Snow Crash
Meme Magic In The Metaverse
New to the series? Start with our foundational posts on Hyperreality and the Financial Matrix for essential context, or explore the full Table Of Contents.
Part of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice series. Originally published privately on January 13, 2021. Updated and revised for public release on June 20, 2024, with previously omitted content restored for completeness, expanded discussion of Snow Crash, edits to improve readability, and enhanced graphics.
“This Snow Crash thing--is it a virus, a drug, or a religion?”
Juanita shrugs. “What’s the difference?”
―Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash
In our hyperreal existence, the boundaries between the digital and physical realms—and between the real and unreal—have blurred beyond recognition. Our lives, societies, and financial markets have come to mirror
’s cyberpunk novel Snow Crash—which now serves as a thought-provoking lens through which to examine the hidden forces that shape our perceptions and determine our reality.
Source: , Twitter
Self-replicating ideas born in cyberspace breach the boundaries of the digital realm to exert profound influence over markets, politics, and culture. The power of “meme magic” to reshape reality has become all too palpable; it infiltrates and manipulates both individual minds and the fabric of society itself.
In this hyperreal, hyperconnected world, the firewalls tasked with safeguarding our minds, ensuring financial system integrity, and maintaining societal cohesion have become as vulnerable as outdated, unpatched antivirus software attempting to fend off cutting-edge, polymorphic malware. Our mental, monetary, and social firewalls now fail to protect us under the relentless onslaught of manipulative monetary policy, weaponized information and algorithms, neuro-linguistic exploits, and reality-altering memes meticulously engineered to exploit our deepest psychological, economic, and cultural vulnerabilities.
Snow Crash: A Visionary Blueprint For Today’s Hyperreality
In the realm of science fiction, few works have proven as prescient and thought-provoking as Snow Crash. At the time of its publication in 1992, the digital universe that now pervades our lives was but an embryo, gestating within the womb of academia, science, and the military. Into this quiet digital dawn, Snow Crash exploded onto the cyberpunk literary scene with the force of a cultural supernova.
Arriving a full seven years before The Matrix—a film that itself drew significant inspiration from its pages—Snow Crash seared its way into our collective unconscious. Stephenson’s work popularized concepts that have since become cornerstones of our tech-infused lives, shaping the vision and actions of influential tech industry leaders, and paving the way for the burgeoning cryptocurrency and “web3” movements. One of Snow Crash’s most significant contributions to the digital lexicon is the term Metaverse, which Stephenson coined to describe an all-encompassing virtual reality akin to the Matrix.
The novel is set in a future that—in many ways—bears an unsettling resemblance to our present reality. Stephenson masterfully weaves together a tapestry of virtual reality, ancient languages, mythology, artificial intelligence (AI), and memes—yielding an incisive framework through which to examine the pervasive hyperreality that defines our contemporary existence.
In the world of Snow Crash, ideas and language emerge as potent instruments of “meme magic” capable of reshaping people’s perceptions, beliefs, actions, and ultimately reality itself—resonating strongly with the way memes now operate in our own hyperreal, hyperconnected world.
Warning: plot spoilers ahead; to avoid them skip to the conclusion, here.
For a more detailed plot summary of Snow Crash and the novel’s parallels to our modern society, please see our companion piece here.
Meme Magic In The Metaverse: Language As Code
Hiro Protagonist—whose name embodies the novel’s embrace of cyberpunk satire—finds himself in a frantic race against time to unravel the secrets behind Snow Crash, a mysterious entity that exists simultaneously as a computer virus in the virtual world of the Metaverse and a mind-altering drug in the physical world.
In the virtual Metaverse, Snow Crash manifests as a computer virus capable of causing a system crash, displaying a classic “snow-like” pattern on screen (above). Meanwhile, in the real world, Snow Crash takes the form of a drug that affects the human brain, causing symptoms ranging from nonsensical babbling to complete catatonia.
The plot thickens as Hiro traces the origins of the virus back to ancient Sumeria and discovers its connections to the legendary Tower of Babel. In ancient times, humans existed as a monoculture—a singular society where knowledge and ideas were transmitted not through individual conscious thought, but through a viral-like spread of information.
