Snow Crash

In Snow Crash, the Metaverse is a virtual reality environment that takes the shape of an urban environment. When entering the Metaverse, people are able to walk down the streets, ride vehicles, and enter buildings as though they were in reality. In this sense, the Metaverse is a form of heightened reality. While inside the Metaverse, Hiro can be whomever he wants to be. He can alter his avatar so that he appears in a way that better suits his identity, or he can alter his appearance to hide from other people. The Metaverse offers a more flexible, more individualistic version of reality. This flexibility provides the Metaverse with an escapist element. When entering the Metaverse, people can be whoever they want to be. They can live out the fantasies and ambitions that they might not be able to carry out in their actual lives. This fantastical proposition inherent in the Metaverse ties into its history as a construction by a team of idealistic hackers. Young men like Hiro wanted the Metaverse to be a technological wonderland. They wanted people to live their best lives in the Metaverse, suggesting that the entire Metaverse is a symbol of the opportunity and hope offered by technology and hacking skills. With this, the Metaverse represents the potential for a technological future.

However, life inside the Metaverse is not ideal. Hackers like Hiro have been marginalized, and like everything else in the Snow Crash world, everything has become commodified. For all the potential for self-expression, people who use the Metaverse remain limited by their material conditions. They either lack the computing power needed to render certain avatars, meaning that they cannot afford to look the way they want, or they are forced to inhabit virtual reality spaces that are owned and operated by big businesses. Even though the Metaverse is a seemingly limitless virtual space, real estate is still a premium investment. The real estate within the Metaverse is a symbolic recreation of the complete commodification of the world defined by unfettered capitalism; artificial limits have been created to better extract profits from the masses. The commodification and corruption of the Metaverse’s ideals demonstrate the corrosive nature of capitalism as defined in the Snow Crash world. In reality, the police accept all major credit cards. In the Metaverse, the same companies who own the security forces own every facet of existence, and they charge people who use it for the privilege of occupying a virtual reality space.

Amid this rampant commercialization, certain people in the Metaverse do not need to obey the rules. Either through better hardware or sheer financial muscle, the rich and the powerful can dominate the Metaverse as they do the real world. Rife owns a vast swath of real estate in the Metaverse that does not need to conform to the same rules as everywhere else. In a very literal sense, the same rules do not apply to the rich. This imbalance is a symbolic reflection of the status quo in reality, where rich men such as Rife are permitted to do as they please because there are no longer any rules or regulations that can limit their actions. The rich have recreated the social hierarchy inside the Metaverse, and only talented hackers like Hiro are able to bend these rules as a challenge to the social order. Rife’s status in the Metaverse and Hiro’s ability to challenge him is a symbolic demonstration of the conflict between the rich status quo and the marginalized majority.