Snow Crash - Navigating Digital Nature
From Snow Crash (1992) by Neal Stephenson.
Describing the “Street,” the main avenue of the “Metaverse,” which characters enter via virtual-reality goggles and move through as animated avatars – sort of like the Internet, but built to work like a walkable, 3D, physical world.
“The dimensions of the Street are fixed by a protocol, hammered out by the computer-graphics ninja overlords of the Association for Computing Machinery’s Global Multimedia Protocol Group.The Street seems to be a grand boulevard going all the way around the equator of a black sphere with a radius of a bit more than ten thousand kilometers. That makes it 65,536 kilometers around, which is considerably bigger than Earth.
“The number 65, 563 is an awkward figure to everyone except a hacker, who recognizes it more readily than his own mother’s date of birth: It happens to be a power of 2–2^16 power to be exact–and even the exponent 16 is equal to 2^4, and 4 is equal to 2^2. Along with 256; 32,768; and 2,147,483,648; 65,536 is one of the foundation stones of the hacker universe, in which 2 is the only really important number because that’s how many digits a computer can recognize. One of those digits is 0, and the other is 1. Any number that can be created by fetishistically multiplying 2s by each other, and subtracting the occasional 1, will be instantly recognizable to a hacker.” (pg. 24)
Why all this talk about numbers? It seems so excessive. Who cares, right? Wrong.
Where most people up until the recent past had to be intimately in touch with the subtle rhythms of their environments, the shifts of the winds, the changing of tides, hints of clouds on the horizon, the subtlety of a midday dip in humidity – now Stephenson shows us humans at home in a new kind of landscape and in touch with a new kind of ecological system.
The most adept characters in this new digital world are the hackers, able to live on the margins and slip through the cracks gracefully because they understand the grounding logics and patterns of their highly regulated digital world. But their appreciation of the beauty of 2s, as a feature of “nature”, is not the same as a 2015 citydweller’s appreciation of the beautiful sunset view at the end of a weekend hike – it’s more like a rancher’s appreciation of those subtle rhythms of the the environment, the winds, the clouds, etc. (what else? I don’t know!). In other words, this digital-nature forms a landscape that isn’t beautiful because it’s beautiful – it’s beautiful because it matters to those who are deeply in touch with it. And this nature is unlike any we’ve seen before. Or at least it’s unlike any we’ve noticed.