In the real world — Planet Earth, reality — there are somewhere between six and ten billion people. Perhaps a billion of them have enough money to own a computer; those people have more money than all the others put together. Of these billion potential computer owners, maybe a quarter of them actually bother to own computers, and a quarter of those have machines that are powerful enough to handle the Street protocol. That makes for about sixty million people who can be on the Street at any given time. Add in another sixty million or so who can't really afford it but go there anyways, and at any given time the Street is occupied by twice the population of New York City.

That's why the place is so overdeveloped. Hold a Book Club Vergecast on the Street and the hundred million richest, hippest, best-connected people on earth will see it every day of their lives.

As you might have guessed, Laura and I will be discussing Snow Crash today, and we'll be joined by technology journalist Joel Johnson, formerly of Gizmodo, Kotaku, Animal New York, and Mother New York among other places. Tune in for virtual reality, Sumerian myth, swords, and skateboarding.

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