Sc3nius

We're all gonna make it

Oct 25

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Hi friends 👋,

Happy Monday! I hope everyone had a great weekend and has their Halloween costumes squared away. I am supposedly going to be Aladdin. I have 6 days to get in vest-no-shirt shape. I’m ngmi.

In May 2020, a couple of months into the pandemic, I wrote my longest essay ever on a concept called scenius. Now, a year and a half later, we’re in the midst of a history-bending one.

Let’s get to it.

Sc3nius

We live in exceptionally rare times. We’re a part of the first global, internet-native Scenius.

Throughout history, a handful of time-place combinations have punched so far above their weight in terms of contribution to human progress that their existence befuddled academics.

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?’"

Figure out why, the logic goes, and we should be able to reproduce those productive periods and places on-command. But in his essay, Banks concluded that no one had sufficiently explained the phenomenon, in part because “essentially no scholarly effort had been directed towards it.”

Twenty-three years later, Tyler Cowen and Patrick Collison identified the same phenomenon in their 2020 essay, We Need a New Science of Progress:

Looking backwards, it’s striking how unevenly distributed progress has been in the past...the discoveries that came to elevate standards of living for everyone arose in comparatively tiny geographic pockets of innovative effort.

They called for a new scholarly discipline, Progress Studies, which “would study the successful people, organizations, institutions, policies, and cultures that have arisen to date, and it would attempt to concoct policies and prescriptions that would help improve our ability to generate useful progress in the future.”

Harry Todd / Hulton Archive / Getty via *The Atlantic*

The list of challenges facing humanity is long and complex: climate change, inequality, natural disasters, travel, education, and more. We can’t leave solving those hard problems to chance. Understanding those productive periods and places might give us insight into organizing ourselves in such a way as to maximize our chances of solving them.

The same periods come up over and over again in these conversations because they were so head-scratchingly productive. Ancient Greece. Renaissance Florence. Elizabethan England. Northern England during the Industrial Revolution. Silicon Valley. These time-place combinations produce new ideas, new art, new economic structures, and new technology of astonishing breadth, quality, and staying power.

Was it just random chance? Were an exceedingly large number of historical geniuses randomly born in the same small place in the same short timespan?

Across the pond, British ambient musician Brian Peter George St John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno RDI (henceforth, “Brian Eno”) was scratching at the same question, focusing less on scholarship and more on vibes. He sought to push back on “the notion that gifted individuals turn up out of nowhere and light the way for all the rest of us dummies to follow.”

In a letter to his friend Dave Stewart, published in his 1996 book A Year With Swollen Appendices, Eno wrote:

I became (and still am) more and more convinced that the important changes in cultural history were actually the product of very large numbers of people and circumstances conspiring to make something new. I call this ‘scenius’ - it means ‘the intelligence and intuition of a whole cultural scene’. It is the communal form of the concept of genius.
I would prefer to believe that the world is constantly being remade by all its inhabitants: that it is a cooperative enterprise.

In the letter, Eno cited cultural examples like Dadaism in France, American experimental music in the late 50’s and 60’s, and punk in the 70’s, but also suggested that it would be “interesting to include scenes that were less specifically artistic - for instance, the history of the evolution of the internet.”

Turns out, scenius shows up throughout history in those astonishingly productive places. It’s the best explanation I’ve seen for excess genius. According to Kevin Kelly, whose framework for scenius we’ll dive into shortly, “Scenius is like genius, only embedded in a scene rather than in genes.”

To clear up some terms we’ll use here, “scenius” is the concept of communal genius, but we’ll use Scenius with a capital S to describe those magical time-place combinations. Scenius is the proper noun; scenius is the common one. Ancient Greece was a Scenius. The Renaissance was a Scenius. Silicon Valley was a Scenius.

Historically, scenius had been tied to, and limited by, place. Early last year, pre-pandemic, I set out to write my longest essay to date on whether there could be an Internet Scenius that removed the physical boundaries and therefore unleashed more progress than any previous Scenius. There were about 100,000 people living in Florence during the Renaissance… if you multiply that by 79,000, do you get 79,000x the good ideas? Do you get even better ideas, thanks to more connections and better intellectual sparring?

I started research for the essay in February 2020, and quickly became disavowed of the notion. There were three reasons I didn’t think we’d been able to conjure Scenius online:

We have been unable to replicate the magical camaraderie of in-person collaboration online.
There has been no common mission or common enemy strong enough to unite people around the world (I see you, crypto people. We shall see.) [Ed. Note: I was ngmi]
Until now, we have not experienced a global catalyzing event that has necessitated new modes of creating, communicating, and collaborating.

