Thursday, March 6, 2008

The power of information

Anybody ever play Animal Crossing for the Gamecube? It's a much more primitive version of Second Life. You can visit other players' villages, but not while they're there, and you can only interact with computer-controlled animals. But like in Second Life, the fun parts are in the little secrets, the parts that you aren't meant to see or do. It still got boring pretty quickly, though.

On another note, I found one of the most interesting themes in Snow Crash to be the power of information. It's not always obvious how powerful information is in today's world, but Stephenson illustrates it very well. Obviously, the bitmap's ability to destroy a programmer's mind is one example of this. One passage mentions that cars are checked for "bombs or NBCI (nuclear-biological-chemical-informational) agents in the undercarriage" (p. 176). Information, in the form of DNA and three-ring binders, is the source of power for viruses and franchises.

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