) and really enjoyed it, and so read this because it is touted as his most famous novel (somewhere). At first I was put off by the amount of world-building Stephenson gets caught up in. (But I also acknowledge that the level of detail and ingenuity is partially why it is so popular--because people can take these building blocks and build on them --if only in their imagination). But by the end, I was immersed in this "future" world (it was written in 1992, and can only imagine that Stephenson was writing of a future close to our actual timeline based on context clues). I loved Hiro Protagonist, a coder that helped create the Metaverse which is a virtual reality world that closely resembles a lot of virtual worlds that now exist. The main thrust is a motley group of programmers, couriers, and tech geeks trying to stop the spread of a language virus. There is so much dense information on the history of language and the philosophy of how language shapes us/ we shape language--I loved it. Delivered in a glib conversations
Condense fact from the vapor of nuance.
This Snow Crash thing—is it a virus, a drug, or a religion?” Juanita shrugs. “What’s the difference?”
“All people have religions. It’s like we have religion receptors built into our brain cells, or something, and we’ll latch onto anything that’ll fill that niche for us.
“Computers rely on the one and the zero to represent all things. This distinction between something and nothing—this pivotal separation between being and nonbeing—is quite fundamental and underlies many Creation myths.”
nam-shub--words that lead to action
Many linguists have tried to understand Babel, the question of why human language tends to fragment, rather than converging on a common tongue.”
Babel--Bab means gate and El means God "Gate of God"
The tower is described, literally, as 'its top with the heavens.' ...actual Babylonian ziggurats have been excavated, astrological diagrams--pictures of heavens--have been found inscribed in their tops.
“He believed that Babel was an actual historical event. That it happened in a particular time and place, coinciding with the disappearance of the Sumerian language. That prior to Babel/ Infocalypse, languages tended to converge. And that afterward, languages have always had an innate tendency to diverge and become mutually incomprehensible—that this tendency is, as he put it, coiled like a serpent around the human brainstem.”
“He felt that the nam-shub of Enki was a neurolinguistic virus.”
me--rules or principles that control the operation of society, like a code of laws, but on a more fundamental level
“In many Creation myths, to name a thing is to create it.
Hammuarbi. The Code of Hammurabi is a well-preserved Babylonian law code of ancient Mesopotamia, dating back to about 1754 BC. It is one of the oldest deciphered writings of significant length in the world. The sixth Babylonian king, Hammurabi, enacted the code, and partial copies exist on a man-sized stone stele and various clay tablets. The Code consists of 282 laws, with scaled punishments, adjusting "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth" (lex talionis) as graded depending on social status, of slave versus free man.Nearly one-half of the Code deals with matters of contract, establishing, for example, the wages to be paid to an ox driver or a surgeon. Other provisions set the terms of a transaction, establishing the liability of a builder for a house that collapses, for example, or property that is damaged while left in the care of another. A third of the code addresses issues concerning household and family relationships such as inheritance, divorce, paternity, and sexual behavior. (from The Code of Hammurabi Amazon selling site)
Kramer and Maier--Myths of Enki the crafty God
from Snow Crash-- Enki brought water by masturbaating and giving his "water of the heart""Enki's most important role is as the creator and guardian of the me and gis-hur--'key words' and 'patterns' that rule the universe.
In one myth, the goddess Inanna goes to Eridu and tricks Enki into giving her 94 me and brings them back to her hometown...they are like algorithms for carrying out certain activities essential to society. Some of them have to do with the workings of priesthood and kingship. Some explain how to carry out religious ceremonies. Many of them are about the arts and crafts: music, carpentry, smithing, tanning, building, farming, even such simple tasks as lighting fires."
"The operating system of society"
To these people water equals semen (?). Enki's water--his semen, his data, his me--flow throughout the country of Sumer and cause it to flourish
They took the clay directly from the riverbeds
So Enki even provided them with their medium for conveying information--clay. They wrote on wet clay and then they dried it out--
The Kabbalists--Jewish mystics of Spain and Palestine--believed that supernormal insight and power could be derived from properly combining the letters of the Divine Name
George Steiner: relativists tend to believe that language is not the vehicle of thought but its determining medium.
Hence, the study of the evolution of language is the study of the evolution of the human mind itself.”
Universalists believe that if you can analyze languages enough, you can find that all of them have cetain traits in common.
“The universalists think that we are determined by the prepatterned structure of our brains—the pathways in the cortex. The relativists don’t believe that we have any limits.”
So Lagos was trying to say that the newborn human brain has no structure—as the relativists would have it—and that as the child learns a language, the developing brain structures itself accordingly, the language gets ‘blown into’ the hardware and becomes a permanent part of the brain’s deep structure—as the universalists would have it.”
Enki somehow understood the connection between language and the brain, knew how to manipulate it...That gave him the power to create nam-shubs. And nam-shubs had the power to alter the functioning of the brain and the body.
The tongue of Eden was like a flawless glass; a light of total understanding streamed through it. Thus Babel was a second Fall.’
Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout
