Da5id and the Iconoclasts

This week, I'd like to read religion and imagery in Snow Crash against "Simulation and Simulacra." I'm particularly interested in looking a Baudrillard's passage in which he writes about the Iconoclasts, and (perhaps ironically) suggests that their counterparts, the "iconcolates" were the first "modern minds" since they "enacted God's death in the epiphany of his representations." In other words, by forming an image of God, the icon worshipers create a model of an unrepresentable "reality," thereby rendering their images more "real" than the God that the images are meant to represent. God therefore becomes less significant than the signs indicating God, and the cycle of worship re-centers around an image.

In Snow Crash, the "snow crash" itself seems to be a sort of religion composed of images. Although it has been argued extensively that the Metaverse is Stephenson's most accurate representation of a simulacrum, it is worthwhile to consider that the "virus, religion, and disease" is the real simulated reality. The hacker has simply to look at snow crash in order to become infected- the series of ones and zeros that comprise the explosion of binary trigger a hardwiring malfunction in a hacker's brain like a computer. The difference is that merely showing some binary to a computer can't affect it- only processing the binary results in any activity. The hacker is thereby more computer-like than the actual computer; as Hayles wrote, code for the hacker in Snow Crash "is what it does," and snow crash the virus/religion/disease supersedes the knowability of learned language and body functions. Da5id can be damaged by snow crash because he has become a sort of highly sensitive computer, which is itself based on the concept of perfect mechanized processing. The referent has disappeared- man's skills (in this instance, looking at code to understand it) are now based on machine functions, and he is rewarded when his ability to mimic a machine surpasses that of the machine itself.

In this way, hackers fit the description of Baudrillard's icon worshippers and snow crash fits the model of the image of God. Both hackers and iconolates are "infected" with religion because of the visibility of its simulacrum.

(I hesitate to discuss the Matrix in this post, since Baudrillard stated in 2003 that the Matrix treated virtual reality- and not as skillfully as Lynch's Mulholland Drive- rather than simulacra)