Snow Crash predicts nothing about technology that matters.

It predicts everything about human laziness — the metaverse Stephenson imagined, the Street, isn't a place where the rules of the physical world dissolve, but rather where they calcify.

Plot avatars directly correspond to real-world wealth, so your presence is literally proportional to your CPU and bandwidth. A poor man's avatar pixelates and stutters; a rich man's gleams in perfect resolution.

The Street doesn't liberate — it renders inequality as code, which means it feels natural, inevitable, technical rather than chosen. The actual insight is not that we'd build virtual worlds, but that we'd architect them to make old dominations feel like physics. Hiro Protagonist—note the name, dripping with Stephenson's contempt for his own protagonist—accepts this without serious resistance, not fighting the hierarchy but navigating it, hustling within it, the exact posture the system demands.

The metaverse's most radical feature, in Stephenson's hands, is that the Metaverse Corporation owns the Street outright — not regulates it but owns it — with no pretense of democracy, no governing structure, no appeal, just property law projected into digital space. Stephenson grasped what later technologists would spend billions pretending to discover: making something virtual doesn't make it egalitarian, it makes exploitation easier to hide because now it's styled as a choice of avatar skin.