BOOK
Snow Crash
THE GIST
The gist
In a privatized, franchised America, a hacker who delivers pizza for the Mafia and a teenage skateboard courier chase a mysterious drug that crashes both computers and minds. Neal Stephenson's satirical cyberpunk novel introduced the "Metaverse" (1992).
ON THE SHOW
On the show.
- Ep 2 — Did science fiction invent our future? (05:06–07:18, 09:14–10:31): Caitlin asks Rob to explain the book behind Meta's rebrand. Rob compares it to Ready Player One and calls its metaverse "kind of a neutral place," then wonders whether the real-world metaverse flopped because the tech isn't right yet or because people fundamentally don't want it.
TERMS
Terms it runs on.
- Metaverse — A persistent, shared virtual world where people meet and interact through avatars, a term that comes from Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash (1992).
- Cyberpunk — Science fiction about "high tech, low life": near-future worlds of computer networks, body modification, and megacorporations, told from the street level.