Stephenson:Neal:Snow Crash:03:CosaNostra Pizza University(Mike Lorrey)
From the Quicksilver Metaweb.
The Snow Crash page on the Mafia
Stephensonia
"When you're with us, you're family...a really twisted dysfunctional family..." Didn't happen anymore. Pizza delivery is a major industry. A managed industry. People went to CosaNostra Pizza University four years just to learn it. Came in its doors unable to write an English sentence, from Abkhazia, Rwanda, Guanajuato, South Jersey, and came out knowing more about pizza than a Bedouin knows about sand. And they had studied this problem. Graphed the frequency of doorway delivery-time disputes. Wired the early Deliverators to record, then analyze, the debating tactics, the voice-stress histograms, the distinctive grammatical structures employed by white middle-class Type A Burbclave occupants who against all logic had decided that this was the place to take their personal Custerian stand against all that was stale and deadening in their lives: they were going to lie, or delude themselves, about the time of their phone call and get themselves a free pizza; no, they deserved a free pizza along with their life, liberty, and pursuit of whatever, it was fucking inalienable. Sent psychologists out to these people's houses, gave them a free TV set to submit to an anonymous interview, hooked them to polygraphs, studied their brainwaves as they showed them choppy, inexplicable movies of porn queens and late-night car crashes and Sammy Davis, Jr., put them in sweet-smelling, mauve-walled rooms and asked them questions about Ethics so perplexing that even a Jesuit couldn't respond without committing a venial sin. The analysts at CosaNostra Pizza University concluded that it was just human nature and you couldn't fix it, and so they went for a quick cheap technical fix: smart boxes. The pizza box is a plastic carapace now, corrugated for stiffness, a little LED readout glowing on the side, telling the Deliverator how many trade imbalance-producing minutes have ticked away since the fateful phone call. There are chips and stuff in there. The pizzas rest, a short stack of them, in slots behind the Deliverator's head. Each pizza glides into a slot like a circuit board into a computer, clicks into place as the smart box interfaces with the onboard system of the Deliverator's car. The address of the caller has already been inferred from his phone number and poured into the smart box's builtin RAM. From there it is communicated to the car, which computes and projects the optimal route on a heads-up display, a glowing colored map traced out against the windshield so that the Deliverator does not even have to glance down. If the thirty-minute deadline expires, news of the disaster is flashed to CosaNostra Pizza Headquarters and relayed from there to Uncle Enzo himself - the Sicilian Colonel Sanders, the Andy Griffith of Bensonhurst, the straight razor-swinging figment of many a Deliverator's nightmares, the Capo and prime figurehead of CosaNostra Pizza, Incorporated - who will be on the phone to the customer within five minutes, apologizing profusely. The next day, Uncle Enzo will land on the customer's yard in a jet helicopter and apologize some more and give him a free trip to Italy - all he has to do is sign a bunch of releases that make him a public figure and spokesperson for CosaNostra Pizza and basically end his private life as he knows it. He will come away from the whole thing feeling that, somehow, he owes the Mafia a favor. The Deliverator does not know for sure what happens to the driver in such cases, but he has heard some rumors. Most pizza deliveries happen in the evening hours, which Uncle Enzo considers to be his private time. And how would you feel if you had to interrupt dinner with your family in order to call some obstreperous dork in a Burbclave and grovel for a late fucking pizza? Uncle Enzo has not put in fifty years serving his family and his country so that, at the age when most are playing golf and bobbling their granddaughters, he can get out of the bathtub dripping wet and lie down and kiss the feet of some sixteen-year-old skate punk whose pepperoni was thirty-one minutes in coming. Oh, God. It makes the Deliverator breathe a little shallower just to think of the idea.
