Probably. I'm able to piece together a lot more of what happened and why in Count Zero than I am from Neuromancer. But I still think they're both "required read

Probably. I'm able to piece together a lot more of what happened and why in Count Zero than I am from Neuromancer. But I still think they're both "required reading". Neuromancer has its great bits that are worth reading and mulling over. I remember being blown away by the Rasta. Because even in a book that predicted an information matrix connecting everything before the internet existed, that character predicted the culture that would form on it. He compares their internet to Babylon, which in Rastafari thought refers to Israel's captivity by Babylon and is a symbol of oppressive foreign power. The internet can be an oppressive place with the advertising and the tracking and the pressures of social media. But beyond just that, Babylon to someone like a Rasta also points back to Babel, and the Tower of Babel was a massive structure built by humanity to unite themselves and become like gods, but which led to their division instead (a theme which is the core of Snow Crash as well). The modern internet is definitely a massive structure, and on one hand provides a previously unimaginable access to information (Snow Crash considers the possibility that the Tower was built for astrological purposes, thus it too is built for purposes of information). It can sometimes feel like being virtually omniscient. But we've also seen that as people connect online, memes which trigger strong negative emotions spread rapidly. People are once again becoming divided, as we've seen with political developments in recent years. It probably helped that I read it while dubstep (which originally spun off from dub) was still sweeping the internet so that helped make the connection all the more intriguing.