Then, of course, COVID hit. COVID is the greatest catastrophe the world has experienced collectively since World War II, and it’s taken a terrible toll on human lives and the global economy. But I’m an optimist, and as I was writing Conjuring Scenius, I realized that it might also get us unstuck and create the conditions for an internet-scale scenius. Reading it back, a lot of the writing in the essay is cringey and overwrought, but I think I fucking nailed this prediction:

When it is all said and done, I believe that historians will look back at the Coronavirus pandemic as the greatest catalyst for progress and creativity in human history.

Seventeen months after I hit publish, we’re in the middle of a Holy Grail Scenius: global instead of local, with the internet as the scene, bound only by time but no longer by space. During COVID, we successfully moved large parts of the way we work and communicate online, unbound genius from geography, created new economic models and incentive structures, and made meaningful advances in healthcare, climate, finance, education, and more. This Scenius is also building the tools that will make other Scenia more common in the future.

Part of the reason that we’re more productive now than ever before is just that we’re on an exponential curve, following the Law of Accelerating Returns, as I covered in Compounding Crazy. But I think it’s something bigger than that, a step change instead of a smooth curve.

Since February, I’ve been writing an accidental series on how web3 is impacting culture, work, and the way that we all interact with each other. If Power to the Person was about how technology is empowering individuals as the new atomic units of commerce, The Great Online Game was about how the internet blurs the line between work and play for those individuals, and The Cooperation Economy was about how we play the game as teams of individuals or small groups, this essay goes one layer up to figure out how it all fits together: we’re all part of a great global Scenius. We’re all gonna make it. Let’s call it the WAGMI Scenius.

I had a vague idea that web3 was at the core of a new Scenius when I started researching this piece, but what I didn’t appreciate is that web3 seems to be a toolkit for conjuring Scenius. More than financial speculation, web3 offers a set of tools that can align incentives in ways that allow groups to tap into their communal genius. We’ll focus mainly on web3 in this piece because it fits the Scenius framework so beautifully, but the WAGMI Scenius isn’t limited to web3.

The conditions are ripe for progress, and the culture is coalescing around the same ethos that has defined Scenia of the past, but this time, the whole globe is participating. The outputs are unpredictable, but when all is said and done, I still believe historians will look back at this period as the most productive and creative in human history to date. Plus, the models we develop today might play a critical role in shaping how we govern our new frontiers: space and the Metaverse.

This essay is an attempt to put … gestures broadly at everything … into historical context and guess at where it’s headed. To understand what’s going on, why, how, and how to contribute, we’ll cover:

Deconstructing Scenius
Is This a Scenius?
WAGMI Scenius

Scenius is a vibe -- one of those, “you know it when you see it” things -- but there’s also a framework of exogenous and endogenous factors that nurture scenius and help us identify it.

Deconstructing Scenius

There are two sets of factors that make for a productive Scenius:

Exogenous factors are the pre-conditions, outside of the control of the scene itself.
Endogenous factors are those things the scene does and how it behaves, its rituals and norms.

The first part is luck -- whether the environment is right for Scenius at a given time -- and the second part is what the people in the scene do with that luck to make the most of the opportunity. Let’s start with the Exogenous.

Exogenous Factors

David Banks ended The Problem of Excess Genius with disappointment that so little, well, progress, had been made in understanding why intellectual hot spots appear on the map when and where they do.

Finally, fifteen years later, in a 2012 Wired article, Cultivating Genius, author Johah Lehrer proposed an answer to Banks’ question, citing Nobel Laureate Paul Romer’s work on meta-ideas, or ideas that support the spread of other ideas. He suggests three that have been present in eras of excess genius, like Renaissance Florence and Elizabethan England:

Human Mixing. Past talent clusters were all commercial trading centers, which allowed a diversity of people to share ideas.
Education. Each of the “flourishing cultures” Lehrer examined “pioneered new forms of teaching and learning.” In Florence, it was the rise of the apprentice-master model; in Elizabethan England, it was the government’s effort to educate middle-class males, like William Shakespeare, the son of an illiterate glover.
Institutions that Encourage Risk-Taking. Florence had the Medicis, and “Shakespeare was lucky to have royal support for his odd tragedies.” Wealthy benefactors gave creatives room to flourish. (This one sits between exogenous and endogenous).

