L Bob Rife

From the Quicksilver Metaweb.

Stephensonia

*"'so why would L Bob Rife be interested in finding signals from alien civilizations?' The reporter asks condescendingly.

L Bob Rife replies in a good old boy tone intended to irk the overly educated, 'Well, I figger, I got this planet just about all wrapped up, eh?'"*

Community Entry: L Bob Rife

L Bob Rife is the King of All Media in the future world of Snow Crash. Starting off as a college football star, then a sportscaster, he quickly parlayed the inheritance of a cable television station into a nationwide cable conglomerate, then an international telecommunications monopoly of cable, fiber, satellite, or any other means of delivering information to the masses, like phytoplankton to the krill of the ocean, so the krill can in turn be consumed by the whale that is the US economy, which is at the same time the biggest basketcase and the most vibrant on the planet.

To feed this whale, L Bob Rife purchases a yacht from the bankrupt "government" of the United States of America, a formerly territorially contiguous (mostly) nation-state, superpower, and global trade empire squandered on the decadent consumption of its people and the manipulations of the banking cartels that fed that consumption with never-ending credit and debt. Rife uses his yacht, formerly known as the U.S.S Enterprise, to bring immigrants by The Raft-load to the western shores to become the sort of Americans the world has seen on television for decades.

Along the way, he financed the development of Reverend Wayne's Pearly Gates, an FOQNE evolved out of a minor Texas televangelist. The dogma of this church, pentacostal protestantism, is the vehicle by which L Bob is able to infect a large chunk of the world with the Asherah virus to make them into his mind-slaves.

Ted Turner

The closest parallel to L Bob Rife in the real world is the real king of all media, Ted Turner. A college football star and captain of a winning Americas Cup yacht, Turner inherited a television station and a cable company from his father, which he quickly turned into "The Superstation", and with the purchase of rights to movie studios archive libraries, started beaming b&w and colorized movies over the airwaves, while simultaneously providing 24-7 news content on the Cable News Network.

CNN was considered a bit schlocky in the mainstream media until its breakthrough event, of covering the Gulf War on the ground, from both Baghdad, where Peter Arnett provided night vision coverage of the anti-aircraft fire on the first night of bombardment as cruise missiles rained down on Hussein's capital city, and in the bases and camps of the Coalition Forces, the hunky coverage by Wolf Blitzer and news vixen Christianne Ammanpour, quickly shot CNN to the top of the Neilsen ratings for the entirety of the war.

Following this ratings success, Turner Broadcasting became a media powerhouse, eventually merging with Time-Warner-AOL to become the largest media conglomerate on the planet.

L Ron Hubbard

It is also said that Neal Stephenson based this character at least partly on L Ron Hubbard, founder of the Church of Scientology, "creator" of the pseudoscience of Dianetics, and author of many low-grade science fiction novels (several after his death), including "Battlefield Earth", which was made by Scientologist/Actor Tom Cruise into the box office bomb of the same name, and is likely Hubbards most widely read novel. However, accurate readership figures are hard to come by due to a practice by the CoS of purchasing large numbers of Hubbards novels to put them and keep them on best seller lists.

Parallels to Rife are as follows: * Given the long history of brainwashing (a la YT's kidnapping, drugging, and transport to The Raft), * extremely agressive tactics against critics on and off the internet (like how Rife uses the Asherah virus to attack hackers via static patterns), and * widespread infiltration of Hollywood and the wider media industry by CoS adherents, as well as * Hubbards retirement age project of creating the "Sea Org" of yacht-borne followers and church leaders in international waters (a real world analog of The Raft), * Rife's attraction to alien radio signals parallels the CoS's dogma that the alien evil lord Xenu exterminated an alien race and transported the souls of his victims to Earth where they trouble the human species as "engrams" which they must be "cleared" of to become truly high functioning human beings. These engrams sound suspiciously like the rational language structures and informational virus immunities that humans evolved since the time of Babylon, which the Ashera virus is supposed to be able to penetrate in order to zombify its victims. * The radio antennae ebedded minions of Rife resemble agents of the CoS who wear radio earbuds a la the Secret Service and are responsible for keeping church members in line as well as taking offensive action against critics of the Church.

It is likely that L Bob Rife is a combination of Hubbard and Turner, however neither individual has ever purchased an aircraft carrier.