Posting on Behalf of Andrew

A speech with magical force. Nowadays, people don’t believe in these kinds of things. Except in the Metaverse, that is, where magic is possible. The Metaverse is a fictional structure made out of code. And code is just a form of speech – the form that computers understand. The Metaverse in its entirety could be considered a single vast nam-shub, enacting itself on L. Bob Rife’s fiber-optic network.” (Ch. 27)

 

This quote echoes Galloway’s statement that “code is the only language that is executable” (165). Executable speech – speech that does what it says – can be likened to incantations, which form a “meta-layer” (a Metaverse) around the purely written language. Castells’ concept of “real virtuality” similarly emphasizes code’s uniqueness in the scheme of human communication systems. People’s “symbolic existence” – what Peirce would call the function of written language – is not communicated as experience but becomes the experience itself (373). We may also recall Guillory’s definition of code (writ large) as the “cheat of words,” where only the medium is visible (339) – in other words, where the message disappears into the medium, and the medium becomes the only thing experienced.

But the novel, in comparing Metaverse code to Sumerian “nam-shub,” seems to emphasize the continuity between code and “real” historical languages over their difference. Like the “Infocalypse” of Babel, the Metaverse falls prey to a “neurolinguistic” virus that crashes the central nervous systems of users. Through the “real virtuality” of code, the virus affects both the computer and the human body (as seen with Da5id), both of which are implicated in a ‘magical’ world where written code (i.e. on the Brandy’s scroll) is executed as real speech acts. The speech of code takes on the physical aspect of contact and contagion.

Importantly, the novel does not portray the pre-infected Metaverse as a utopia where code unifies all agents with a common comprehensible tongue. The Metaverse operates on a fiber-optic network run by L. Bob Rife, who is interested primarily in privatizing and monopolizing telecommunication information flows. Rife is a religious charlatan, upholding the “miracle of [common] tongues” in order to sanitize his exploitation of cheap labor. Religion seems to occupy a place of ambivalence in the novel: it can be both a “virus” of incomprehensibility (the Pentecost in Acts) and a cleansing force (the medically-minded theodicy of the Essenes). Accounting for Galloway’s portrait of the hacker as anti-commercial, pro-protocalist “freedom fighter,” it is unclear to me at this point who the “enemy” is, and whether that enemy is the Snow Crash virus itself (decentralized and distributed) or a centralized entity that controls it.