race/gender/science fiction - Response 8

metaverse(s) and identity

surrealistic — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 17:09:20 +0000

So this is me freaking out somewhat because I realized halfway through the weekend that I forgot to do my post about Snow Crash...eeeeek. Let's see what can be done.

When one enters the Metaverse, an "avatar" or virtual clone of oneself is created and used for interaction. We all seemed to agree in class that there are points in the book in which it's hard to tell whether Hiro is in the "real world" or the Metaverse; this creates an interesting problem for the whole great American ideal of the secure individual self that no one else can touch. Obviously the Metaverse allows for some distinctive bending of the laws of the natural world; basic actions such as walking, running, talking with others can be executed purely through the power of the mind. One can almost be completely detached from one's "self" in the Metaverse and yet still be controlling them. Only fighting requires total immersion into one's virtual self. Where, then, do we draw the line between characteristics that cannot be changed (race, perhaps) and constructed aspects of the self? Or can any human characteristic be changed, i.e. mind over matter?

I think it's possible that this book is suggesting a world in which identity is completely a personal and social construct...and that we are either already in that world without realizing it, or moving towards that world. Hiro's multifaceted racial identity (part black, part Asian by way of...etc.) certainly suggests a purposeful breakdown of racism and a growing inability to pigeonhole anyone based on their appearance or skin color. We talked some in class about the virtual reality game Second Life (which I will admit to having an account on at one point, though I split once I realized actual money was involved) which is similar in theory to the Metaverse, and how its "artificiality" has been positive in some ways, creating an environment in which people of all colors and preferences are free to express themselves.

However, in an indirect study of the Metaverse, I found myself thinking about something I actually noticed while I was still playing Second Life...often people of non-white races (black, Asian, Indian, etc.) would make their avatars visibly white and then brag about how "white" they were. They blurred the lines, by proudly declaring their actual ethnicity in their avatar's profile, even if the avatar itself was blonde, pale and very "Aryan" looking. This bothered me a bit. In an odd way, the ability to construct oneself was reinforcing racism and other problems of our society, such as homophobia and religious extremism; but why? Is it because we don't know how to operate any other way? Does commerce and capitalism require this kind of racial hierarchy? One of my favorite things about sci fi in general is how it pushes people to imagine their world differently and put down their assumptions...so I would hope that we're not stuck regardless.

I suppose the main question of the Metaverse is whether we have the same amount of freedom or less freedom than Hiro when it comes to re-creating ourselves; in a virtual reality game we seem to have the same amount, but the problems that we struggle with in the real world end up being re-created. In the real world, it is not recommended to change one's skin color although it is possible; but, we are in the process of redefining race, and the population of multiracial/multicultural people is expanding. Could our identity be just as malleable in the real world as it is virtually?

Juanita the goddess

blacklace — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 17:48:23 +0000

Though somewhat of a periphery character, Juanita is arguably one of the most powerful characters in Stephenson's "Snow Crash." While most of the people who were working for Lagos are in the project for their physical power, like Ng's security and the Mafia's muscle, Juanita is in the project because of her mind, and she is the only one who looks at Lagos' goals and makes her own larger, personal goals in the project.

It is Juanita who first brings Hiro into the project. She tells him he will be working somewhat under Lagos, but when Hiro meets Lagos at the concert, the man has no interest in Hiro. This is perhaps the first indication that Juanita may be working at something more than solving the mystery. By bringing in Hiro, who it seems is of a relatively comparable skill level with computers as Juanita, she frees herself up from her job as hacker to be able to pursue her own goals and work towards achieving her own power goals.

Juanita and Hiro both use manipulation as a source of power and control. Hiro, however, keeps this manipulation to a semi-concrete level by manipulating data and computers, but not people directly. Juanita, on the other hand, is presented as always using her skills as a manipulator on people: she programs the faces in the Metaverse, controlling people's ability to have life-like interactions. When she first asks Hiro to join her in the anti-Snow Crash project, she tells him , she tells him that she will talk to him in the Metaverse, something she usually avoids, "Because of our relationship--when I was writing this--you and I are the only two people who can ever have an honest conversation in the Metaverse" (67). Juanita's expressions are on the face of every single female avatar in the Metaverse, and Hiro's is on all the males. This gives Juanita a certain god-like quality in the Metaverse, for man and woman are made in her and Hiro's image. She can control subtle interactions in the Metaverse without even trying because she has programmed the faces, and because she only truly programmed two faces.

