapnel from the destruction of the Asian powers; young bohos; and the technomedia pristhood of Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong. Young smart people like Da5id and Hiro, who take the risk of living in the city because they like stimulation and they know they can handle it.

186 -- [Juanita:] "The Brandy's scroll wasn't just showing random static. It was flashing up a large amount of digital information, in binary form. That digital information was going straight into Da5id's optic nerve. Which is part of the brain, incidentally --if you stare into a person's pupil, you can see the terminal of the brain."
[Hiro:] "Da5id's not a computer. He can't read binary code."
"He's a hacker. He messes with binary code for a living. That ability is firm-wired into the deep structures of his brain. So he's susceptible to that form of information. And so are you, homeboy."

187 -- [Juanita:] A Metavirus: "It's the atomic bomb of informational warfare -- a virus that causes any system to infect itself with new viruses."
[Hiro:] "Make up your mind. This Snow Crash thing -- is it a virus, a drug, or a religion?"
Juanita shrugs. "What's the difference?"

195 -- "Computers rely on the one and the zero to represent all things. This distinction between something land nothing -- this pivotal separation between being and nonbeing --is quite fundamental and underlies many Creation myths."

195 -- [Hiro to the librarian:]
"Let's stay on track," Hiro says.
"Fine. I can return to this potential conversation fork at a later time, if you desire."

197 -- (Librarian) "Yes. A nam-shub is a speech with magical force. The closest English equivalent would be 'incantation,' but this has a number of incorrect connotations."
(citing Kramer and Maier): "[Sumerian incantations] demonstrate an intimate connection between the religious, the magical, and teh esthetic so complete that any attempt to pull one away from the other will distort the whole."

197 -- A speech with magical force. Nowadays, people don't believe in these kinds of things. Except in the Metaverse, that is, where magic is possible. The Metaverse, that is, where magic is possible. The Metaverse is a fictional structure made out of code. And code is just a form of speech -- the form that computers understand. The Metaverse in its entirety could be considered a single vast nam-shub, enacting itself on L. bob Rife's fiber-optic network."

199 -- The room is filled with a three-dimensional constellation of hypercards, hanging weightlessly in the air. It looks like a high-speed photograph of a blizzard in progress. In some places, the hypercards are placed in precise geometric pattersn, like atoms in a crystal. In other places, whole stacks of them are clumped together. Drifts of them have accumulated in the corners, as though Lagos tossed them away when he was finished. Hiro finds that his avatar can walk right through the hypercards without disturbing the arrangement. It is, in fact, the three-dimensional counterpart of a messy desktop, all the trash still remaining wherever Lagos left it. The cloud of hypercards extends to every corner of the 50-by-50-foot space, and from floor level all the way up to about eight feet, which is about as high as Lagos' avatar could reach.

202 -- "The nam-shub of Enki is both a story and an incantation," the Librarian says. "A self-fulfilling fiction. Lagos believed that in its original form, which this translation only hints at, it actually did what it describes."
"You mean, changed the speech in men's mouths."
"Yes," the Librarian says.

214 -- "...according to what you just quoted me, the Torah is like a virus. It uses the human brain as a host. The host --the human --makes copies of it. And more humans come to synagogue and read it."
"...After the deuteronomists had reformed Judaism, instead of making sacrifices, the Jews went to synagogues and read the Book. If not for the deuteronomists, the world's monotheists would still be sacrificing animals and propagating their beliefs through the oral tradition."
"Sharing needles."

214-15 -- The Bible as a "benign virus."

215 -- The Asherah virus is physical, spread through bodily fluids.

216 -- "I wonder if viruses have always been with us, or not. There's sort of an implicit assumption that they have been around forever. But maybe that's not true. Maybe there was a period of history when they were nonexistent or at least showed up, the number of different viruses exploded, and people started getting sick a whole lot. That would explain the fact that all cultures seem to have a myth about Paradise, and the Fall from Paradise."

220 "sacrifice zones:" "land whose clean-up cost exceeds their total future economic value."

