Stephenson's book SNOWCRASH was fiction, but manipulation of human consciousness and behavior by means of infectious self-replicating structures is not. The use of harmful, behavior changing images, sigils and glyphs which act below the threshold of consumer awareness, is what the advertising industry does.
Who, looking at that information above in the 1950s, would care enough about these biological curiosities, behavior altering parasites, to research and weaponize them?
Only a tippy top man o' science like:
Doc Sid Gottlieb head, chemical section, C_A tech services.
https://www.mdma.net/mk-ultra/index.html
Doctor Sid Gottlieb made Dr Strangelove look like a squittering shill. Why nuke an enemy when you can enslave the world population with high tech information engineering?
Sidney Gottlieb, the fiendish C_A tech services chief, was the model for the fictional Doctor Benway in the works of William S. Burroughs. (FYI The character and name Benway was appropriated for the first online [fictitious] persona ever recognized. This virtual character posted on the Community Memory BBS, the first electronically accessible bulletin board system).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Benway
Doc Sid Gottlieb ran the university mental hospital and prison MK U research programs which produced both the pedophile gangster Whitey Bulger and occultist musician Charles Manson and many other assassins; all while introducing them (and thousands more experimental ‘subjects’) to the use of LSD.
Sid Gottleib, head "chemical section" of Allan Dulles technical services directorate, was into some dark technologies, trying to get on terms with trans dimensional entities, cracking heads and frying experimental subjects’ brains with drugs, trauma, hypnosis.
The LSD amped program Gottlieb ran at the US Marine base in Atsugi, Japan, is where the young Marine, Lee Harvey Oswald was first exposed to LSD as a part of Gottlieb's MK research program.
Sid Gottlieb knew signal forging in nature allowed tiny organisms like beetles to capture much larger prey or even whole insect societies – social superorganisms like the huge termite nests in Africa.
https://www.radiantlunatic.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/TheSoulOfTheWhiteAnt.pdf
The MK programmed revealed to the Church committee and later to the Senate committee was NOT the MK program. What was revealed was tiny fraction of research selected to mislead the American people about the nature and scope of the MKU program and its ultimate objective: total social control.
The entire MKU research project was compartmentalized by design, individual research ‘modules’ were assigned to 100s of prestigious university and institutional contract labs. The work was done parallel rather than serially or sequentially. Few if any of the prestigious institutions who accepted the funds knew any more that that they were doing “national defense” research.
When the time came the largest and most sinister mind and social control research program in history became the biggest C_A cover up.
MKU was pitched to the US public as C_A’s shameful and embarrassing disclosure – now safely past, MKU would never, can never happen again.
It never stopped. MK Ultra succeeded and NPCs are the unwitting product of MKU.