From: "Perry E. Metzger" <perry@piermont.com>
Date: Sun, 14 Apr 1996 10:23:40 +0800
To: Adam Shostack <adam@lighthouse.homeport.org>
Subject: Re: No matter where you go, there they are.
In-Reply-To: <199604140011.TAA13006@homeport.org>
Message-ID: <199604132331.TAA01039@jekyll.piermont.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



Adam Shostack writes:
> Perry E. Metzger wrote:
> 
> | Adam Shostack writes:
> | > 	Snow Crash is a book about a future in which governments are
> | > ineffective.  Companies run things, and have complete local control.
> | > The world has gone to hell, and as a result, life is nasty, poor,
> | > brutish and short.  Many people do not look forward to this world.
> | 
> | Snow Crash is hardly scary. You have characterized it as a
> | story where life is nasty brutish and short but that isn't the same
> | book that I read. at all.
> 
> 	The CIA privatized & selling data to all comers?  An
> unstoppable wave of illegal immigration coming to California?  Sounds
> pretty scary to many people.  There are other readings, but that one
> is there.

Lets be concrete. You say that life in the book is nasty, brutish and
short. The book does not depict people's lives as being short, and it
especially does not appear that most people living in that world have
lives that end in violence. Furthermore, it doesn't depict their lives
as nasty -- it seems like America only more so, with ever escalating
guarantees that your pizza will be delivered on time and fairly normal
lives being lead.

As for illegal immigration, I saw no depiction of it in the book, and
so far as I can tell the legal structure depicted in the book has no
such concept as "illegal immigration".

I can't see that you read the same book.

As the cypherpunks significance of this is rapidly vanishing, I'd
suggest that this be taken to private mail.

.pm