Wikipedia: Mafia
The Mafia, also referred to as La Cosa Nostra (Italian, variously translated as This Thing Of Ours or Our Thing), is the collective name of various secret organizations in Italy, Sicily, Corsica and the United States. The Mafia was originally the name of a loose confederation of people in Sicily, who, in the middle ages, joined for the purposes of protection from the Turks and Normans currently occupying the area. Soon the group turned to vigilante law enforcement. This confederation later engaged in organized crime. There also is a theory that the word "mafia" came from an Arabic word mah?ya or similar meaning "flashy", i.e. "the swank set" or similar; it was observed that in Sicily, for example, an unusually ornate and demonstrative cockerel can be described by the adjective "mafioso". A member of the Mafia is a "mafioso", or a "man of honor". The Mafia spread to the United States through immigration by the 20th century. Mafia power peaked in the United States in the mid-20th century, until a series of FBI investigations in the 1970s and 1980s somewhat curtailed the Mafia's influence. Despite the decline, the Mafia and its reputation have become entrenched in American popular culture, portrayed in movies, TV shows, and even product commercials. Today the Italian-American Mafia remains the most powerful criminal organization operating in the USA and uses this status to maintain control over the majority of both Chicago's and New York City's criminal enterprises. The term "mafia" has now been extended to refer to any large group of people engaged in organized crime (such as the Russian Mafia, Japanese Yakuza, and Triads), or in suspicious activity (such as the Trenchcoat Mafia from the Columbine High School massacre). When unqualified, however, "Mafia" still usually refers to the original Sicilian/American organizations. (complete in link)
"Our Thing"
Nova Sicilia is the umbrella/conglomerate FOQNE/Phyle name for a group of enterprises, families, and employees, formerly known internally as "la cosa nostra" and externally as 'the mafia' or 'the mob'. Subsidiaries include CosaNostra Pizza Incorporated, Mafia, Inc., the Our Thing Foundation, the Old Sicilia Inn chain, Goombata Banks, a chain of barber shops, as well as social clubs, concrete and trucking enterprises, etc.
With the devolution of the federal government, the mafia is no longer an illegal enterprise. Theoretically speaking the mafia is a target of the federal government in today's world because they compete for the same markets: social insurance, protection rackets, extortion and confiscation, drug dealing, smuggling, prostitution, and the incremental takeover of legitimate private enterprises through loansharking, blackmail, and intimidation (the federal government just uses more polite words to describe the ways they do the same thing).
Thus, in an ancap world, if a rump federal government is allowed to survive in the market, then there should be a competetive niche in the same markets for other, similarly operated enterprises like the Mafia, the Triads, the Yakuza, as well as the Russian and Irish mobs, and, last but not least, Narcolombia.
In Snow Crash, Nova Sicilia engages in urban pacification programs to wipe out infestations of the rabidly violent Narcolombia competition, install CosaNostra Pizza franchulates, and generally try to gain public goodwill by keeping a clean and safe neighborhood, like any government-aspirant should. Whether private protection agencies such as Novo Sicilia would engage in such open conflicts is debatable, as mob-wars in the past century tended to occur as they fought over territory and markets that were limited by government law enforcement, and said law enforcement imposed high intangible costs of doing business that demanded high product costs and low margins after externalities are accounted for.
Pizza Delivery
Godfather Appearances:
"As the boss, I feel it's my duty to
make sure you get the goods.
You may have noticed that I take
my job very seriously. I demand
that my crew serves you a pizza pie piled
high with your favorite toppings every
time you visit my joint or else
they have to answer to me.
Every so often, I like to
watch 'em in action make
sure things are bein' done right.
So you might find me in
your neighborhood Godfather's
Pizza some time soon."
In the world of Snow Crash, pizza is one of the four industries which Americans still excel at better than anybody in the world following the massive offshoring of US industry. The novel opens upon a scene of one pizza deliveryman, Hiro Protagonist, aka "The Deliverator", whose mission in life is to keep the sacred personal contract between Uncle Enzo and his customers to deliver his pizzas within 30 minutes or it's free.
Our two protagonists meet when one, YT, a plank Kourier with RadiKS, harpoons The Deliverator on a high speed run to deliver a pizza picked up at a ripe old age of 12 minutes. The resulting high speed hijinks ensure Hiro's exit from the pizza business (and into his other side-line as a CIC intelligence stringer that will land him in the middle of the plot of the novel) while YT's positive performance in keeping Uncle Enzo's covenant endear her to the old geezer.