Perhaps her most disturbing exercise of power comes when she willingly goes to The Raft and becomes one of the people who is able to speak the ancient original tongue. When they release the nam-shub of Enki, she refuses to be "cured." When Hiro asks why, she says, "I'm a neurolinguistic hacker now, Hiro. I went through hell to obtain this knowledge. It's part of me. Don't expect me to submit to a lobotomy" (432). Yet presumably there are others on the raft who had a similar ability, and she had no qualms about "lobotomizing" them.

Juanita's close personal association with Inanna is a way for her to manifest the superiority she feels to those around her. By identifying herself as a goddess, Juanita can rationalize doing to others what she will not do to herself. The fact that she does retain the ability to hack the brainstem is perhaps the most frightening thing about her. What exactly does she plan to *do* with this ability? Rife tried to conquer the world with his knowledge of the me and his ability to "hack the brainstem." Given Juanita's past record, it is hard to believe that fundamentally she will do anything all that different from Rife. Perhaps not on the scale, perhaps far more subtly, but when one can hack the brainstem, when one has god-like power over others, is there truly any way to avoid turning those "inferior" to you into dependent slaves of one sort or another?

Snow Crash vs Jennifer Government

amphiskios — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 14:12:08 +0000

Both Snow Crash and Jennifer Government postulate a fairly dystopian future. Snow Crash is very much science fiction, while Jennifer Government is merely fiction, and has nothing really scientific about it. However, both overlap in their portrayals of business, corporations and government in the future.
In Snow Crash, large franchises have all the power. These units are like nation-states, corporations, and gangs all in one. For instance, there is the Mafia, which alongside its goons and guns for hire, run a large and successful pizza business. There is the Hong Kong franchise, New South Africa, and among others, the Government franchise. The government has turned into a for-profit business like the rest of these entities. All of these entities can battle it out with the minimum of interference by any other organization, because the government doesn't work the same way as it used to. Security must be handled by private firms, and all roads and mail are covered by private firms. It is a darker place if one wants some government supports in their lives. Jennifer Government postulates the same sort of future, with a few twists that's make it interesting to the Snow Crash future. Jennifer Government is set in a world where corporations run everything. The government has been nearly disbanded, and has only one job now. The government tracks down criminals and catches them. The catch is that the victim must pay the government to actually perform this service, because after taxes were abolished, the government needed some form of revenue. The rest of the world, except for socialist Europe, is under the sway of anarcho-capitalism, which sounds very similar to the economic model in Snow Crash. Roads are built by private companies, and are all toll roads. That fact is hinted at in Snow Crash but never said right out. Companies ally themselves together, and hire private security to keep their Corporations secure. On one side the corporations hire The Police, a private security company descended from the real police. This company has the power to throw people in jail that it was hired to arrest, just like in Snow Crash when Y.T. is caught in the burbclave. On the other side is the NRA, which has evolved from its status to become a paramilitary organization that trains commandos for secret missions for its clients. It has evolved into a company, just like The Mafia does in Snow Crash.
Jennifer Government's premise is a dreary one. Jennifer Government takes the anarcho-capitalism that is in Snow Crash and drives it to the next level. War in the world of Jennifer Government means business. And the firms that are hired have surface to air missiles, tanks and other modern tech. And they fight huge clashes between corporations. No one says anything because it isn't any of their business. In Snow Crash, the world has not quite progressed to that. The maneuvers between corporations tend to be lighter. They are still afraid to come out into the very open. This would have changed with Rife's victory, but luckily (for some people) that crisis was averted. But it is oh so easy to tell how much worse it could be for people if the world in Jennifer Government was the more similar to the world in Snow Crash.

Anarchy in Snow Crash

supergoat — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 10:04:21 +0000

The political world in Snow Crash resembles that of an organized anarchy. We only get a real sense of what the governmental situation in America is like, but we know that the federal government completely collapsed. The American dollar experienced hyper inflation similar to that of Germany in the early 1920's, to the point of where trillion dollar bills were almost worthless. The role of the federal government has been reduced to the equivalent of an overly proud company that thinks it is way more important than it is.