This ancient mode of information dissemination resembles the modern-day Non-Player Characters (NPCs) meme, which portrays many in our society as similar to NPCs in video games—lacking individual thought and mindlessly adhering to scripted, predictable behaviors without deviation.
Neuro-Linguistic Programming: Hacking The Mind
Hiro learns that the ancient Sumerian language is a primordial programming language for the human brain, serving as the fundamental cognitive framework that underlies human thought processes. Much like an assembly or machine language in computer programming, Sumerian is depicted as the ultimate neuro-linguistic programming tool for the brain—executing commands that bypass higher-level conceptual thought to control individuals at a more fundamental, pre-linguistic level.
This unique characteristic makes the human mind susceptible to hijacking and reprogramming. When individuals are exposed to memes encoded in the Sumerian language, these viral ideas can infiltrate their minds—overriding free will and compelling the infected individual to perform actions beyond their control.
Meme magic in Snow Crash is illustrated through the ‘nam-shub’—a Sumerian term meaning “potent incantation” or “speech with magical force”. The nam-shub is a spell that actualizes what it narrates:
“The nam-shub of Enki is both a story and an incantation..A self-fulfilling fiction…in its original form, which this translation only hints at, it actually did what it describes.
This duality highlights the power of language as a transformative force, capable of altering reality simply through its expression and reception. As a story that acts out its own effects, the nam-shub exemplifies how deeply embedded ideas, or memes, can reprogram human thought and behavior, and become a “self-fulfilling fiction”.
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 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 [ed: meme magic], enacting itself on…a fiber-optic network.
Memes and information create and alter not just perceived virtual reality in the Metaverse, but physical reality itself. Language is a powerful programmatic code capable of infiltrating and manipulating reality at its core. The novel’s ancient Sumerian “meme magic” serves as a potent metaphor for our own hyperreality and the increasing permeability between digital, mental, and physical realms.
Infohazards: The Mind Has No Firewall
Snow Crash’s treatment of “meme magic” forces us to reconsider the nature of information and our relationship to it. Our minds are susceptible to “infohazards”—informational threats that can exploit vulnerabilities inherent to the human brain and have negative consequences for our minds and physical reality itself. The “mind has no firewall”: unlike digital systems, which we can protect with cybersecurity measures, the human brain remains open to various forms of information warfare and psychological manipulations.
The neurolinguistic memes in Snow Crash influence human behavior, just as codes in various forms—ranging from binary to symbolic and linguistic—dictate our own daily interactions and experiences. These codes serve as the foundation for our navigation through mental, virtual, and physical realms, profoundly shaping our understanding of and engagement with reality.
Conjuring Reality: Sci-Fi Made Manifest
Stephenson’s vision of “meme magic” as a transformative force is no longer confined to the pages of sci-fi. Today, we see it playing out in real-time, as self-replicating ideas birthed in the depths of the “dark web” breach the boundaries of cyberspace to exert profound influence on our reality—our politics, economy, markets, culture, and society. As in Snow Crash, “Meme magic” has become a defining feature of our hyperreal era.
How Stupid Pictures Of Badly Drawn Frogs Influenced The 2016 Election
In the political sphere, the saga of Pepe the Frog—a cartoon character co-opted and transformed into a memetic force—perhaps exemplifies this phenomenon. A ragtag army of internet denizens—believing in the reality-altering power of memes—rallied behind their chosen candidate, Donald Trump, during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. They attribute his unexpected victory to their “meme magic”, wielding Pepe as their mascot; entire books have been written on this topic.
Infinite Money Glitch
The financial world, too, has fallen under the spell of “meme magic”. During the GameStop/WallStreetBets saga—which saw an unruly band of Redditors unite to pummel short-selling hedge funds and send GameStop ($GME) stock soaring—WallStreetBets traders explicitly invoked “meme magic” as the driving force behind their assault on the financial establishment. They effectively merged social media with tangible financial consequences in the real world, creating their own “infinite money glitch” in the process—a (profitable) self-fulfilling “reality”.
In a dizzying twist of abstraction layered on top of abstraction, a group of Redditors even created their own “memeconomy”—a stock market simulation that treats memes as if they were tangible financial assets, allowing users to practice “meme magic”. This controlled, gamified environment acts as a crucible for the forging of memes, allowing users to refine their magical creations before unleashing them upon the “real” world.
