"I wear the beard, it does not wear me."
The Diamond Age is a, somewhat indirect, sequel to Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel, Snow Crash, which explored a world where nation-states had broken down and been replaced by distributed republics called “Franchise Oriented Quasi-National Entities” (FOQNEs)—autonomous enclaves run as franchises of some corporation, party, or ideal, e.g. “Narcolombia” (the Medellin cartel), “CosaNostra Pizza” (the mafia), and so on. The plot concerned a memetic virus modelled on the Sumerian concept of me—a sort of programming language for human brains.