CosaNostra Pizza was likely inspired by the real life franchise chain (with outlets in 40 US states) known as "Godfather's Pizza", which features as a corporate mascot a fedora and double breasted suit clad gentleman with a twisted nose and a wise guy accent who promises delivery "or else". The Godfather promotes on his website his various efforts in good corporate citizenship, helping improve communities and educate kids, just like the Our Thing Foundation. One wonders if NS was ever a Deliverator for the Godfather... fuggitaboutit....
Nova Sicilia Corporate Policy
As described by Fisheye, the mafia is able to avoid the virus of political or institutional ideology in its operations through a cultural practice of pursuing corporate policies through the guise of personal relationships. Thus, the 30 minute pizza delivery guarantee is a sacred covenant between Uncle Enzo and each of his customers, NOT a corporate policy for timely customer service in and of itself. Rescuing YT from The Raft is a result of the personal fatherly protective relationship Uncle Enzo has with YT, and obtaining the Nam-Shub of Enki is merely a beneficial side-effect of that personal relationship, not an end in and of itself for going on what is essentially a suicide mission.
The result of this outlook is that corporate activities remain people-centric and thus do not fall into the dehumanizing trap of bureaucratic inertia and depersonalizing numbering, categorizing, punching and filing of real people with real lives. Internal esprit de corps remains high and man-on-the-street opinion of the mafia is highly positive. Managers take personal responsibility for the progress and success of their subordinates.
Jason "Ironpumper" Breckenridge: A Symptom of Stagnation or Excessive Growth?
The achilles heel of this sort of management philosophy is that its practitioners cannot just practice it as a matter of book learning and three-ring-binder entrepreneurship. Jason Breckenridge is a symptom of this weakness. Jason did his senior thesis on Narcolombian vs Nova Sicilian market dynamics, like some business school case study of fast food competition. Thus, while a decent manager who knows from training how the culture of the Mafia works, lacks the critical personal skills and street smarts (such as reading the directions) required of effective local mob bosses.
The management by personal relationships, to endure, requires individuals who understand the concepts of 'family' and 'honor' and 'trust' in their bones, as personally visceral aspects of one's personality and embedded obligations to others, not just as a question on some b-school quiz. Enzo notices this problem, of a lack of social contract, when dealing with younger lieutenants who are unable to think on their feet, handle multiple issues at once, or deal with problems personally. Enzo seems to imply that YT is the sort of person he would like to see more of in Nova Sicilia, perhaps take over the family at some later date.
Part of the problem is that Enzo's drive to expand the Nova Sicilian franchise into as much of the power vacuum left by the collapse of the United States of America places the insular culture of la cosa nostra under threat of dilution by outside encultured individuals. We see this in Cosa Nostra Pizza University, which takes in Uzbekistani and Tajikistani immigrants and tries to turn them into effective purveyors of pizza-pie. The fiasco of the burned out microwave oven that causes Hiro's receipt of a 12 minute old pizza is a sterling example of the complications of this fast-growth strategy.
This is a common problem in a number of industries where entrepreneurial companies with innovative products, markets, or management systems come under pressure from their own success to expand too fast to maintain 'the magic' and too big to avoid having to take on a lot of anonymous and impersonal middle management. Hiring gets taken out of the hands of the bosses and put in the hands of 'human resources' so-called-experts. Management is taken out of the hands of technical experts with charisma and management potential and put in the hands of b-school grads with no technology specific expertise. To save costs, middle management hires too many employees at the wrong end of the employment demand curve.
As a result of this change, prospective employees are no longer chosen for their initiative, creativity, agressiveness, etc. but instead middle management seeks unimaginative uncreative uninnovative individuals who are moldable into the same cookie cutter mold that B-school graduates have been taught to think of as 'trainable' types (taught by professors who teach because they cannot do). The result is that corporate growth rates and productivity per worker drop, middle management engages in witchhunts to push out old-school unorthodox employees who drive innovation, and the corporation is set to fall into a 'death spiral' if it is unable to rejuvinate itself.