Linus Torvalds - Just for Fun

No, it doesn't make much sense. I got into Linux because I was a technology geek, not because I was any good at public appearances, let alone philosophizing without prudent limits. But few things in life make all that much sense, so I'm not complaining.

Back to the subject at hand.

This time I was invited to a local event in Berkeley called "Webrush." Normally I wouldn't even consider it, but the invitation came through the Finnish Consulate here in the United States and being a patriotic person (or at least feeling slightly guilty about hating snow and having moved abroad), I had stupidly said "Okay. Jag gor det." [6] "Yes, sure, I'll do it."

Now, nobody expected me to talk about the meaning of life, least of all myself. But this event was about life in the networked society, and I was there as the Internet person and representative of Finland. Finland, due to Nokia (the largest, best, and most beautiful company in the world as any Finn will tell you), is into communications in a big way, and "the networked society" is where it is at. We've already discussed how there are more cell phones than people in Finland, and the current research into finding ways of implanting the things surgically at birth.

So there I sit, wondering what I should talk about regarding communications. Oh, I forgot to mention that most of the rest of the panel would be comprised of philosophers talking about technology. This is Berkeley, after all. The two things they take very seriously in Berkeley are Berkeley politics and Berkeley philosophers.

So what the heck. If they were going to have philosophers talking about technology, why not have a technologist like me talking about philosophy? Nobody should accuse me of not having balls. They might call me terminally stupid (and hey, they probably do) -- but chicken ?

Not this geek.

So there I am, feverishly trying to come up with a subject to speak about the next day. (I never get around to doing speeches until it is way too late, so late the evening before the event is usually when you'll find me worrying about it.) And I'm struggling there, trying to ponder the "communication society" and what it's all about, and what Nokia and all the other communications companies will eventually evolve into.

And the best I can do is to just explain the meaning of life.

It's actually not much of a "meaning." It's more a law of life, hereafter to be called "Linus's Law." It's equivalent to the second law of thermodynamics in physics, but rather than explaining the devolution of order in the universe, it is about the evolution of life.

I'm not talking "evolution" in the Darwinian sense here. That's a different thing -- for Webrush I was more interested in how society evolves, and how we moved from the industrial society into a communications society: What's next, and why? I wanted to make it sound good, and to make enough sense to convince an audience for the duration of a panel discussion. Everybody has his or her own agenda, and that day mine was to emerge alive from a panel discussion with two notable philosophers.

So why do societies evolve? What's the driving factor? Is it really technology that drives society? -- which seems to be a common view. Was it really the invention of the steam engine that got Europe started as the industrial society, and eventually evolved us through Nokia and cell phones into the communications society? That seemed to be the philosophers' take on this all, and they seemed to be interested in how technology changes society.

And I, as a technologist, know that technology drives nothing. It is society that changes technology, not the other way around. Technology just sets the boundaries for what we can do, and how cheaply we can do it.

Technology, like the devices it creates, is at least so far inherently stupid. It's only interesting insofar as what you can do with it, and the driving force behind it is thus really human needs and interests. We don't communicate more these days because we have the means to do so-we communicate more these days because people are blabbermouths, and they want to communicate; and if the means aren't there, they will be created. Thus Nokia.

So, my argument went, in order to understand the evolution of society, you have to understand what really motivates people. Is it money? Is it success? Is it sex? What fundamentally makes people do what they do?

The one obvious motivational factor that probably nobody will argue with is simple: survival. That is what defines life, after all -- it survives. It doesn't just blindly follow the second law of thermodynamics, but instead survives despite a universe that seems fairly inimical to the kind of complexity and order that is the very underpinning of life. So survival is motivational factor #1.

In order to rank the other motivational factors, I had to consider how they would stack up against that very simple will to survive. The question is not "Would you kill for money?" but "Would you die for money?" The answer there is clearly no. So we can safely strike money off the list of fundamental motivational factors.

But there are obviously things that people are willing to die for. There are a lot of heroic stories of people and even animals who are in fact willing to die for some larger cause. So plain survival alone does not explain the motivational factors that drive our society.

The other motivations I came up with for the talk in Berkeley were simple and not very contested at the panel. So at least somebody agrees with them. (Or, in consideration of the Finnish consulate, they were just being polite.) There aren't very many things that man is willing to die for, but social relations is definitely one of them.

The examples of social motivation being enough to drive people to forget about survival are numerous, from the literary Romeo and Juliet (dead not because they wanted anything as crass as sex , but because they would rather die than lose their social relationship) to the case of the patriotic soldier willing to risk his life for his country and his family -- his society. So chalk up "social relations" as motivational factor #2.

The third and final motivational factor is "entertainment." That may sound trite, but it's unquestionably a very strong force. People die every day doing things that they're only doing for fun. Jumping out of perfectly operational airplanes just to get the rush, for example.

And entertainment doesn't have to be trite. It can be a game of chess, or the intellectual entertainment of trying to figure out how the world really works. It can be the curiosity and exploration of a new world. Anything that makes a person sit in a crowded rocket on top of a gadzillion pounds of highly explosive material just to be able to see the earth from space can certainly be called "motivational."

And that's it: Survival. Your place in the social order. And entertainment . The three things that make us do the things we do. Everything else is what a sociologist would probably call "emergent behavior" -- patterns of behavior that emerge from those much simpler rules.

But it's more than just "these are the things that motivate people." If that were all, it wouldn't be much of a theory of life. What makes it interesting is that the three motivational factors have an intrinsic order, an order that shows up wherever there is life. It's not just that we're motivated by those three things -- they also hold true for forms of life other than human life, and they show up as the natural progression for any lifelike behavior.

Survive. Socialize. Have fun. That's the progression. And that's also why we chose "Just for Fun" as the title of this book. Because everything we ever do seems to eventually end up being for our own entertainment -- at least if we have been given the possibility to progress far enough.