234 -- [Hiro to Y.T.:] "I'm sorry for reminding you of this, but if we still had laws, the Mafia would be a criminal organization."
"But we don't have laws," she says, "so it's just another chain."

239 -- Enki, god of masturbation and naming. What else do hackers do?

240 -- _me_ as "operating system of society."

241 -- Story of Enki copulating with his daughters as a metaphor for recursive processes.: "from a modern standpoint, semen is just a carrier of information."

244 -- One of L. Bob's zombies: "We're helping to spread the Word."

246 -- "I wasn't really happy when I was a hacker. I never thought about the important things. God. Heaven. The things of the spirit. It's hard to think about those things in America."

249 -- Finally Mom winds down, defeated by Y.T.'s strategy of silence. ...

249 -- "It's like, if you -- people of a certain age -- would make some effort to just stay in touch with sort of basic, modern-day events, then your kids wouldn't have to take these drastic measures."

254 -- He no longer has to worry about trying to be the baddest motherfucker in the world. The position is taken. The crowning touch, the one thing that really puts true world-class motherfuckerdom totally out of reach, of course, is the hydrogen bomb. If it wasn't for the hydrogen bomb, a man could still aspire.... But Raven's nuclear umbrella puts the world title out of reach.

259 -- "Lagos said that Enki had the ability to ascend into the universe of language and see it before his eyes. Much as humans go into the Metaverse. That gave him power to create nam-shubs. And nam-shubs had the power to alter the functioning of the brain and the body."

260 -- "Early linguists, as well as the Kabbalists, believed in a fictional language called the Tongue of Eden, the language of Adam. It enabled all men to understand each other, to communicate without misunderstanding. It was the language of the Logos, the moment when God created the world by speaking a word. In the tongue of Eden, naming a thing was the same as creating it."

260 -- ...all language whether heavenly or human derives from one source: the Divine Name. [Gershom Scholem]. The practical kabbalists, the sorcerers, bore the title _Ba'al Shem_, meaning 'master of the divine name.'

261 -- Sumerian was a language ideally suited to the creation and propagation of viruses. That a virus, once released into Sumer, would spread rapidly and virulently, until it had infected everyone.

261 -- Hiro: "Maybe Babel was the best thing that ever happened to us."

263 -- The US Government's attitude toward work: "Not even any desktops. Desktops encourage the use of paper, which is archaic and reflects inadequate team spirit. What is so special about your work that you have to write it down on a piece of paper that only you get to see? That you have to lock it away inside a desk? When you're working for the Feds, everything you do is the property of the United States of America. You do your work on the computer. The computer keeps a copy of everything, so that if you get sick ro something, it's all there where your co-workers and supervisors can get access to it. If you want to write little notes or make phone doodles, you're perfectly free to do that at home, in your spare time."

264 -- The Feds still operate in Flatland. None of this three-dimensional stuff, no goggles, no stereo sound. The computers are all basic flat-screen two-dimensional numbers. Windows appear on the desktop, with little text documents inside. All part of the austerity program. Soon to reap major benefits.

268 -- She [Y.T.'s Mom] scans through the memo, hitting the Page Down button at reasonably regular intervals, occasionally paging back up to pretend to reread some earlier section. The computer is going to notice all this. It approves of rereading. It's a small thing, but over a decade or so this stuff really shows up on your work-habits summary.

274 -- All these beefy Caucasians with guns! Get enough of them together, looking for the America they always believed they'd grow up in, and they glom together like overcooked rice, form integral, starchy little units. With their power tools, portable generators, weapons, four-wheel-drive vehicles, and personal computers, they are like beavers hyped up on crystal meth, manic engineers without a blueprint, chewing through the wilderness, building things and abandoning them, altering the flow of mighty rivers and then moving on because the place ain't what it used to be.
The byproduct of the lifestyle is polluted rivers, greenhouse effect, spouse abuse, televangelists, and serial killers. But as long as you have that four-wheel-drive vehicle and can keep driving north, you can sustain it, keep moving just quickly enough to stay one step ahead of your own waste stream. In twenty years, ten million white people will converge on the north pole and park their bagos there. The low-grade waste heat of their thermodynamically intense lifestyle will turn the crystalline icescape pliable and treacherous. It will melt a hole through the polar icecap, and all that metal will sink to the bottom, sucking the biomass down with it.

