(2021-03-23) Mccormick Conjuring Scenius

Packy McCormick: Conjuring Scenius. IT’S TIME TO BUILD TOGETHER: In January, I read Taylor Lorenz’s New York Times piece on The Hype House, the LA mansion in which nineteen of TikTok’s biggest stars live, create, and collaborate.

The Hype House is part of a millennia-old tradition of collaboration among those at the avant-garde of new forms of media, technology, and thought. Outsiders like me have always dismissed the novel as silly, faddish, or worse. When those inside the cutting-edge scenes band together to support, teach, and create with each other, their niche and experimental projects can become the new normal on top of which the next generation builds.

The Eagle and Child pub in Oxford, England doesn’t look magical

Patrons of The Eagle and Child wrote three of the five best-selling fantasy series of all-time within an eighteen year period - The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, and The Chronicles of Narnia.

The Eagle and Child played host to scenius, the major driving force behind much of the world’s progress

The various groups and time periods that represented and played host to scenius are well known - Ancient Greece, The Renaissance, and Bell Labs to name a few

I will start by exploring why scenia are the driving force behind much of the world’s progress

Here is a quick overview of the topics I will cover:
The Power of Scenius
Deconstructing Scenius
Time Traveling for Ingredients
Budding Scenius
Lessons to Take into the New World

The Power of Scenius

Astonishingly Productive Periods

In 1997, historian David Banks argued in “The Problem of Excess Genius” that, “The most important question we can ask of historians is ‘Why are some periods and places so astonishingly more productive than the rest?’" (2021-02-14) VisakanV The Problem Of Excess Genius By David Banks 1997

Brian Eno, the inventor of ambient music who has been described as “one of popular music's most important and influential figures,” coined the term scenius to describe “the intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene. It is the communal form of the concept of the genius

Counter to the Great Man Theory of History, which says that history can be explained by the impact of certain heroes and geniuses, Eno argued that: "What really happened was that there was sometimes very fertile scenes involving lots and lots of people – some of them artists, some of them collectors, some of them curators, thinkers, theorists, people who were fashionable and knew what the hip things were – all sorts of people who created a kind of ecology of talent.""

Scenia do not start fully-formed. Instead, they evolve through three stages: communities, micro-scenia, and scenia.*

Community

Examples: early personal computer enthusiasts, church groups, affinity groups, Slack groups

Micro-scenius

Examples: Homebrew Computer Club, Write of Passage

Scenius:

Examples: Silicon Valley, Scottish Enlightenment, The Renaissance, Les Années Folles

Scenia can be large or small, span over centuries or last just a decade. The Inklings consisted of no more than fifteen people who met for a little under two decades, while Silicon Valley, fueled by the contributions of millions of people, has progressed uninterruptedly for nearly seventy years

The chart below shows thirteen of history’s most productive and influential scenia and their contributions to humanity.

Timeline

Today, the conditions are ripe for new scenia to join this list.

Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste

historians will look back at the Coronavirus pandemic as the greatest catalyst for progress and creativity in human history

Historically, the scenia responsible for much of the world’s progress have been geographically constrained. The internet has the potential to break that constraint. With global connectivity comes the possibility of scenius that transcends physical place and unites the world’s greatest minds irrespective of distance or station in life.

The Coronavirus pandemic is perfectly suited to break through those barriers in three main ways:

• it serves as the previously-absent, globally-catalyzing event for the internet generation. Throughout history, the majority of the world’s great scenia were born out of periods of struggle.
• Second, people across the globe have banded together, united by a common mission: to fight the spread of this disease
• Finally, having been forced to interact almost exclusively online for an extended period, people are creating new tools, processes, and social norms that make collaborating online more like collaborating in-person.

might Animal Crossing play host to communal genius just as The Eagle and Child did nearly 100 years ago?

Silicon Valley is responsible for much of the world’s progress over the last half-century, and it would not exist without World War II.

