The business is a simple one. Hiro gets information. It may be gossip, videotape, audiotape, a fragment of a computer disk, a xerox of a document. It can even be a joke based on the latest highly publicized disaster.
He uploads it to the CIC database - The Library, formerly the Library of Congress, but no one calls it that anymore. Most people are not entirely clear on what the word "congress" means. And even the word "library" is getting hazy. It used to be a place full of books, mostly old ones. Then they began to include videotapes, records and magazines. Then all the information got converted into machine-readable forms, which is to say, ones and zeros. And as the number of media grew, the material became more up to date, and the methods for searching the Library became more and more sophisticated, it approached the point where there was no substantive difference between the Library of Congress and the Central Intelligence Agency. Fortuitously, this happened just as the government was falling apart anyway, So they merged and kicked out a big fat stock offering.
Millions of othe CIC stringers are uploading millions of other fragments at the same time. CIC's clients, mostly large corporations and Sovereigns, rifle through the Library looking for useful information, and if they find a use for something that Hiro put into it. Hiro gets paid.
From Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson, 1992
Ok, so I am reading a book from 1992, to get a better grasp of Web 2.0. Ok, so it's a science fiction written more than 15 years ago, about some future world....or in the case of Snow Crash, some future Meta-verse.
