Week Eleven: Cyberpunk and Steampunk - Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson (# 6 points)

 

The shock of using VR devices for the first time is still unforgettable. It’s still a little closer to the virtual side than to the real one, but it was still amazing. Since then, I have been interested in virtual reality and augmented reality, and have started to read related articles and books. It was difficult to fully understand, but I was convinced that the technology would gradually focus on making virtual realities more realistic.

VR appeared in the mid-2010s, but there was someone who came up with this concept 20 years before this. It’s Neal Stephenson, the writer of ‘Snow Crash’, and the novel ’Snow Crash’ is a book that enables us to approach the world of virtual reality more easily. 

Considering this book was published in 1992, I’m really surprised that the story described in this novel is almost close to the world right now, where a lot of Internet-related technologies have made remarkable development.

‘Metaverse’ the virtual place that the computer made through the goggles and headsets is very brilliant. The writer even depicts ‘Avatar’, as another myself in the virtual places, that are familiar to us now but unfamiliar at that time when people lacked awareness of the Internet. It’s very surprising that the future society, drawn by the author’s imagination, has been realized to some extent now. 

Our real world doesn’t feel much different from the world that the writer described in the novel, so it feels like ’Snow Crash’ criticizes the problems of modern society while showing the future society. Although there will be a lot of changes in the future, It’s the environment that changes, not the human themselves. What is the fundamental solution to the problems that humans constantly create? 

Sometimes, a world that has become more convenient feels more uncomfortable. There are far more complex problems to solve, such as an invasion of privacy and dehumanization, and these are not easy to solve as removing a computer virus. Like the Tower of Babel, symbolized as a challenge to God, science challenges the impossible field. It was the book that made me think about what is the approaching future that we are going to see.