Reflecting on these developments, Bloomberg recently dubbed 2020 “The Year Of The Meme Stock”.
Crypto Meme Magic
Cryptocurrency enthusiasts have regularly engaged in memetic warfare, and prominent figures including Elon Musk have been known to cause significant fluctuations in crypto prices:
Pepe later received his own memecoin.
Bitcoin Meme Magic: To The Moon
“This is our meme world, Everyone else is just living in it.”
Bitcoiners like
consciously and explicitly invoke “meme magic” to promote Bitcoin:We’re not just playing around with magic internet money, we’re engaging in advanced geopolitical meme craft and were shaping civilization for centuries and we have to get our message out.
Iconic memes like “Bitcoin to the moon”, “HODL”, and “have fun staying poor” have become ubiquitous. Another popular meme—”Bitcoin fixes this”—positions the cryptocurrency as a panacea for myriad economic and societal issues, from inflation to wealth inequality to censorship.
Societal Snow Crash
But “meme magic” amongst the fringes of online culture—day traders, crypto afficionados, and Trump supporters—is merely a symptom of a disease that penetrates to the very core of our hyperreal Financial Matrix itself. Memes, like the magical “nam shub” incantations in Snow Crash, are bringing ideas into tangible existence—influencing thoughts, beliefs, and actions on a global scale.
“Meme magic” has become a feature of our society, not a bug, precisely because over the past decade, the topology of our world has been terraformed. We have gutted the financial system and society itself—remodeling them into a hyperreal medium akin to the Metaverse. This transformation has created the perfect petri dish for cultivating the proliferation of competing memes, narratives, and "truths" that no longer require confirmation or refutation by facts in the real world. As we survey our current landscape, it becomes clear that we are living through a societal “Snow Crash”.
The War On Reality
What drove this profound transformation? While society’s and the financial markets’ user interfaces may cosmetically appear identical to the old system, we have entirely replaced its core operating system with code that is designed at its root level to facilitate “meme magic” like that which influenced the NPC-like Sumerian monoculture in Snow Crash.
Our money—the operating system for society—has been unanchored from physical reality and entirely self-referential since Nixon closed the gold window in 1971; ever since the 2008 crisis we have corrupted this operating system at warp speed. After transmuting money into a purely self-referential symbol, central bankers further metastasized this corruption of reality by performing the same alchemy on other assets ranging from houses to stocks to bonds.
Economic and financial theory, too, has long been self-referential and abstracted from reality. It was bad enough when these theories were purely analog and mostly confined to textbooks, class lectures, and “policy summits”. But over the past decade we’ve been able to directly hard code these fallacious belief structures into the digitized markets themselves and reshape the real world to fit our models through—inter alia—passive investing as well as the computational tools and algorithms available to us.
And finally, over the past decade we ourselves as humans have become increasingly untethered from reality and self-referential as a direct result of the poisonous effects of corrupt money and exacerbated by the pernicious confluence of social media, omnipresent screen time, and “hyperinformation” that characterizes our modern world; our perceptions and reality are shaped by the information, memes, algorithms, and echo chambers of our own Metaverse.
In short, we’ve waged an all-out war against reality itself. Why then should we be taken aback when our self-replicating magical brooms carry out our wishes and amplify them long after our cauldron is full of water, so to speak?
Why should we be surprised that we’ve created an overarching hyperreality that has profound impacts on our society, economy, and culture? Or that, in the realm of finance, we have seemingly transmuted what used to be relatively short-lived cyclical phenomena restricted to narrow aspects of the markets—e.g., bubbles, frauds, pump and dump schemes, ponzis, speculative orgies, zombie companies, etc.—into the first ever globally synchronized “Everything Bubble” that now appears to have achieved a “permanently high plateau”?
Ten Milestones On The Road To Hyperreality
As we navigate this uncharted territory, it is worth reflecting on the forces that have brought us to this juncture. Over the coming weeks, we will trace the ten milestones that led us down the path to hyperreality, and then conclude with some of the key investment and societal implications that arise from this hyperreal state of affairs.