Just for Fun

The Meaning of Life II

Have you ever lain back on a warm summer's night, looking up at the stars, and really wondered why you are here? What is your place in things, and what are you supposed to do with your life?

Yeah, well, neither have I.

Yet I ended up having a theory about Life, The Universe, and Everything -- or at least the subset called "Life." You were introduced to this theory in the preface of this book. And since you've gotten this far, I might as well explain myself a little more.

My theory didn't come about while staring up at the stars, immersed in wonder over the immenseness of it all on a clear night. It came about while I was preparing for a speech. When you become well known for one thing, people just assume you can be trusted to generate brilliant insight into unrelated bodies of knowledge that have been mystifying humankind for millions of years. And they want you to share those insights before a herd of perfect strangers.

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]

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.

You don't believe me?

Look at how we classify animals as "lower" or "higher" order animals. They all survive. But the higher you get in the evolutionary scale, the more you are likely to first create social patterns -- even ants, fairly low down on the scale, have very strict social patterns -- that eventually progress into having fun. Playing with your food is not something ants tend to do a lot. ... But cats do. Ants don't enjoy sex, either.

Yes, take something as basic (and delightful) as sex. I don't claim that it is one of the fundamental motivational factors per se -- but it's a great example of rather fundamental human behavior that has undergone the whole evolution of life. There's no question that it started out as a pure survival trait. After all, even plants have "sex" in the survival sense, and at some stage billions of years ago, sex was probably purely a survival thing for those single-celled animals that would slowly evolve into geeks and other humans. And there's no question that sex long ago evolved from a purely survival phenomenon into a very social phenomenon. It's not only among humans that you find marriage ceremonies and a lot of social infrastructure for getting laid. Think of the ritual dance of the Sandhill crane -- which mates for life, by the way. In fact, inordinate amounts of energy get spent every day on the social courtship rituals associated with the simple matter of reproduction of all the species.

Entertainment? That too, I assure you. Not just among humans, but it is probably no coincidence that the most evolved species on the planet also seems to make the most out of the entertainment aspect of sex.

The progression of survival to social behavior to entertainment is everywhere. Take war: very much a survival trait back when the only way to get to the watering hole was to kill the people in your way who wanted that source of water for themselves. War has long since become a tool for maintaining social order in society. And with the advent of CNN, it has become entertainment. Like it or not, this seems to be the inevitable progression.

Civilization itself follows the same larger pattern. Originally it was a way to ensure survival by cooperation and power in numbers. That is nothing unique to humans. Most animals and even plant life create societies in order to survive better by helping each other. And what is so interesting is how society itself moves from being survival-based toward being more social; how all human civilizations end up building bigger and better roads and communication channels in order to be able to better socialize.

And in the end civilization too becomes geared toward entertainment. Look at the Roman Empire -- famous not only for its road building and strong social order, but also, especially later, even more famous for its entertainment.

Or look at the United States today. Does anybody doubt that the film and computer-game industries are not about ushering in the entertainment society? From having been niche markets not that long ago, they are now among the biggest industries in the richest country in the world.

And what is interesting to me as a technologist is how this pattern repeats itself in the technology we create. We call the early age of modern technology the Industrial Age, but what it really should be called is the Age of Technological Survival. Technology, up until not that long ago, was almost exclusively for surviving better -- being able to weave cloth better and to move goods around faster. That was some of the original impetus for it all.

We call the current period the Information Age. It's a big shift. It's about technology being used for communication and spreading information -- a very social behavior -- rather than just surviving in better style. The Internet, and the fact that so much of our technology is starting to move toward it, is a big road-sign of our times: It means that people in the industrialized countries are starting to take the survival thing for granted, and suddenly the next phase of technology becomes the big and exciting one: the social aspect of communication technology, of using technology not just to live better but as an integral part of social life.

The ultimate goal, of course, is still looming. Past the information society, the entertainment society. A place where the Internet and wireless communications twenty-four hours a day is taken for granted and doesn't get any headlines anymore. A time when Cisco is the old market, and Disney Corporation owns the world. A time probably not too far in the future.

So what does this all mean? Probably not much. After all, my theory of the meaning of life doesn't actually guide you in what you should be doing. At most, it says "Yes, you can fight it, but in the end the ultimate goal of life is to have fun."

It does, to some degree, explain why people are willing and eager to work on projects like Linux on the Internet. For me, and for many other people, Linux has been a way to scratch two motivational itches at the same time. Taking survival for granted, Linux has instead brought people both the entertainment of an intellectual challenge and the social motivations associated with being part of creating it all. We may not have seen each other face-to-face very much, but email was much more than just a dry exchange of information. Bonds of friendship and other social ties can form over email.

This probably also means that if and when we ever meet another intelligent life form in this universe, their first words are not likely to be "Take me to our leader." They're more likely to say "Party on, dude!"

Of course, I might be wrong.