absurdist humor. In his book The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History, Walter Benn Michaels targets Stephenson's view that "languages are codes" rather than a grouping of letters and sounds to be interpreted. Michaels contends that this basic idea of language as code is central to the construct of Snow Crash ("... a good deal of Snow Crash's plot depends upon eliding the distinction between hackers and their computers, as if—indeed, in the novel, just because—looking at code will do to the hacker what receiving it will do to the computer"), but at the same time, trivializes the role of meaning in linguistic works.The body that is infected by a virus does not become infected because it understands the virus any more than the body that does not become infected misunderstands the virus. So a world in which everything—from bitmaps to blood—can be understood as a "form of speech" is also a world in which nothing actually is understood, a world in which what a speech act does is disconnected from what it means. Rorty's Achieving Our Country uses Snow Crash as an example of modern culture that "express the loss of what he [Rorty] calls 'national hope'... the problem with Snow Crash is not that it isn't true—after all, it's a story—but that it isn't inspirational". This lack of inspiration is offset by something else Snow Crash and other works like it offer:These books produce in their readers the 'state of soul' that Rorty calls 'knowingness', which he glosses as a 'preference for knowledge over hope' (37)"; this preference for knowledge "contribute[s] to a more fundamental failure to appreciate the value of inspiration—and hence of literature—itself". Influence on the World Wide Web and computing While Habitat, the 1986 virtual environment, applied the Sanskrit term avatar to online virtual bodies before Stephenson, the success of Snow Crash popularized the term to the extent that avatar is now the accepted term for this concept in computer games and on the World Wide Web. The novel's Central Intelligence Corporation—the result of a merger between the Library of Congress and Central Intelligence Agency—operates a wiki-like private knowledge base known as the Library. However, unlike Wikimedia, contributors to the Library (stringers) are paid if their contributions are used, making the Library more of an information marketplace than a public knowledge repository. Many virtual globe programs, including NASA World Wind and