Questions about The Matrix:

1) How is artificial intelligence represented in The Matrix?

2) How is technology represented? Are there good technologies and bad technologies in The Matrix?

3) How does The Matrix subvert our perception of what is real? Is it effective in making us more skeptical of what we take to be real in our everyday lives?

4) How does the Matrix compare to the Metaverse? How are the portrayals of virtual reality in The Matrix and Snow Crash similar? How are they different?

5) Should we locate The Matrix within the cyberpunk genre? Why or why not?

6) How do representations of gender and race intersect with representations of technology in The Matrix?

7) How is Christian symbolism utilized in The Matrix? How does the use of religious symbols and images in The Matrix compare to that in Snow Crash?

8) In its representation of the dehumanizing effects of technology, what does The Matrix have in common with Brave New World? How are they different?

Questions about Snow Crash:

1) Who is L. Bob Rife? Is Rife a figure for a really existing media mogul in the late twentieth century?

2) What is the significance of religion in Snow Crash? What is the place of fundamentalist Christianity? Is all religion inherently problematic in the novel? How does religious devotion promote susceptibility to the Snow Crash virus?

3) What is the significance of the Raft?

4) Last time I gave you a definition of cybernetics, in which I characterized it as a field "concerned with the way systems work, the way they govern themselves, the way they process information." The system in question could be a machine, or it could be a human body. To what extent is Stephenson in dialogue with the field of cybernetics?

5) Consider Stephenson's portrayal of the federal workplace where Y.T.'s mother is employed. Is Stephenson in dialogue with Garson's critique of workplace automation and surveillance?

6) How is power distributed in Snow Crash?

7) Is the representation of technology in Snow Crash more or less pessimistic than the representation of technology in The Matrix? Is there anything that makes either Snow Crash or The Matrix more plausible than the other?

8) Stephenson privilege human consciousness over machine consciousness?

9) Is it significant that the words "Metaverse" and "metavirus" look and sound so much alike? How might we interpret this similarity?

PASSAGES

So Y.T.'s mom has clacked up the stairs in her black pumps and gone into her office, actually a large room with computer workstations placed across it in a grid. Used to be divided up by partitions, but the EBGOC boys didn't like it, said what would happen if there had to be an evacuation? All those partitions would impede the free flow of unhinged panic. So no more partitions. Just work-stations and chairs. Not even any desktops. Desktops encourage the use of paper, which is archaic and reflects inadequate team spirit. What is so special about your work that you have to write it down on a piece of paper that only you get to see? That you have to lock it away inside a desk? When you're working for the Feds, everything you do is the property of the United States of America. You do your work on the computer. The computer keeps a copy of everything, so that if you get sick or something, it's all there where your co-workers and supervisors can get access to it. If you want to write little notes or make phone doodles, you're perfectly free to do that at home, in your spare time. (281)

Hiro does not know what he is doing, what he is planning for. . . .

He knows one thing: The Metaverse has now become a place where you can get killed. Or at least have your brain reamed out to the point where you might as well be dead. This is a radical change in the nature of the place. Guns have come to Paradise.

It serves them right, he realizes now. They made the place too vulnerable. . . . (351)

Now that he's gotten over his initial nausea, he's finding this easier to look at. It helps to know that the guy is out of his misery. More than half of his brain is gone. He's still talking -- his voice sounds whistly and gaseous, like a pipe organ gone bad, because of the changes in his skull -- but it's just a brainstem function, just a twitch in the vocal cords.

The thing sticking up out of his head is a whip antenna about a foot long. It is encased in black rubber, like the antennas on cop walkie-talkies, and it is strapped onto his head, above the left ear. This is one of the antenna-heads that Eliot warned them about.

Hiro grabs the antenna and pulls . . .

It doesn't come off . . . And that's how Hiro figures out that this isn't a headset at all. The antenna has been permanently grafted onto the base of the man's skull. (385)

". . . He [Enki] realized that in order for the human race to advance, they had to be delivered from the grip of this viral civilization.

"So he created the nam-shub of Enki, a countervirus that spread along the same routes as the me and the metavirus. It went into the deep structures of the brain and reprogrammed them. Henceforth, no one could understand the Sumerian language, or any other deep structure-based language. Cut off from our common deep structures, we began to develop new languages that had nothing in common with each other. The me no longer worked and it was not possible to write new me. Further transmission of the metavirus was blocked."

"Why didn't everyone starve for lack of bread, having lost the bread-making me?" Uncle Enzo says.

"Some probably did. Everyone else had to use their higher brains and figure it out. So you might say that the nam-shub of Enki was the beginnings of human consciousness. . . . (398)

". . . But one of the functions of his Third World missionaries was to go out into the hinterlands and vaccinate people -- and there was more than just vaccine in those needles.

"Here in the First World, everyone has already been vaccinated, and we don't let religious fanatics come up and poke needles into us. But we do take a lot of drugs. So, for us, he devised a means for extracting the virus from human blood serum and packaged it as a drug known as Snow Crash.

"In the meantime, he got the Raft going as a way of transporting hundreds of thousands of his cultists from the wretched parts of Asia into the United States . . .

"He can control these people by grafting radio receivers into their skulls, broadcasting instructions -- me -- directly into their brainstems. If one person in a hundred has a receiver, he can act as the local en and distribute the me of L. Bob Rife to all the others . . .

"He also has a digital metavirus, in binary code, that can infect computers, or hackers, via the optic nerve." (404-405)

From Hiro's front yard to L. Bob Rife's black cube . . . is halfway around the Metaverse, a distance of 32,768 kilometers. The only hard part, really, is getting out of downtown. He can ride his bike straight through the avatars as usual, but the Street is also cluttered with vehicles, animercials, commercial displays, public plazas, and other bits of solid-looking software that get in his way. (433)

His blade doesn't have the power to cut a hole in the wall--this would mean permanently changing the shape of someone else's building--but it does have the power to penetrate things. Avatars do not have that power. That is the whole purpose of a wall in the Metaverse; it is a structure that does not allow avatars to penetrate it. But like anything else in the Metaverse, this rule is nothing but a protocol, a convention that different computers agree to follow. In theory, it cannot be ignored. But in practice, it depends upon the ability of different computers to swap information very precisely, at high speed, and at just the right times. And when you are connected to the system over a satellite uplink, as Hiro is, out here on the Raft, there is a delay as the signals bounce up to the satellite and back down. That delay can be taken advantage of, if you move quickly and don't look back. Hiro passes right through the wall on the tail end of his all-penetrating katana. (435)

Fido doesn't like guns very much. A stranger with a gun shot him once and made him hurt. Then the nice girl came and helped him.

These are extremely bad strangers. Any nice doggie in his right mind would want to hurt them and make them go away. As Fido listens to the bark, he sees what they look like and hears the way they sound. If any of these bad strangers ever come into his yard, he will be extremely upset. (443)