Mad - You might want to skip this entree

Modern biology says* it’s all about procreation, ensuring the survival of one’s genes, or genes as close to yours as possible.

Freud said* it’s all about sex.

I maintain that every human achievement, every advancement of civilization has been made by a man seeking to impress a woman or challenge another man’s plans/claims for some woman. All the great creative thinking was done by people in their late teens and early twenties, before they became old and settled down, monetizing their ideas into college money for the kids.

Until some entrepreneur invented porn. Now, I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt and consider it wasn’t a plan to eliminate competition but a service for men who have no access to women for long periods of time (such as soldiers) and no wish to practice homosexuality and/or bestiality. Which is all great (when tastefully done) but as with all good things, introduces a catch: porn, unlike flesh and blood females, is immaterial information (graphical or audio-visual), thus making pr0n feasible.

When computers were invented and all the really important things to do with them ran out (cracking Enigma, building The Bomb, playing chess) geeks found that relieving themselves using graphical stimuli is a quicker way of clearing one’s mind and getting back to solving interesting problems than bothering with real women (wooed or rented), and since they were still in the creative stage of their lives they didn’t care for reproduction.

Since most good hacking is done by “scratching one’s itch”, i.e. working on fixing the problems you face yourself, technologies for enhancing the experience quickly evolved. Technologies like high resolution true color graphical displays, graphical user interfaces (to navigate albums in thumbnail mode), networking (to share pr0n with friends and argue taste), cheap photo-realistic inkjet printers (in case of power outages), storage so cheap you can fit the library of congress without selling a kidney (for collections), complex algorithms to compress and transport multimedia streams over bad network conditions with minimal loss of quality and audio-visual synchronization (because one never has enough storage), the web (the ultimate publishing medium for conventional pr0n), P2P networking (for spreading the racy stuff) and DHTML bookmarkslets (to remove bad links from pages).

Higher levels of immersion are being developed – Doom3 can make you scared, but what else is the graphical engine capable of? What do you think AI is being developed for? Accurately guessing what the user wishes the character does next, of course! And finally, the ultimate, last, invention of human kind – Virtual Reality, when all the creative minds of humanity get lost in a Matrix-like dream-world they’ve built for themselves.

You ask how I know all that stuff was invented for pr0n? I'll tell you. Because all the real work I do on my computer (managing big distributed databases, developing, testing, debugging, deploying and analyzing the output of cross platform software (and by "cross-platform" I mean the exact same source is compiled on s390 (MVS), RS/6000 (AIX 4) and P4 (Win2k)...), etc.) I do on the command prompt, in text-only mode, usually by telnet. The only reason for me to have a monitor like that is for reading lots of documentation PDFs (because I don't want to search for the hardcopy) and watching the flash clips my friends keep sending me, not for using bloated development environments like Websphere or Visual Studio .Net 2003. I imagine it's much the same for many other people, so unless the CAD/CAM industries were that influential, I say computer graphics were invented for pr0n.

* - I am aware these are criminal generalizations, people.