The political system that arises resembles organized anarchy, for there is no true law, no inalienable rights, no justice system to protect a newborn child. However there are rules and protection services offered through the individual franchulates. This system of franchises combines with the free anarchy left with the disappearance to form a very capitalism rooted form of anarchy. The different franchulates actually compete and advertise, whether in the real world or the metaverse, for citizens to come join. Different franchulates carve out specific niches for their customers, such as the New South Africa franchise which offers genetic purity for the stereotypical southern white male. Company wars manifest themselves in actual gang wars, such as the war depicted between the mafia owned Nova Sicilia and Narcolombia franchises. This system, just like economic capitalism, leads to large powerful franchises such as Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong, and much smaller specialized franchises such and CosaNostra Pizza.

An interesting parallel to the Anarchy system in the continental United States is found on the raft. One quote in particular shows this on page 387: "The worst thing that can happen on the Raft is for your neighborhood to get cut loose. That's why the raft is such a tangled mess. Each neighborhood is afraid that the neighboring 'hoods are going to gang up on them, cut them loose, leave them to starve in the middle of the Pacific. So they are constantly finding new ways to tie themselves into each other..." the raft mirrors anarchy in that there again is no law or inherent rights obtained just by being a part of the raft. It is a cutthroat, free-for-all society in which any member could get screwed over and not be able to do anything about it.

The Stephenson Bias

roseblack — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 09:32:03 +0000

On page 57 of Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson describes the problem that the Black Sun staff has understanding Juanita's work as "sexism, the especially virulent type espoused by male techies who sincerely believe that they are too smart to be sexists." To some degree, it seems that he may be, intentionally or not, describing himself.
For a male author whose work contains so many female protagonists, Stephenson tends to write them into surprisingly familiar paradigms. While it's relatively subtle, his heroines tend to function as sex objects, and operate around the men among them. Juanita, for instance, despite being the most broadly functional holder of the information in the Babel/Infocalypse stack, abdicates a large portion of the responsibility involved in order to do relatively academic research. The 'real work' of unraveling L. Bob Rife's evil master plan is left to the men: Mr. Lee, Uncle Enzo, Ng, and Hiro, who, most of the time seems to be involved primarily to the end of getting back together with Juanita. Even Y.T. describes her as "that piece of tailâ€¦"
Y.T., while pretty much as empowered as anyone can get, is rather disenfranchised, for the simple reason of being 15, and possessing the maturity level of a 15 year old. She's mostly just playing with the power she has as a middle class white girl in America, until she's kidnapped and brought to the Raft. When she ends up in an unfamiliar place, living as she realizes much of the world lives, she gets scared and stays in her place. She too ends up needing a man to come rescue her, and once again, Raven ends up helping her cause trouble purely because he's enamored of her physical charms.
The frustrating thing about Stephenson is that he's clearly trying. Most of his work, and all of his recent work, is built around strong, driven female characters. However, their power is consistently derived in a fairly traditional form. Eliza, of the Baroque cycle, possesses astounding business acumen, but is still far more successful at acquiring power through sex, marriage and subtle politicking. Princess Nell of The Diamond Age takes her astounding skill set and works as a writer for a bordello.
On the other hand, this may be a critique of Stephenson's reader base. His fans consist, in great part of the very same type of well-intentioned male techies he's describing, each thinking, as they read the sentence, that he's talking about someone else. Perhaps the forms of power with which Stephenson endows his female characters are those he thinks will go down most smoothly, and make the most impression in the end. Or maybe it's just disturbing that a smart, thoughtful, modern male science fiction writer still can't give the women in his novels power unmediated by men.

2 effects of capitalism gone wild

Kamin — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 09:09:22 +0000

I wanted to follow-up on the idea presented in-class that Snow Crash takes a similar stance on both prejudice and democratic government. Eventually both will be pushed out of existence as capitalist competitivism acts as the ultimate driving force for all socio-cultural change.

