Okay so I'm only at like the first chapter but I honestly can't tell if the stupid little bildrungsroman bit about the midwestern tech bro turned feudal lord is intended as satire.
Choice bits:
...(he) found that the surest way to shock most people, in those days, was to believe that some kinds of behaviors were bad and others good, and that it was reasonable to live one's life accordingly.
...while people were not genetically different, they were culturally as different as they could possibly be, and that some cultures were simply better than others.
Honestlt I'd assume satire but coming from what I know about Stephenson I'm really not sure.
The ending to Ready Player One is this meme, with the author shooting the larger points over his own head and going "Wow! Optimus Prime".
The ending to Ready Player Two is even worse. The "hero" from the first book is now unironically a mind controlling near-omnipotent narcissist psychopath but both he (and the author) have zero fucking clue about how not heroic that all is, and then the "hero" ragequits by boarding a magic spaceship with a harem of mind-controlled sex slaves and goes into space to do... something, because ruling the Earth is too hard due to all those ungrateful peasants.
I think I know which meme, but the link isn't working.
Ah yeah I ended up fixing it.
Thanks!