Two questions, since I enjoyed the few Stephensons I've read:

1) a quick search of FoDiH brings up that it's from the perspective of a character in Reamde, which is one of his I have not read yet. Is it a mandatory prerequisite, a good-to-have but optional prerequisite, or essentially unrelated?

2) that search also brings up that it came out in 2019, but your comment says "It was 2014" w.r.t. something to do with FB (I actually had a lot of troubling parsing the meaning of that specific sentence and am still unsure, but that isn't the point). Can you really say he "called it" if he's reasoning a posteriori?