Snow Crash is a book about a future in which governments are ineffective. Companies run things, and have complete local control. The world has gone to hell, and as a result, life is nasty, poor, brutish and short. Many people do not look forward to this world. Thats an understandable reaction; when I first heard about anonymous assasination markets, I thought it was pretty bizzare as a world to look forward to.
I agree with you that it's a pretty bizzare world to look forward to, but how likely is it? It's always seemed to me that both sides of the crypto debate have been overselling the changes crypto is going to bring. Crypto won't make surveillance impossible, it will make it expensive. That's a big difference. My computer is loaded up with crypto. I use pgp, ssh, sfs, cfs, etc., every day. I've picked strong passphrases, and I edit sensitive files on a ram disk. But getting my data would be child's play for the nsa if they were interested enough in me to come into my apartment and make an active attack. Military security depends as much upon military discipline and procedure as it does on strong crypto tools. When crypted email becomes the norm, remember that 95% of the keys in the world will be sitting on hard drives in the clear or protected by passphrases like "bob1". Software that forces people to pick strong passphrases won't be popular in the marketplace. I know: I run an ISP, and everytime I tell someone how to pick a password, they always come back with "bob1". There's a mindset out there that says, "the only way to fight crime is to do massive surveillance." I don't buy it. Surveillence technology is fairly new, and there were law abiding societies before it was deployed. It's like people who feel that the only way to stop violence in cities is to take away guns. If that's true, how come there are so few murders in Western Nebraska (I have family there), where almost everyone is armed? The truth is the police do surveillence easily and cheaply now, and it's not working. Things are getting worse in many places, not better. Beat cops who talk to people and who know the neighborhood are more effective than spooks in vans or centralized monitoring facilities with sophisticated electronics. If we don't want crime, we're going to have to make sure people have enough skills to develop other economic opportunities. The answer is jobs, not a telescreen in every home. It is true that law enforcement has been building up a giant surveillance apparatus over the past couple of decades, and that crypto is going to kill it. But it's also true that the buildup in surveillence has coincided with a decrease in the effectiveness of police forces in general. Surveillance is good for massive beauracracies with bloated budgets who work behind closed doors and who aren't held accountable for their failures. It's not good for fighting neighborhood crime. I reject the opposition's premise: surveillance is not necessary to keep the four horsemen at bay. How can they have the chutzpah to demand that I sacrifice my civil liberties in the name of the drug war, when everyone in Chicago knows that dealers are allowed to sell without harassment on literally thousands of street corners in this city? They don't need clipper to stop the crack trade, they need to send cops out to arrest the people who are standing out in broad daylight selling and buying. It doesn't take a gps system to track them down.