The Extended Answer
If you made it this page, you have just reached the off-tangent segment. So those who listen to CH14’s podcasts are pretty much familiar to what this is about. To those who are not, it is what it is..off-tangent. Well, in this case, it’s still ON tangent. If you recall there was a question about #ForLove, but that was just a portion of what Joao answered. In fact, the answer was so long that it had to be abridged. However, as I listen to the recorded answer again and again, it got me thinking: this DESERVES a spot in this blog post. Especially since it was really just a followup question to what I asked in the original interview but forgot to jot down my notes (my bad). The original question was not just what #ForLove meant, but its significance to both of them. Here’s Joao’s answer on #ForLove…
Joao: “Where did it come from? It was an inside joke. It’s also Linux related. It had something to do with AG’s interaction with the women who eventually became his girlfriend or something. I gave him a video to give to his girlfriend; it was from a reputable news agency. I told him to give it to her ‘for love’, or something like that. It eventually became our battle cry.
Everything you do, you do for love.
Does the hashtag have anything significant? No. Not really. But, me being me, I won’t leave it at that. What do we mean by #forlove? It’s the ultimate expression of our humanity as human beings. Like, for love.
When you think about one of the things that make us human, you think about language. But language comes from cognition. Every animal, is cognizant of the world around it. Like you can interact with the world (senses, etc). But something that makes humans different is that we are capable of something called meta cognition. We can think of our own thought and as a consequence, we arrive at this idea of the self, which is this intangible thing that makes us human (e.g. hopes, dreams, aspirations). This is part of the person that isn’t part of biology. One thing that is essential is ‘self giving’.
It was a powerful idea we had going into college. It served as a basis of the arts community in our University that we went to. We were all about ‘love’, or the ‘muse’. It’s corny, I know, but there we go. ‘For love’. I guess we hold this idea of ‘love’ in very high regard and what we do, we do for love. We do for the idea of self giving. So, here we are, sharing ourselves to the audience (the faithful fourteen). This is part of me giving myself to understanding Linux. We are doing it for love.
Where’s the hashtag come from? It’s a joke, right? Was it Aristotle that said man was a social animal? That social thing is a thing that makes people… “people”. We can communicate and share ideas through conversation, writing, art, etc. We are capable of the exchange of ideas and language. Now people have to exist in a society, generally. But we have to exists in a society to be the best that we can be. So one of the ‘contemporary’ expressions of that is social media where the hashtag forms an integral part of communication in social media. It’s another expression of humanity, this idea of communication as represented through the hashtag. I think I might be stretching a bit far, but yeah, it holds a special significance as the Aristotelian idea of man being a social animal.”
Thanks Joao! 😀
For the full audio version of this, please go to their site to hear it word for word (if it is uploaded there as of press time). This answer gives you something to think about: A mere # can be part of the significance of an Aristotelian idea of man being a social animal?
Yeah, that just happened. In any case…
