Technology

It is not a novel about good things or a good future.

If I recall correctly, Snow Crash expands upon Stephenson's short The Great Simoleon Caper in which the US Government tries and fails to delay its inevitable bankrupting as its citizens evade taxes en masse by using cryptocurrency. The full anarcho-capitalistic collapse and dissolving of centralized powers continues in the sequel Diamond Age when automated education at-scale finally becomes creative enough to invent machines capable of bypassing the last technological barriers against printing weapons of mass destruction. Usually, I'm in support of stories in which centralized power is decentralized and fewer people are in command; Stephenson's works of fiction explore this space but with armchair passivity, neither arguing for or against the politics of their fictional characters. In this sense Stephenson is conservative; post-cyberpunk instead of solarpunk. Stephenson is more likely to blow up the Moon, kill all the main characters, or fast-forward three thousand years than to try and dream up a plausible pathway for us, the readers, to live in a world not controlled by billionaires. This is why you hear so much of Stephenson from the likes of Microsoft or Facebook; socialist alternative stories such as those by Kim Stanley Robinson tend to recommend assassinating billionaires or purposefully collapsing the housing market for the sake of preventing billions of deaths from climate change, all prospects that are not profitable to the ultra wealthy such as Jeff Bezos who hired Stephenson as a consultant for their rocket company, Blue Origin.