285 -- He turns off all the techno-shit in his goggles. All it does is confuse him; he stands there reading statistics about his own death even as it's happening to him. Very post-modern. Time to get immersed in Reality, like all the people around him.

285 -- ...after that it's just a chase scene.

321 -- Raven's full name is Dmitri Ravinoff

327 -- [Uncle Enzo to Hiro] ...when you were a pizza guy you didn't deliver pizzas fast because you made more money that way, or because it was some kind of a fucking policy. You did it because you were carrying out a personal covenant between Uncle Enzo and every customer. This is how we avoid the trap of self-perpetuating ideology. Ideology is a virus.

327-28 -- ...when hackers are hacking, they don't mess around with the superficial world of Metaverses and avatars. They descend below this surface layer and into the netherworld of code and tangled nam-shubs that supports it, where everything that you see in the Metaverse, no matter how lifelike and beautiful and three-dimensional, reduces to a simple text file: a series of letters on an electronic page. It is a throwback to the days when people programmed computers through primitive teletypes and IBM punch cards.
Since then, pretty and user-friendly programming tools have been developed.
It's possible to program a computer now by sitting at your desk in the Metaverse and manually connecting little preprogrammed units, like Tinkertoys. But a real hacker would never use such techniques, any more than a master auto mechanic would try to fix a car by sliding in behind the steering wheel and watching the idiot lights on the dashboard.

338 -- The "Reason" gun: "Ultima Ratio Regum"

353 -- "See, the world is full of things more powerful than us. But if you know how to catch a ride, you can go places," Raven says.
"Right. I'm totally hip to what you're saying." [Y.T.]
"And you're surfing on it."
"Yeah."

369 -- [Hiro speaking to Ng:] Under the right conditions, your ears --or eyes --can tie into the deep structures, bypassing the higher language functions. Which is to say, someone who knows the right words can speak words, or show you visual symbols, that go past all your defenses and sink right into your brainstem. Like a cracker who breaks into a computer system, bypasses all the security precautions, and plugs himself into the core, enabling him to exert absolute control over the machine.

371 -- [Hiro:] There is an informational entity known as the metavirus, which causes information systems to infect themselves with customized viruses. This may be just a basic principle of nature, like Darwinian selection, or it may be an actual piece of information that floats around the universe on comets and radio waves -- I'm not sure. In any case, what it comes down to is this: Any information system of sufficient complexity will inevitably become infected with viruses -- viruses generated from within itself.

372 -- The nam-shub of Enki: a countervirus that spread along the same routes as the _me_ and the metavirus. It went into the deep structures of the brain and reprogrammed them. Henceforth, no one could understnad the Sumerian language, or any other deep structure-based language.

372 -- So you might say that the nam-shub of Enki was the beginnings of human consciousness -- when we first had to think for ourselves. It was the beginning of rational religion, too, the first time that people began to think about abstract issues like God and Good and Evil. That's where the name Babel comes from. Literally it means 'Gate of God.' ... a gateway in our minds... moved us from a materialistic world to a dualistic world -- a binary world -- with both a physical and a spiritual component.

373 -- Asherah, unlike "viral ideas" couldn't be stamped out because it has an organic component.

374 -- The only thing that protects us from "viral ideas" is "the Babel factor"

374 -- The deuteronomists "encouraged a sort of informational hygiene, a belief in copying things strictly and taking great care with information, which as they understood, is potentially dangerous. They made data a controlled substance."

375 -- Christ's gospel is a new nam-shub, an attempt to take religion out of the temple, out of the hands of the priesthood, and bring the Kingdom of God to everyone.

377 -- "L. Bob Rife, Lord of Bandwidth"

377 -- He figured that with a little venture capital, this neurolinguistic hacking could be developed as a new technology that would enable Rife to maintain possession of information that had passed into the brains of his programmers. Which, moral considerations aside, wasn't a bad idea.

