[From a talk by Larry Wall, the inventor of the Perl programming
language--my bread-and-butter.]
I would like to say one thing here about objectivity, however. While I
despise the Modern Cult of Objectivity, I also despise the quasi-postmodern
Cult of Subjectivity. I call it absolute cultural relativism. It's the
notion that everything is as good as everything else, because goodness is
only a matter of opinion. It's like claiming that the only thing you can
know absolutely is that you can't know anything absolutely. I think this is
really just another form of Modernism, a kind of existentialism really,
though unfortunately it's come to be associated with postmodernism. But I
think it sucks.
The funny thing is, it's almost right. It's very close to what I do, in
fact, believe. I'd go so far as to call myself a strong postmodernist.
Strong postmodernism says that all truth is created. But this really isn't
a problem for anyone who believes in a Creator. All truths are created
relative, but some are more relative than others. A universal truth only
has to be true about our particular universe, so to speak. It doesn't much
matter whether the universe itself is true or false, just as long as it
makes a good story. And I think our universe does make a good story. I
happen to like the Author.
I like Lois McMaster Bujold too, so I read her stories. Same for Tolkien,
and C.S. Lewis. Turning that around, some people use Perl because they like
me. Who am I to argue with them? You're all totally objective about Linus
and Linux, right? Uh, huh. Three cheers for objectivity.
I'm getting tired of talking about cults, and you're probably getting tired
of listening to me talk about cults. However, I want to talk about the open
source phenomenon now, and I'm afraid I'll have to drag the cults in
occasionally. But fear not. I think the open source movement is, actually,
a postmodern movement.
Think about it. We've actually been doing open source for a couple of
decades now. Why is it suddenly taking off now? Why not twenty years ago.
Linux could have been written twenty years ago, albeit not by Linus.
Of course there are lots of mundane reasons why Linux wasn't written twenty
years ago, not the least of which is that we didn't really have the
ubiquitous, cheap hardware to support it yet. Nor did we have the
networking to support cooperative development. But since this is a
philosophical talk, I'll ignore reality and talk about what I think was
really going on. Here's where the cults come back in again.
The Cult of Spareness decreed that we should all use the same operating
system. Of course, everyone had their own idea of what that was, but Bill
Gates actually had the most success in carrying out the decree. For which
he is now on trial, where he may eventually have to consent to a consent
decree. All in all, it's been a bad year to be named Bill. The wolves are
circling, and waiting for further signs of weakness, and everyone's hedging
their bets by attending LinuxWorld, and making sure the press know it.
Full talk: http://www.perl.com/pub/1999/03/pm.html#jump7
Louis Proyect
Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org
