Snow Crash

“Their point is that at some level, language has to happen inside the human brain. Since all human brains are more or less the same—”
“The hardware's the same. Not the software.”

See, the world is full of things more powerful than us. But if you know how to catch a ride, you can go places

it's not really camping when you don't have a house to go back to

According to Chomskyan theory, the deep structures are innate components of the brain that enable it to carry out certain formal kinds of operations on strings of symbols. Or, as Steiner paraphrases Emmon Bach: These deep structures eventually lead to the actual patterning of the cortex with its immensely ramified yet, at the same time, ‘programmed' network of electrochemical and neurophysiological channels.”

America is wonderful because you can get anything on a drive-through basis. Oil change, liquor, banking, car wash, funerals, anything you want—drive through!

“The problem with you hackers is you never stop working.”
“That's what a hacker is,”

“You're a hacker. That means you have deep structures to worry about, too.”
“Deep structures?”
“Neurolinguistic pathways in your brain. Remember the first time you learned binary code?”
“Sure.”
“You were forming pathways in your brain. Deep structures. Your nerves grow new connections as you use them—the axons split and push their way between the dividing glial cells—your bioware self-modifies—the software becomes part of the hardware. So now you're vulnerable—all hackers are vulnerable—to a nam-shub. We have to look out for each other.”

Abkhazia had been part of the Soviet fucking Union. A new immigrant from Abkhazia trying to operate a microwave was like a deep-sea tube worm doing brain surgery

hackers are, to a greater or lesser extent, assembly-line workers

So Hiro's not actually here at all. He's in a computer-generated universe that his computer is drawing onto his goggles and pumping into his earphones. In the lingo, this imaginary place is known as the Metaverse.