Michael Burry warned this week that the U.S. may be heading toward a “Snow Crash cyber-punk future” as the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) prepares rules that would let crypto platforms trade tokenized versions of traditional stocks.
Writing on his Substack channel “Cassandra Unchained” and mirroring the post on X, the Big Short investor Michael Burry pointed to Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel Snow Crash to frame his concern. The dystopian story depicts a fragmented America where corporations replace governments, citizens retreat into virtual reality, and human relationships erode under the weight of digital identity and economic sorting.
Burry tied that vision directly to recent news that the SEC, under the Trump administration, was developing a broad innovation exemption allowing crypto firms to list tokenized versions of U.S. stocks.
“We may be headed full-on to a Snow Crash cyber-punk future with no long-term personal relationships and digital value embedded in all of us directly correlated to the value provided to a society that increasingly devalues humanity,” Burry wrote.
He added a follow-up in the comments section:
