In an interview on Virtual Living

Tell me about Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson.

This is a fascinating book, published in 1996, and it’s a cyberpunk vision of a technological future, in the vein of William Gibson. The author creates an extraordinary vision of an all-encompassing virtual environment in which we will interact though avatars, but at the same time he describes the back doors, and the fact that there is a control hierarchy: there is an underworld and an overworld, as it were, of the social engineering that goes into the development of these spaces. Ultimately, the people who create them are the gods of these worlds, because they have the technological know-how and prowess, and they exploit the system for their own gain.

While it’s a work of fiction, again I think it’s relevant when you look at things like Google and Facebook, Amazon and Twitter and all of the contemporary social environments. There’s a reason why Rupert Murdoch spent such a phenomenal amount of money to buy myspace, and it’s because he then had ownership of the infrastructure, which gave him the power and the control over the hundreds of thousands of millions of people that were using his technology. That’s why I like Snow Crash so much: because it exposed that phenomenon of what they were thinking and what they do, and the pure data that they have access to. Perhaps not in an explicit way, but certainly that’s how I read it.

It’s up to the gods of these technologies whether and when to inform you what they will do with that data.

Exactly. Yet it’s so ironic, because the entire dotcom industry preaches transparency. That, in and of itself, has created a movement throughout the whole business sector where people are now demanding transparency. And yet it seems that the transparency that has changed and revolutionised the workplace and the culpability of companies is not necessarily what the people who ushered it in are themselves practising. They believe they have the right solution – we can clean it up later, but for the moment it’s the best solution. Interesting concept, but when you’re dealing with so much data – especially in the case of Google – and so much private information, it can truly become dangerous.