The background to the story includes a massive earthquake laying waste to the San Francisco Bay Area in California. Millions die and millions more are left to live on government handouts. The subsequent economic depression, coupled with the rootlessness enabled by access to online data and strong social pressure to be flexible (the results of corporations wanting highly mobile workforces without strong local ties), results in a fragmentation of society along religious, ethnic, and a variety of class markers, what Toffler called "subcults", including what would in 2010 be described as gangs. The equitable distribution of data access and data privacy is a prominent theme in the book; characters who have access to information which is nominally secret enjoy demonstrable economic advantages over others lacking access to such data. In the novel, data privacy is reserved for corporate entities and individuals, who may then conceal wrongdoing; by contrast, normal citizens do not enjoy significant privacy.