We currently sit on the cusp of an unprecedented opportunity to amplify the magic generated by historically place-based scenia with the internet’s ability to connect smart, passionate people across the globe.

If we are able to deconstruct scenius into its constituent ingredients, we can provide guidance to the communities springing up today that have the potential to leverage the most rapid change the world has ever experienced.

Deconstructing Scenius

looked at historical examples and listed four factors that nurture scenius in a piece from 2008:

• Mutual appreciation
• Rapid exchange of tools and techniques
• Network effects of success
• Local tolerance for the novelties

but it is not a recipe for conjuring scenius today and in the future

Scenius builds over time, often over decades. That said, if you apply the lessons learned throughout this essay to a promising community, you can nudge it along the path to scenius.

for scenius to form, the right conditions need to be in place:

• Change needs to be in the air as a result of a catalyzing event
• Smart, talented people need to be motivated by a shared mission audacious enough to keep them interested for a long period.
• Governments need to be friendly to progress, or distracted enough to not notice the change underfoot.
• The right mix of people from a variety of backgrounds need to be in the same place at the same time.

When those conditions are present, as they are today, communities can tap them to mount enough attempts at scenius that a few will stick and change the world. Any one specific attempt may not take, but some will emerge out of the multitude of attempts.

In addition to Kevin Kelly’s four ingredients, we will search through the historical examples listed in the introduction to find additional ingredients key to their lasting influence.

Adding any or all of the ingredients that we uncover does not guarantee that a community will turn into scenius. That takes a special type of magic - the combination of right time, right place, right people, right idea, right underlying conditions.

Ingredient #1: Emergence from Catastrophe

"Disasters, he proposed, create a “community of sufferers” that allows individuals to experience an immensely reassuring connection to others.

In “Common Enemies”, investor and writer Morgan Housel compares the Coronavirus pandemic to World War II.

Too much time spent in unbroken abundance allows innovation to compound until it reaches the Wall-E state. Catastrophe breaks that curve, creates new needs, and opens the door to progress.

Housel quotes the journalist and author Sebastian Junger. In his book, Tribe, Junger wrote:

10 of the 13 scenia we are discussing emerged from catastrophe, and the other three emerged from similarly large societal shifts.

Until recently, it felt like we were heavy on innovation, and light on progress.

Something was missing, some catalyst that would shake us out of our comfort zone.

Catastrophe pushes aside the boundaries that typically divide people and allows them to form communities that might evolve into scenia.

World War II did more than unite us in our pursuit to defeat the Axis Powers. It created the need for the Manhattan Project and laid the foundations for Bell Labs and Building 20, two of history’s great scenia.

Ingredient #2: Competition

Scenius is communal, but communal doesn’t necessarily imply Kumbaya. Scenius can get competitive

Similarly, competition drove the greatest artistic rivalry of the Florentine Renaissance. It all started with perspective.

The School of Athens was both a product of the Renaissance scenius, and depicts art, philosophy, mathematics, poetry as one entire historical scenius, each building off the other through the long arc of time

Ingredient #3: Place-Based Ritual

As it turns out, a surprising amount of innovation happens in bars.

Franklin’s Junto depended on place-based ritual, meeting on a set schedule in a specific, informal place with a consistent agenda

Across the Atlantic, less than twenty years after the Junto began meeting in Philadelphia, the Scottish Enlightenment rose concurrently with Edinburgh’s taverns.

a recent paper by Northwestern economist Michael Andrews, “Bar Talk”, highlighted the causal role that taverns play in innovation. Andrews looked at the rate of new patents before, during, and after Prohibition to show that bars play an important role in the creation of new ideas and products

With the passage of prohibition, the state took away these social hubs, disrupting the preexisting informal social network and forcing people to interact in other venues… The imposition of prohibition caused patenting to drop by 8-18% in the counties that wanted to remain wet relative to consistently dry counties in the same state

Ingredient #4: Diversity of Thought and Experience

Range, author David Epstein

at a similar conclusion. Citing research done by Luis A. Nunes Amaral and Brian Uzzi

The commercial fate of Broadway during a particular era, be it unusually prosperous or exceptionally flop-ridden, had less to do with specific famous names and more to do with whether collaborators mixed and matched vibrantly

This principle of diverse collaborators mixing and matching vibrantly was on full display in Detroit at the turn of the 1960s.

