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William Pietri @williampietri.sfba.social.ap.brid.gy · 24/04/2026

Came across this image that I made years ago, long before Facebook rebranded as Meta to pursue the notion of a metaverse that this book invented. Here life imitated art: despite Stephenson making a big deal about how faces mattered even though male techies […] [Original post on sfba.social]

Photo of page from Snow Crash, with the bit about sexism highlighted.

It wasn't until a number of years later, when they both wound up working at Black Sun Systems, Inc., that he put the other half of the equation together. At the
time both of them were working on avatars. He was working on bodies, she was working on faces. She was the face department, because nobody thought that faces were all that important—they were just flesh-toned busts on top of the avatars. She was just in the process of proving them all desperately wrong. But at this phase, the all-male society of bitheads that made up the power structure of
Black Sun Systems said that the face problem was trivial. It was, of course, nothing more than sexism, the especially virulent type espoused by male techies who sincerely believe they are too smart to be sexists.

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