Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

• Waleed Kareem Abbas Al. Hafadhi ¹
• Ali Salami ²

¹ Department of English, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, University of Tehran

² Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, University of Tehran, Iran

Abstract

This essay contends that Neal Stephenson’s *Snow Crash* is best read not as a parodic dystopia of “virtual reality,” but as a theory of digital urbanism, where space is administered by protocols and the self is manufactured as an interface. The “digital city” is treated here as an urban form, not as a decorative metaphor for online life. What matters, accordingly, is governance: how movement is routed, how passage is credentialed, how presence is made legible. The novel’s franchulated sovereignties, burbclave boundaries, logistical corridors, and regulated thresholds—visas, barcodes, access gates—do not merely furnish atmosphere; they reorganize mobility into a regime of permissions. Fragmentation, then, is not a free-floating postmodern condition. It is built. Identities become modular, role-bound, and readable only through the systems that sort, index, and route them. The Metaverse’s Street functions as a second, continuous skin of the same city: it translates privatized property relations into frontage, visibility, and bandwidth, while intensifying surveillance and status into spatialized metrics. The book’s comedic exaggeration is not an evasion of seriousness but a way of making governing mechanics newly visible. Satire becomes diagnostic, rendering infrastructural power legible without allowing realist familiarity to normalize it. The novel’s analytic value lies less in predictive accuracy than in its structural continuity with platform governance.

Keywords

• digital city
• platform urbanism
• metaverse
• protocol governance
• networked subjectivity
• satire
• fragmentation

Main Subjects

• Research in Contemporary World Literature