Consider the messages about prejudice found in the novel. Japanese (to use Snow Crash's terminology, "Nipponese" from here on out) businessmen rule economically, despite whatever prejudice may have existed in the past. The New South Africans have their own franchise with every right to create whatever racist rules they want (82), but they only exist because they had some economic value (and they prove quite easy to dispatch â€“ see pp. 301-302). As they cease to remain competitive, they will crumble in this world of no external support. Moreover, with more and more of life taking place in the metaverse, the idea of identity changes rapidly. In the 'verse, "your avatar can look any way you want it to, up to the limits of your equipment" (36). Race and gender become preferences that one can hide from an outside world. With an altered physics, overcrowding no longer becomes a physical problem â€“ there is no physical urban space to fight over as everyone can occupy any space and only the most advanced have created a means of physical combat. Combined with an inability to produce results within this ultra-capitalist world, prejudice becomes obsolete.

Snow Crash makes similar predictions about the future of the US democratic government. From the introduction of YT's mother it becomes clear that the government no longer functions in any way truly meaningful to the people it used to serve. With the CIA and Library of Congress corporatized, the government begins to sound just like another franchise: "Feds don't make much money, but they have to work hard, to show their loyalty" (101). With weekly polygraph tests and no obvious influence on the rest of the country (security is privatized and services, to the extent that they exist at all, are provided by each burbclave), the feds seemed to have turned on themselves to keep busy. The steadily increasing power big business stripped the government of any legitimate function. In this capitalist world, they quickly disappear into the fringes of society.

the red pill or blue pill?

dreamfall17 — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 08:53:44 +0000

Well, judging by the titles of the responses that have come before me, I have chosen a well-trodden path to talk about, but it's the only question that came up repeatedly for me as I was reading, so I'm going to write about it anyway and hope that some kind of original thought manages to creep its way in somewhere.

It's a popular theme for science fiction writing and film: which to choose, grim reality or blissful illusion? Somehow, the message is nearly always "choose reality" â€“ Snow Crash is the first text I've come across (though I do not claim to have a comprehensive view) that is somewhat value-neutral on the subject. I say "somewhat" because the two main characters advance such polar opposite viewpoints, both of which seem equally appealing.

Hiro is in control and has power in the Metaverse; he is a "warrior prince" in the Metaverse (63). He is not totally sold on reality, either, saying "when you live in a shithole, there's always the Metaverse" (63). Y.T. has a similar kind of control and power in reality; she is pretty much autonomous and is almost always in control of her body and her fate. She has no qualms about entering into the Metaverse only as a black-and-white, something aficionados of the Metaverse cringe at, and criticizes Hiro at one point (though I cannot find the citation now, of course) for spending too much time there.

Several months ago, a friend of mine posed this question to me: If you could have a spouse OR a Hobbes (of the Calvin and Hobbes variety), which would you choose? It was supposed to be a light question to keep the conversation going, but the ensuing discussion went on for hours. The advantages and disadvantages of having a spouse are pretty obvious, so I will pass over them for now. Hobbes would be the perfect best friend â€“ you would have a complete and total understanding of one another, and you would be guaranteed to never meet anyone that could even rival Hobbes for fulfilling interaction and conversation.

However, for everyone else, he's imaginary. You cannot share him with anyone else, so you effectively have to choose between a perfect friendship with one person, and the rest of the world, which does not contain anyone who could be your friend in any real way (they will always pale in comparison to Hobbes). Compare this to Hiro: does he choose the U-Stor-It or the Metaverse, a reality that he can manipulate and control, a reality more perfect than one he could realistically attain in the real Los Angeles?

The book's answer is ambiguous, which is a bit of a cop-out, but does prove what a complex question it is. Snow Crash seems not to be arguing for one kind of reality over another, but a balance of the two. Hiro criticizes those who never totally leave the Metaverse, describing the gargoyles as "the embarrassing side of the Central Intelligence Corporationâ€¦they serve as human surveillance devices, recording everything that happens around them. Nothing looks stupiderâ€¦[it] mark[s] the user as belonging to a class that is at once above and far below human society (123-124). However â€“ lest readers think they have landed on a solution to the tension â€“ Hiro becomes a gargoyle later in the book, and that unquestionably saves his life.

I chose Hobbes.

So I wrote about race.

