I suspect _Diamond Age_ suffered from some heavy and hurried editing.
IOW, there was alot more that Stephenson originally wanted to put in
the book but had to leave out to keep it from becoming too long and
confusing. E.g., there was a whole excerpt, called "Hack the Spew" on
the cover of Wired about a year before the book came out, that I kept
looking for in the book but it wasn't there.
Mark Crosby