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In Snow Crash, the behemoth of a man, Raven was seen trying to sell the Snow Crash "drug" to Hiro just outside the Black Sun Club in the metaverse.

Why would he be doing this if

he had plans of detonating a bomb in the middle of a concert for hackers and thereby infecting every hacker watching with the Snow Crash drug/virus?

If he had that plan all along, what would the point be of giving it away one at a time?

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    Boredom? Wanted a test bed for it? Something to do to pass the time?
    – Jeff
    Oct 28, 2011 at 15:07

3 Answers 3

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Raven wasn't randomly peddling drugs on the street. He was specifically targeting high profile hackers. It seems safe to assume that he was distributing it to people who would be both high profile, and extremely vulnerable to it, as a way to test it prior to the planned major release.

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    Reminds me of Neo and his customer... Mar 10, 2012 at 2:10
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He was a smart, careful man. I am guessing he knew that if he could take out the top level hackers the plan had a much better chance of success.

You have to admit, if he had managed to infect Hiro his plan probably would have worked!

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The Snow Crash bomb was not part of Rife's original plan; the original plan was to cow the world's hackers with the threat of Snow Crash.

But he can threaten us with the blunt instrument of Snow Crash. That, I think, is what happened to Da5id. It may have been an experiment, just to see if Snow Crash worked on a real hacker, and it may have been a warning shot intended to demonstrate Rife's power to the hacker community.

In order for Raven's use of Snow Crash at that point to be a successful warning shot, he needs to use it on a well-known hacker. He first tried to tempt Hiro (calling him by name, suggesting that Raven had been briefed on who to try to use Snow Crash on), and when Hiro declined, Raven tried Da5id next.

After Rife's plan has failed, due to Juanita's release of the nam-shub, all Rife and Raven have left is revenge on the hackers (Juanita's community) by using the Snow Crash bomb.

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