Captain.ver.Kerk — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 07:04:25 +0000

Race and racial discrimination are a very large part of Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, but they do not manifest in the way we would expect. In Stephenson's future world, race becomes defined more by who you work for rather than what your genetics are. Residents and employees of the various Franchises are granted a sense of exclusive community as per their "citizenship," and come to distrust and even feud with those from other Franchises.

Hiro Protagonist is genetically half African, half Japanese, and the people he deals with on a regular basis are just as culturally diverse. Hiro's very roommate, Vitaly Chernobyl, comes from a very different background: "Vitaly Chernobyl and the Meltdowns arrived in Long Beach on one of those hijacked ex-Soviet refugee freighters, they fanned out across southern California looking for expanses of reinforced concrete that were as vast and barren as the ones they had left behind in Kiev," (104). Japanese and Russians have never been on very friendly terms, and I have no idea of the contact levels between Russians and Africans, but I don't imagine they are long time allies. Yet the two can get along perfectly fine. Similarly, Italians and Hiro, Chinese and Japanese, and other individual interracial relationships occur without problem. This is because racial divisions have moved from original ethnicity to gained citizenship within franchulates.

The most predominant franchise in the novel is The Mafia, an organization unchanged from reality to novel in its power structure. The Mafia is a very welcoming organization to the individual, evidenced by their advertisements, which portray the head of the franchise, Uncle Enzo, with "his arm around the shoulders of a young wholesome-looking black kid," or another that says: "NO WAY, JOSÃ‰! Uncle Enzo holding up one hand to stop an Uzi-toting Hispanic scumbag; behind him stands a pan-ethnic phalanx of kids and grannies, resolutely gripping baseball bats and frying pans," (146). But when it comes to inter-franchulate relations, the Mafia, like most other franchulates, is not particularly fond of the opposition. "Most of the franchises are yellow-logoed, wrong-side-of-the-tracks operations like Uptown, Narcolobia, Caymans Plus, Metazania, and The Clink. But standing out like rocky islands in this swamp are the Nova Sicilia franchulates â€“ beachheads for the Mafia's effort to outduel the overwhelmingly strong Narcolobia," (145). Sure, they could be called rival companies, but their power and operations extend way beyond that of what one would consider corporate. Franchises even have passports, making them even more like a country than a business: "They don't want to let him in. He flashes his passport; the doors openâ€¦ Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong is an open country, always looking for new citizens, even if they are the poorest Refus," (328). Alliances are even formed between them, as the Mafia and Mr. Lee's people get together in an attempt to overthrow another superpower, L. Bob Rife.

This separation of Ethnicity from a biologically determined factor to an issue of allegiances and subscription is an interesting proposition by Stephenson. People are learning to classify less along genetic lineage and be less racist I feel, but the idea that something will arise to replace this is a frightening idea. Stephenson seems to be hinting at ingrained structures of hate and rivalry, which are hard to deny, especially when examining our past as a species, but to say that our future just holds more of the same is a rather pessimistic view, and one I hope does not come to pass.

(disjointed) Snow Crash/ eXistenZ response.

