Much of the world's territory has been carved up into sovereign enclaves, each run by its own big business franchise (such as "Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong", or the corporatized American Mafia), or various residential burbclaves - quasi-sovereign gated communities.
The remnants of government maintain authority only in isolated compounds, where they do tedious make-work that is, by and large, irrelevant to the society around them.
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Highway companies compete to attract drivers to their roads, and all mail delivery is by hired courier. Mercenary armies compete for national defense contracts, while private security guards preserve the peace in sovereign, gated housing developments. Franchising, individual sovereignty, and private vehicles reign supreme. Los Angeles is no longer part of the United States, since the federal government has ceded most of its power and territory to private organizations and entrepreneurs. The story opens in Los Angeles in the 21st century, an unspecified number of years after a worldwide economic collapse.
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In the author's acknowledgments (multiple editions) Stephenson recalls: "it became clear that the only way to make the Mac do the things we needed was to write a lot of custom image-processing software. Stephenson originally planned Snow Crash as a computer-generated graphic novel in collaboration with artist Tony Sheeder. The god Enki created a counter-program, which he called a nam-shub, that caused all of humanity to speak different languages as a protection against Asherah (a re-interpretation of the ancient Near Eastern story of the Tower of Babel). According to characters in the book, the goddess Asherah is the personification of a linguistic virus, similar to a computer virus. The book presents the Sumerian language as the firmware programming language for the brainstem, which is supposedly functioning as the BIOS for the human brain. Stephenson has also mentioned that Julian Jaynes' book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind was one of the main influences on Snow Crash. Stephenson wrote about the Macintosh that "When the computer crashed and wrote gibberish into the bitmap, the result was something that looked vaguely like static on a broken television set-a 'snow crash '".
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Was the Command Line", Stephenson explained the title of the novel as his term for a particular software failure mode on the early Macintosh computer. Like many of Stephenson's novels, it covers history, linguistics, anthropology, archaeology, religion, computer science, politics, cryptography, memetics and philosophy. Snow Crash is a science fiction novel by American writer Neal Stephenson, published in 1992.