[agar]

As usual, Stephenson is at his best when he's taking current trends and extrapolating them to almost absurd extremes...until about a decade passes and you realize they weren't that extreme after all.

I loved that he extended the concept of identity as an individualized pattern of events and activities to the real world: the innovation of face masks with seemingly random but unique patterns to foil facial recognition systems but still create a unique identity.

Like you say, the story itself had horrible flaws (I'm still not sure if I liked it in its totality, and I'm a Stephenson fan since reading Snow Crash on release in '92), but still had fascinating and thought provoking content.