because there's a big guy between you and the water hole.
Next, you need to fight the guy for a wife. And then war
becomes a social-order thing. That's how it was long
before the Middle Ages.
D:
War as a means of establishing social order.
L:
Right. And also a means of establishing yourself as part
of the social order. Nobody cares about social order, per
se. Everybody cares about his own place in that order. It's
the same thing whether you're a hen in a pecking order or
you're a human.
D:
And now war is for entertainment?
L:
That's right.
D:
Maybe for people watching it on TV. For them it might
be entertaining.
L :
Computer games. War games. CNN. Well, the
reason
for
war can often be entertaining. But also the perception of
war is entertaining. And the reason for sex is often enter
taining. Sure, the survival part is still there, especially if
you're Catholic, right? But even if you're Catholic, some
times you probably think about the entertainment part,
too. So it doesn't have to be plain entertainment. In
everything, a piece of the motivation might be survival, a
piece might be social order, and the rest might be enter
tainment. Okay, look at technology. Technology came
about as survival. And survival is not about just surviv
ing, it's about surviving better. You get a windmill that
draws water from the well . . .
D:
Or fire.
L:
Right. It's still survival, but it hasn't progressed to social
order and entertainment.
o:
Now how has technology progressed to social order?
L:
Well, actually most of industrialization has been really
just survival, or surviving better. In cars, that meant
making faster cars and nicer cars. But then you get to
technology in a social sense. That brings us the tele-
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phone. And TV, to some degree. A lot of the early TV
stuff was basically for indoctrination. Radio, too. That's
why countries often started investing in radio, for the
social-order side of it.
D:
Establishing and maintaining social order . . .
L:
Rigl}.t, but then it just goes past that. Today, TV is obvi
ously used mostly for entertainment. And right now you
see all these wireless mobile phones. It's basically social.
But it's moving into entertainment, too.
D:
So what's the future of technology? We've gone beyond
the survival stage and now we're in the social stage, right?
L:
Right. All technology used to do was make life easier. It
was all about getting places faster, buying things
cheaper, having better houses, whatever. So what's so dif
ferent about information technology? What comes after
the fact that everybody is connected? What more is there
to do? Sure, you can connect better, but that's not funda
mentally different. So where is technology taking us? In
my opinion, the next big step is entertainment.
D:
Everything eventually evolves into entertainment . . .
L:
But this also explains why Linux is so successful, to some
degree. Think of the three motivational factors. First is
survival, which people with computers take for granted.
Quite frankly, if you have a computer, you've already
bought your food and stuff like that. The second is for
social order, and the social side is certainly motivational
for geeks sitting inside their own cubicles.
D:
You said something really smart at Comdex, something
about Linux development being a global team sport. So,
you basically made that happen, dude.
L:
Linux is a great example of why people love team sports,
and especially being part of a team.
D:
Yeah, sitting in front of a computer all day, you'd proba
bly want to feel like you were part of something. Any
thing.
xx
j u s t fo r F u n
L:
It's social, like any other team sport. Imagine people on a
football team, especially in high school. The social part of
Linux is really, really important. But Linux is also enter
tainment, the kind of entertainment that is very hard to
buy with money. Money is a very powerful motivational
factor when you're at the level of survival, because it's
easy to buy survival. It's very easy to barter for those
kinds of things. But suddenly when you're at the level of
entertainment, money . . .
o:
Money is useless?
L:
No, it's not useless, because obviously you can buy
movies, fast cars, vacations. There are a lot of things you
can buy that can help make your situation better.
T:
Linus, we need to change Daniela. And Patricia has to go
potty. I need a cappuccino. Do you think we can find a
Starbucks here? Where are we?
D:
(looks up): Based on the odor, I think we're near King
City.
L:
Now all this is on a bigger scale. It's not just about peo
ple, it's about life. It's like the Law of Entropy. In this
Entropy Law of Life, everything moves from survival to
entertainment, but that doesn't mean that on a local scale
it can't go backward, and obviously it essentially does.
Things just disintegrate sometimes.
D:
But as a system, everything is moving in the same direc
tion . . .
L:
Everything is moving in the same direction, but not at
the same time. So basically sex has reached entertain
ment, war is close to it, technology is pretty much there.
The new things are things that are just survival. Like,
hopefully, space travel will at some point be an issue of
survival, then it will be social, then entertainment. Look
at civilization as a cult. I mean, that also follows the same
pattern. Civilization starts as survival. You get together
to survive better and you build up your social structure.
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