I liked Snow Crash a lot and there's a pretty good chance that I’ll pick up a copy for myself, but something that really bothered me is that the United States split apart. At this point I really think that is pretty much an impossibility.
Think about the logistics of Brexit. Currently the time when Britain is planning to leave the EU is 2019 over 3 years after the vote happened and they are using an actually established channel inside the EU, and organization which they have been a part of for only 43 years. In order for the US to break apart in the way Snow Crash predicts it will the it would be breaking apart a 240 year old union without any established channel. So breaking apart the US by official channels is going to be practically impossible.
Another problem with the breakdown of the United States is how it starts. If any state were to try and leave that state would be forcefully brought back. So really in order for full states to leave there would have to be a strange process where two equally powerful parts of the nation split apart and then each of them split apart at the same time so that no one can overpower anyone else and so on until you break the US apart into many small equal communities, which again is going to be practically impossible, so the US can't really split apart into chunks like that.
So our only option left becomes to have enough individual anarchists that they can overthrow the government, and that again is pretty much impossible because most people seem to recognize that even a government they don't like is better than nothing. Nothing is definitely better, if you’re looking for a place to set your story featuring a pizza delivering, katana wielding, hacker.
It's hard not to think about this lately, with all the Brexit and Calexit stuff, right?
ReplyDeleteI wonder--maybe the government itself collapsed? Maybe it was privatized to the extent that there was no individual government--just a lot of pay-as-you-go corporations providing services?