Riceguy20 — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 06:03:51 +0000

I had serious trouble organizing my thoughts while writing this, partly from confusion induced after watching eXistenZ, but here are a few of my thoughts the movie and book together.
The difference that I saw in between eXistenZ and Snow Crash was in the great divergence between both the means of entering the Metaverse vs. eXistenZ and the nature of the physical and moral dilemmas that both sides face. Snow Crash had both viral and moral dilemmas in the Snow Crash virus itself and the underlying religious purposes behind it. eXistenZ had the moral problem of substituting an entirely realistic 'false' world for the real one, in a fashion very near to The Matrix, and the corporeal problems of the creation and use of the different 'game pods.' However, unlike The Matrix, in eXistenZ, it was largely impossible to discover who indeed were the 'good guys' and the 'bad guys.' The mix of never knowing what was or wasn't reality and everyone having different, rapidly changing motives gave this a mystical depth that I think surpasses that of both Snow Crash and The Matrix.
To the Realists in eXistenZ, the world that the game programmers create (if they even exist at all) is a threat to morality in that not only does it make the real world less important, it gives its players a world in which there is no real consequence for their actions short of 'losing' the game. This parallels the moral standpoint of video games making players more violent, but to such a realistic extent as to make the 'real' violence and the 'game' violence indistinguishable. A sort of paradox similar to the idea of the self-fulfilling prophecy is created for the player, in that whatever they think they are doing by their own free will is in fact merely advancing the plot line. For example, when Jude Law stands up in the Chinese restaurant and yells, "eXistenZ is paused!" he appears to wake up in the room they entered the game from, when in fact later we learn they have only shifted scenes within the game. I suppose what I am trying to get at here is that since the players can never be sure they are out of the game or not, they can go one of two routes. They can act as they would in real life, not doing anything major to disrupt the social structure, or they can act on impulse and do as they please (i.e., shoot the waiter.)
After watching eXistenZ, I attempted to think of anything that would seem as weird to people in the past as the game pods appears to us, and I honestly could not think of anything close. There are similarities in robot prosthetics, but even then, only some of our most advanced prosthetics can use our own nervous systems to recreate natural movements as close to our own, and none can draw all of their power from the body itself as the pods do. They struck me as technically nothing more than parasites or symbiotic organisms to the human body, only without even any function on their own. No free will, no purposeful movement; only memory storage.

MMORPG's: A blur between reality and virtual reality is already here

LeoniaTavira — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 06:03:19 +0000

In a combination of theories and ideas that have been thrown around in a variety of classes, I have found myself writing a screenplay treatment that centers on the concept of virtual reality and the place of identity. An interesting theme that arises in Snow Crash, eXistenZ, and Neuromancer is the complications involved in creating a virtual version of oneself. In Snow Crash, there is the scene where Hiro engages in a sword fight with someone in the Black Sun. His avatar in the Metaverse was manipulating his own code in order to defeat his opponent, while his physical form in actual reality was carrying out the movements necessary for the battle, whence the unnerved audience he had when he had finished. One of the confusions of movement in the Metaverse is how the characters are controlled, as it seems they can walk around, ride motorcycles, and be moved by other avatars with only their mind control, but for the intricacies of sword play, the physical body must move. However, for the most part, Hiro creates a copy of himself to wander around the Metaverse, somewhat in the capacity of a vehicle through virtual reality.
eXistenZ takes a very different approach to VR. Considering the bioports and the game console situation within the game with the animal part pods, the whole situation revolves around an actual interface with the body involving connection through blood and tissue. You do not create a new character, but have your own body, just the way it appears in reality. The way this vision of VR functions it comes off as more of a controlled hallucination or specifically engineered dream experience than the slightly less "realistic" VR of Snow Crash. There is very little control on the part of the player and one feels entirely ruled by the story line of the game.
The way I see Neuromancer relating to this is in the concept of the Construct. Somehow, in Gibson's view of the future of virtual realities and technology, a person's personality, their identity (up to a certain point) can be saved onto what equates to a floppy disk and moved around, loaded onto computers and forced to exist in cyberspace without a body like some kind of technological limbo. While the Flatline had no concept of time, he was more than just a conglomeration of the former being's memories and skills, he also had the sense of humor, a laugh (as disconcerting as it may have been to Case) and the desire to be erased, released from the cyberspace cage in which he was saved.
I find all three of these versions of VR to be fascinating, and elements of each are incorporated into my idea of VR in my screenplay. The character wrote her own VR world as an escape, a nostalgic playground to represent all that the current government structure had taken away. It plays with the conflict between controlling the image of oneself, as Hiro does, and also the surreal interplay between cyberspace and real life, where it becomes uncertain whether one's involvement with a virtual world can be more real than the real world because of the importance placed in time spent there and one's identity in that space. Dixie had no choice about his personality being saved, and when he was consulted, he chose to be released. However, in eXistenZ, the lines between reality and the virtual game reality were so badly blurred that it became almost impossible to distinguish them. When the American Jude Law character came out of the game within a game for the first time he found that it all felt unreal and he experienced extreme disorientation. Having had periods of my life where I could play six to eight straight hours of a massively multiplayer online role playing game (MMORPG), it seems that the level of technology in these books and movies is unnecessary for one to lose the connection between mind and body, neglecting the physical reality and placing the needs of the virtual character first.

