{"id":4391,"date":"2014-01-02T10:16:31","date_gmt":"2014-01-02T18:16:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.paloaltonetworks.com\/blog\/?p=4391"},"modified":"2020-04-21T14:40:16","modified_gmt":"2020-04-21T21:40:16","slug":"cybersecurity-canon-snow-crash","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www2.paloaltonetworks.com\/blog\/2014\/01\/cybersecurity-canon-snow-crash\/","title":{"rendered":"The Cybersecurity Canon: Snow Crash"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"cybersec<\/span><\/div><\/a><\/i><\/p>\n

For the past decade, I have had this notion that there must be a <\/i>Cybersecurity Canon:<\/i><\/a> a list of must-read books where the content is timeless, genuinely represents an aspect of the community that is true and precise and that, if not read, leaves a hole in cybersecurity professional\u2019s education. I\u2019ll be presenting on this topic at RSA 2014, and between now and then, <\/i>I\u2019d like to discuss a few of my early candidates for inclusion<\/i><\/a>. I love a good argument, so feel free to let me know what you think.<\/i><\/p>\n

Snow Crash <\/b>(1992) by Neal Stephenson<\/p>\n

Every cybersecurity geek on the planet should embrace this book. It has everything that we like: Metaverse hacking, real-world swordplay, awesome weapons, and\u2014to cap it all off\u2014the hacker ends up with the girl.<\/p>\n

Neal Stephenson is a cyber geek of the first order, and his personality is all over this story. His description of the \u201cMetaverse\u201d and the \u201cavatars\u201d that live in it, both terms he made famous in this book, are so prescient that anybody playing World of Warcraft or using Second Life today would feel right at home. Stephenson is an author who truly understands the hacker culture, so it\u2019s not surprising Snow Crash wound up on Time magazine\u2019s list of 100 novels everyone should read, among countless other accolades.<\/p>\n

Why It Holds Up<\/b><\/p>\n

I recently reviewed the classic cyber punk novel Neuromancer<\/a>, so I figured I would continue the trend and review another classic in the genre to see if it too still holds up. Well, that, and as I\u2019ve already mentioned<\/a>, Stephenson is one of my favorite authors in this or any genre.<\/p>\n

I first learned about Stephenson after reading his excellent article called \u201cMother Earth Mother Board\u201d in Wired Magazine in 1996. He told the story about how the world is connected through massive runs of transatlantic cables that traverse the ocean floors and electronically and physically connect three continents to each other. To do the research, he traveled to each location where the cables made landfall and told the story about how it all comes together. But it was not until I read Cryptonomicon and In the Beginning...Was the Command Line, both published by Stephenson in 1999, that I became a fan. Cryptonomicon is the best \u201chacker\u201d novel I have ever read, and after encountering that, I went scurrying back to the library to see what else Stephenson had written. That is when I stumbled upon Snow Crash.<\/p>\n

Oh my!<\/p>\n

Stephenson wrote this book in 1992, eight years after Neuromancer. At this point, authors well understood the main ideas of the style: stories written in a near dystopian future where technology is advanced, governments have withdrawn in potency to be replaced by corporations, and man-machine interfaces and cyborg beings are the norm. But Snow Crash was like nothing I had ever read before. This was my first cyber punk novel (I still hadn\u2019t read Neuromancer for the first time), and every page read like the author was dropping new ideas onto the page like Mardi Gras beads hitting the ground on Bourbon Street. Stephenson wanted to have some fun with it, and the opening pizza-delivery scene reads like you are being launched out of a cannon.<\/p>\n

Snow Crash\u2019s main character is named Hiro Protagonist (see what I mean about having some fun?), a self-proclaimed master swordfighter, hacker in the three-dimensional Internet space called the \u201cMetaverse,\u201d and pizza deliveryman. He teams up with YT (Yours Truly), a 15-year-old skater girl courier, and Uncle Enzio, a mafia kingpin and bankroller for the good-guy team. The bad guys are represented by L. Bob Rife, a Pentecostal evangelist and fiber-optic monopolist, and Raven, a motorcycle-riding, nuclear-bomb-wielding Aleut\u2014as in Aleutian native\u2014who is roughly the size of a house. The catalyst to all of this good-versus-evil business is Snow Crash, a virus that works both in the \u201cMetaverse\u201d and in the real world that L. Bob Rife intends to use to infect the world.<\/p>\n

The Tech<\/b><\/p>\n

Snow Crash itself is a neural-linguistic virus. By that I mean that Snow Crash is a meme that was buried deep in the human brain and forgotten until the bad guys in this story figure out how to unlock it. Stephenson leverages the theory of memetics that was introduced by Richard Dawkins in 1976 with his book The Selfish Gene.<\/p>\n

Dawkins said that memes may be another way that humans evolve other than gene mutation. According to the theory, memes are ideas that humans transmit to one another across generations and may account for long-lasting ideas like religion, morality, and crop rotation.<\/p>\n

In this story, pre-Christian religious leaders controlled the masses with the Snow Crash meme. The virus\u2019s secrets were lost to history until L. Bob Rife (the story\u2019s bad guy) rediscovered them and found out that hackers plugged into the \u201cMetaverse\u201d were susceptible to the digital virus that used them. Hiro asks his girlfriend, \u201cThis Snow Crash thing \u2013 is it a virus, a drug, or a religion?\u201d She replies, \u201cWhat\u2019s the difference?\u201d<\/p>\n

According to Stephenson, he invented the term \u201cMetaverse\u201d for this book. Readers will most likely associate the \u201cMetaverse\u201d with online role-playing games (RPGs) like World of Warcraft and online heightened-reality experiences like Second Life. But Stephenson\u2019s description of the \u201cMetaverse\u201d in the first 30 pages of Snow Crash is almost a blueprint to building these kinds of worlds. When you consider that the designers of Google Earth used Stephenson\u2019s description as a model and that he published the book two years before World of Warcraft debuted and 11 years before Second Life launched, you realize just how prescient Stephenson was. In a perfect example of the definition of \u201cmeta,\u201d players in the Second Life Metaverse annually reenact the Snow Crash novel<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The term \u201cavatar\u201d originates from Hindu mythology and refers to the form of a god living on earth. Game designers adopted the term to represent characters in RPGs as far back as 1979. But Stephenson\u2019s use of the word to describe his characters\u2019 online personas\u2014not just any character but the representation of his or her own personality in the \u201cMetaverse\u201d\u2014catapulted the word into the popular culture, so much so that the word was common enough for James Cameron to use as the title of his blockbuster movie in 2009.<\/p>\n

Conclusion<\/b><\/p>\n

By culturally defining \u201cavatars\u201d and the \u201cMetaverse\u201d for the geek crowd and being one of the first Internet commentators to realize how important memes are, Snow Crash is must-read for any Internet history enthusiast and security professional. It is canon. You should have read this by now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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