Motown

The 2019 Showtime documentary Hitsville: The Making of Motown documented the early days of Motown. It was like an advertisement for scenius. Hitsville highlighted many of the elements that made Motown successful

So is Silicon Valley a Scenius?

examine scenius versus Great Man Theory.

Let’s apply the framework to show that it is an example of scenius and not just an exceedingly coincidental collection of historically great technologists.

This map from Walter Isaacson’s The Innovators traces the path of the Fairchildren, the bloodline of companies that shared Fairchild Semiconductor as a common ancestor.

Value judgments aside, the answer to whether Silicon Valley is a scenius is a resounding yes

Budding Scenius

I sought out potential emergent scenia from the present day.

I found them in the InterIntellect and Write of Passage

Anna and David are similar in that both felt something special happening on the internet and acted quickly to harness it for the good of their growing communities. As their communities both exist primarily online, they can provide insights into the possibility of building online scenia.

Gát felt that the internet was full of brilliant outsiders who wanted to find each other and engage in positive, productive, and nuanced discussions. “People want to come out from the shadows again and meet each other and be post-political and post-division,” Gát says, “and not even in an idealistic way, just like we are realistic, we know this can work out.”

*“I want to do IRL, I want to talk about books and math and philosophy without fear of the other person,” said Gát. Out of that desire, a Place-Based Ritual for the InterIntellect was born. From its first gatherings, the salons spread to other countries, from the UK to the US to India and beyond.

Early in 2020 while home sick with the flu, Gát decided to give the community an online home*

For now, though, Gát is not focused on turning the InterIntellect into a scenius. She is building the community for the community’s sake, and letting it develop organically

I am writing this essay as part of the Write of Passage Fellowship.

We are really more focused on helping people make friends through the course than we are on teaching the ideas,” Perell says, “not because the ideas don’t work, but actually because the ideas work best when you’re part of a community.”

Write of Passage is instructive because Perell is not thinking small; he has plans to make his courses influential enough to become a modern, internet-first scenius

Perell told me: I would say we are somewhere between a community and a micro-scenius

Instead of directly pitting people against each other, Perell highlights the one or two people who have done the best work each week by lauding it within the cohort and sharing it with his vast online following

Modern scenius, however, will increasingly take advantage of two forms of competition:

• Internally, they will leverage non-zero-sum competition, in which one person can succeed without others losing. Contenders will sharpen each other in preparation for battle against common foes.
• Externally, they will engage in zero-sum competition against common enemies: incumbents and global challenges, like pandemics and climate change. When they conquer those, the status quo loses and society wins.

While being remote makes certain aspects of collaboration more challenging, it serves as a boon for increasing access to a diversity of thoughts and ideas

In a conversation with Tyler Cowen, jazz critic and music historian Ted Gioia, said:"I found a surprising number of situations in history where unhealthy settings and situations had created artistic revolutions. Most people date the start of the Renaissance to the year 1350 in the city of Florence. They don’t realize, 1348 was the Great Plague in Florence. What people don’t realize, the troubadour revolution spread from the South of France into the rest of Europe. It followed the exact same dissemination patterns the Black Death did.

The virus has exposed incumbent institutions’ shortcomings; we will need to reimagine and rebuild education, healthcare, work, supply chains, travel, retail, and so much more. We will build new virtual worlds and reimagine the physical one.

We are facing such a catastrophe today, and I fully expect that we will come out of it re-energized. Marc Andreesen said, “IT’S TIME TO BUILD!” And it is.