The colors of Snow Crash

DeusExMachina — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 23:06:23 +0000

I thought I might take a look at the use of color in this novel. After all, the story has a lot of powerful imagery, and it was originally meant to be a "computer-generated graphic novel", so the design of the imagery must have demanded a lot of attention. Even the title of the book, "Snow Crash," is a term with some intrinsic color qualities. A snow crash displays "white noise", "a pattern of black-and-white pixels" (73-74). The black-and-white of the snow crash is a very bad thing: it's associated with nonsense, an extremely primitive fault with a machine. If you see a snow crash, you've witnessed a "system crash... at such a fundamental level" that the graphics output fails (42). It's both menacing and something to scoff at, a simple failure; a properly-protected computer shouldn't suffer a snow crash, but if it has been infected with a virus, it might.

There are also the black-and-white avatars, which tend to draw suspicion and distaste from everyone else. These are "persons who are accessing the Metaverse through cheap public terminals... a lot of whom are run-of-the-mill psycho fans" (41). The grainy black-and-white avatars represent a sort of lower class of Metaverse user, and that lower class apparently consists of generic yet obnoxious characters. "I can't believe you took a hypercard from a black-and-white person," Hiro says to Da5id, implying that Da5id would have to be very stupid to do that. It implies that black-and-white people are dangerously unaccountable, and consequently something to distrust or scorn. This is pretty consistent with the black-and-white of the snow crash: in both cases, the grainy mixture of black and white is associated with something both mundane and dangerous.

However, black by itself, or rather, black with itself, is associated with power within the novel. The uniform Hiro wears when he is The Deliverator is "black as activated charcoal" (1), making him "a grim vision in ninja black" (5), and "his car is an invisible black lozenge, just a dark place that reflects... the loglo" (7). The equipment of the Deliverator is associated with efficiency, danger, and power. He is stealthy, very fast, and wields tools that are immensely powerful, and all of these tools are black. Similarly, the Metaverse's number one hacker hangout is "a squat black pyramid" with "a matte black hemisphere... set in the front wall" - "THE BLACK SUN" (39-40). It's another case of black-on-black, a combination that (unlike black-and-white) is associated with the few most powerful, most dangerous individuals in the Metaverse.

Then there are the colors of advertisements and other businesses. The Kourier service wears a combination of "orange and blue" (13), and the Enforcers uniform is an "acid green uniform" (122). Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong, one of the safest parts of town, is signified by "a green-and-blue sign, soothing and calm in a glare-torn franchise ghetto" (83). The various franchises, and their meaning to the main characters especially, are reflected in the colors they choose for their advertising. Green is security; blue is calm; and orange is flashy but still hip when combined with blue. On the contrary, "cheap, nasty franchises all tend to adopt logos with a lot of bright, hideous yellow in them" (145). These bright, ugly logos are like "radioactive urine" (145) â€“ associated with the disgusting human waste, and probably something that would be dangerous to be exposed to. In other words, all kinds of bright colors are associated with different franchises, but the colors used tend to say something useful about that franchise. This view is both somewhat anticorporate (the distaste for certain franchises) and simultaneously rooted in the kind of psychology that corporate consumerism requires (the association of colors with brands, with the hope that brands can identify themselves as high-quality simply by choosing the right colors).

Of course, even the colored uniform of of the couriers, "fly as it may be", is not always advantageous (259). Even Y.T., who's normally a very brightly-colored person, between her blond hair and the Kourier uniform, resorts to becoming a "black angel" when it comes down to dangerous business (259). This is when the power-of-the-hackers black convention meets the bright-franchise-colors convention: when Y.T. is working for her franchise, she uses the colors, but when she wants power she reverts her clothing to black.

So throughout the book, lots of colors have pretty strong associations. Black-and-white noise is cheap, mundane, yet dangerous; yellow is disgusting and unhealthy; green is security, and blue is placidity. And of course, though I haven't discussed it here, red is danger. These associations mostly hold pretty consistently throughout the novel, which both makes it powerful as a visual experience and acts as a subtle but defining feature of the corporately-defined system of "government" and lifestyle that is at the core of the novel.