The Mafia and Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash

Neal Stephenson envisions a world in his novel Snow Crash that is essentially entirely franchised by various corporations and criminal groups, which he likens to viruses. With the absence of laws, organized crime such as the mafia has become merely another chain in the franchise. Stephenson's Mafia is no longer immersed in secretive operations, and they have become a prominent player in both the business and technological industries. Yet, like a virus, the Mafia has simply adapted its information to fit more nicely into destroying the infrastructure of America. It almost parallels exactly the real world, as the transported mafia is emerging as an irremovable virus from American society. Despite a significant crippling of its power in the past two decades, the mafia is an all pervasive entity. Beyond traditional forms of criminal trade, the mafia has a hand in all sorts of businesses. The largest threat to America is the creation of intricate and essentially unstoppable crime syndicates that are deeply rooted into the society.

Stephenson creates an alternate reality, the metaverse, in which his protagonist, Hiro, spends the majority of his time. In the real world, Hiro delivers pizzas, but in the metaverse, he is a part of its early development and the last of the freelance hackers. When his friend and former employer, Da5id is offered a mysterious new drug called snow crash, they expect nothing to come of it, as they are in the metaverse. Yet, after the snow crash shows Da5id a special bitmap pattern in the form of snow on a scroll in the metaverse, it leaves him only a shadow of his former self outside of the metaverse. Hiro's search for truth concerning snow crash eventually leads him to L. Bob Rife, an extremely powerful man that controls "Reverend Wayne's Pearly Gates," a franchised group of churches. It is one of the main sources of religion for people, and he uses it to distribute snow crash, creating an army of subordinates. Based on theories of Lagos on ancient Sumerian myths and the tower of Babel, Rife's plan is to revert people to a single language with the help of this new drug.

Hiro works with a girl named Y.T., who has been taken in by the mafia, and the mafia in Snow Crash emerges on the side of the protagonists against L. Bob Rife, confusing the traditional roles of good and evil. A virus can adapt to change though, and that is precisely what the mafia in the novel does. Good and evil does not necessarily exist in the strictest sense of black and white, and the mafia falls into the grey area in the absence of laws to declare that their actions are wrong. It emerge as protagonists in the novel because it is self serving, but it does not change the fact that like the virus it is, it will continue to work at the collapse of America. In the real world, the mafia in America is working to do precisely the same thing, becoming rapidly more embedded in several aspects of American politics and business.

In the past two decades, the government has been successful in destroying the old world influence in America, and the amount of mob warfare has decreased significantly. However, the Mafia has merely been suppressed from its original form, and it is far from being finished. Rather, it is moving beyond drug trafficking, extortion, and the more traditional forms of vice. It is embedding itself into organized labor, and nearly every other facet of legitimate business. They own car dealerships, restaurants, cleaning services, construction companies, waste-handling businesses, and most any other sort of business possible. There are even speculations that the mafia has a hold on Wallstreet and several other major financial centers across America. Recently, it has tentatively reached out towards politics, as the notorious Colombo family is rumored to have donated towards the Bush-Cheney campaign. It has rapidly made itself a part of American culture, and its impact is evident on even other crime organizations.

The mafia is renown for its strict and amazingly networked organization, and it is this precise information that has officials scared. Crime syndicates such as the Russian "Mafyia" Colombian drug cartels, Japanese yakuza, Chinese Triads, and inner-city street gangs, are beginning to organize in a way that is based upon Mafia principles. Crime is taking a sudden turn in America, where it, like most everything else, has been traditionally individualistic. With the influence of the mafia, organized crime is growing at an alarming speed, and suddenly, criminals are no longer people that worked towards their own selfish goals. As the mafia virus spreads, it becomes more difficult to remove it from American society, and the sophistication of crime flourishes.

Stephenson predicted that the mafia's hold on America would have grown to the point of it becoming a part of its franchise in the future. It seems ludicrous when the mafia owns the pizza that Hiro delivers for a living in the real world, yet, how it is not far from the truth. The only difference is that the mafia in Snow Crash can now advertise its existence, now that there are no longer laws that ban it. Organized crime is a virus that is destroying American society, and it is so deeply embedded into it by now, that it is nearly impossible to remove. The mafia is one of the best viruses ever created, and its adaptations are fluid and quick, making it basically irremovable. If it continues are this rate, petty crime will cease to exist as anything other than a nuisance, instead, America will become a host for an entirely new era of crime syndicates.