377 -- L. Bob Rife and Reverend Wayne's cult is a "postrational religion"

378 -- The metavirus is everywhere. Anywhere life exists, the metavirus is there, too, propagating through it. Originally, it was spread around on comets. That's probably how life first came to the Earth, and that's probably how the metavirus came here also. But comets are slow, whereas radio waves are fast. In binary form, a virus can bounce around the universe at the speed of light. It infects a civilized planet, gets into its computers, reproduces, and inevitably gets broadcast on television or radio or whatever. Those transmissions don't stop at the edge of the atmosphere --they radiate out into space, forever.

379 -- He wants to be Ozymandias, King of Kings. Look, it's simple: Once he converts you to his religion, he can control you with me. And he can convert millions of people to his religion because it spreads like a fucking virus -- people have no resistance to it because no one is used to thinking about religion, people aren't rational enough to argue about this kind of thing. Basically, anyone who reads the National Enquirer or watches pro wrestling on TV is easy to convert.

379 -- Rife's key realization was that there's no difference between modern culture and Sumerian. We have a huge workforce that is illiterate or aliterate and relies on TV -- which is a sort of an oral tradition.

380 -- ...the information we need is contained within a clay envelope that was excavated from the ancient Sumerian city of Eridu in southern Iraq ten years ago.

390 -- ...the boat might flip. Reason will sink. And Hiro's strapped onto Reason.

396 -- The "magic" dogtags from Uncle Enzo don't work against Rife

397 -- The President of the U.S. ends up on Rife's helicopter

401 -- [Hiro:] "Rife is the Antichrist."
[Juanita:] "Of course he is. But he's still interesting."

402 -- [Juanita:] "I'm a ba'al shem. I can hack the brainstem."

407 -- ...like anything else in the Metaverse, this rule is nothing but a protocol, a convention that different computers agree to follow. In theory, it cannot be ignored. But in practice, it depends upon the ability of different computers to swap information very precisely, at high speed, and at just the right times. And when you are connected to the system over a satellite uplink, as Hiro is, out here on the Raft, there is a delay as the signals bounce up to the satellite and back down. That delay can be taken advantage of, if you move quickly and don't look back. Hiro passes right through the wall on the tail end of his all-penetrating katana.

408 -- Inside L. Bob Rife's utility building in the Metaverse: "It appears to be an older, preexisting network of some kind, with its own internal channels, mostly primitive ones like voice phone. Rife has patched inot it, heavily, with his own, higher-tech systems.
Hiro maneuvers until he can get a closer look at one of the blue cubes, peering through the clutter of lines that has grown around it. The blue cube has a big white star on each of its six faces.
"It's the Government of the United States," Juanita says.
"Where hackers go to die," Hiro says. The largest, and yet the least efficient, producer of computer software in the world.

409 -- [Hiro:] "...I think that the government has been unertaking a big software development project for L. Bob Rife."
[Juanita:] "Makes sense," she says, "He has such a love-hate relationship with his programmers -- he needs them, but he won't trust them. The government's the only organization he would trust to write something important. I wonder what it is?"

410 -- "The Big One" -- Rife's Revenge: an attempt to infect all the world's hacker's with Snow Crash.

412 -- [Rife has to use a telephone to connect with his apparat; but he doesn't manage it.]

416 -- As part of Mr. Lee's good neighbor policy, all Rat Things are programmed never to break the sound barrier in a populated area. But Fido's in too much of a hurry to worry about the good neighbor policy. Jack the sound barrier. Bring the noise.

426 -- Raven realizes his life's ambition: "I nuked America."

440 -- [Stephenson's epilogue:] In thinking about how the Metaverse might be constructed, I was influenced by the Apple Human Interface Guidelines, which is a book that explains the philosophy behind the Macintosh.

440 -- I have probably spent more hours coding during the production of this work than I did actually writing it, even though it eventually turned away from the original graphic concept, rendering most of that work useless from a practical viewpoint.

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