Nearing the final crashes

Less than one hundred pages remain for myself and the ending of Snow Crash. The transition from the Librarian to the Raft shenanigans was jerky and not entirely clear to me. In a sense, the style of the novel echoes the technologies used within the story: rapid, nonlinear, superficial, changeable.

It's indeed a scary world when the reappearance of the Mafia gives the reader (or at least this one) a sense of relief.

"You know that chick Y.T.? The one you have been using to spy on us?"
"Yeah." No point in denying it.
"Well, we have been using her to spy on you."
"Why? Why the hell do you care about me?" (334)

Hiro isn't at all phased that Y.T. is, in fact, a "double agent." Alliances seem superficial at best, and friendship and trust have fallen by the wayside. If someone gets shot or horribly mutilated, as seen later when the Mafia group approaches the Raft, the others react indifferently. Life moves too quickly for mourning. As networked as we may be to each other -- more intensely than ever before, in fact -- we still seek our own survival above the needs of others.

This section, however, was great:
"Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad." (271)

Note that it's not "China Burbclave" or "Neocolombia" or anything along those lines. It's the world as we know it. It's why some people gravitate towards video games and any sort of virtual reality/fantasy that they can participate in -- to be the hero, the villain, the most famed or feared person in a "biomass" of anonymous faces.