In Conjuring Scenius, I tried to add some ingredients to the pot, and one in particular seemed to appear before most of history’s great Scenia: catastrophe.

Take a look:

Ancient Greece followed the Greek Dark Ages, a 350 year period after the collapse of the Bronze Age. You can draw a direct line from World War II to Building 20 at MIT, Bell Labs, and ultimately, Silicon Valley. The Junto came out of the Revolutionary War. The Renaissance emerged from the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the Bubonic Plague. The two above that didn’t emerge from catastrophe rode the momentum from a previous Scenius and used its outputs as building blocks.

Why does Scenius emerge from catastrophe?

For one, catastrophe focuses energy, attention, and talent. The US Government pulled the brightest minds in the nation together to develop new technology to power the war effort, and those technologies, like the transistors that came out of Bell Labs, formed the foundation of Silicon Valley.

Second, crisis shakes and breaks and calls for new solutions. When everything is burnt to the ground, there’s room for new ideas and institutions to grow. Ben Franklin’s Junto created the first volunteer fire company, public library, and philosophical society in the young United States of America, along with the University of Pennsylvania.

Third, catastrophe brings people together in ways that are difficult to accomplish in peacetime. In Tribe, Sebastian Junger wrote:

Disasters, he proposed, create a “community of sufferers” that allows individuals to experience an immensely reassuring connection to others. As people come together to face an existential threat, Fritz found, class differences are temporarily erased, income disparities become irrelevant, race is overlooked, and individuals are assessed simply by what they are willing to do for the group.

Even after the catastrophe ends, there seems to be an afterglow, during which newly-formed channels of collaboration continue to bear fruit.

Those four factors -- human mixing, new educational models, institutions that encourage risk-taking, and catastrophe -- set the stage for Scenius. Then the endogenous factors take over, and it’s up to the scene to make its impact.

Endogenous Factors

A little over a decade after Brian Eno named and defined scenius, Wired’s Kevin Kelly popularized the term in the tech community and put a framework around it. In a 2008 blog post, Scenius, or Communal Genius, Kelly looked at some historical examples and came up with four factors that nurture scenius once it takes root:

Mutual appreciation: Risky moves are applauded by the group, subtlety is appreciated, and friendly competition goads the shy. Scenius can be thought of as the best of peer pressure.
Rapid exchange of tools and techniques: As soon as something is invented, it is flaunted and then shared. Ideas flow quickly because they are flowing inside a common language and sensibility.
Network effects of success: When a record is broken, a hit happens, or breakthrough erupts, the success is claimed by the entire scene. This empowers the scene to further success.
Local tolerance for the novelties: The local “outside” does not push back too hard against the transgressions of the scene. The renegades and mavericks are protected by this buffer zone.

Kelly’s four factors are present in any scenius, from the purely artistic to something as local and specific as Yosemite Park’s Camp 4. In Conjuring Scenius, I added four ingredients that seem to be present in all of the examples of the great Scenia that had a lasting impact on the world. One was emergence from catastrophe, described above, and the remaining three are endogenous factors that can be used to strengthen the Scenius:

Competition: Healthy competition sharpens the blades of new ideas within the safety of the scene, and pushes participants to achieve bigger and better things. The Ancient Greek philosophical schools competed in a “marketplace of ideas,” and competition between Michaelangelo and Leonardo (the artists, not the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles) raised the status of art in culture, and pushed both men to advance the craft.
Place-Based Ritual: A scene needs a setting. The Junto met in a bar, The Inklings in The Eagle and Child Pub, Motown’s artists in Detroit houses, and Renaissance artists in le botteghe. Informal meeting places enable all four of Kelly’s ingredients.
Diversity of Thought and Experience: New ideas form at the intersections of existing ones, and the mashup of people from diverse backgrounds, with diverse thoughts and experiences, provides fodder for the new. This is both an exogenous factor -- diverse people need to be in a certain place at a certain time for their ideas to mix -- and an endogenous one -- the scene needs to be welcoming to new people, ideas, and perspectives.

Those eleven factors -- four exogenous and seven endogenous -- can turn groups of individuals into a Scenius, a community that accomplishes much more, across a range of disciplines, than would otherwise be expected from a group of people with the same talents.

There have certainly been groupings of people as intelligent as those alive in Ancient Greece or Florence during the Renaissance who lived in the same place around the same time; without the right underlying conditions, however, they weren’t able to combine their talents in any way meaningful enough that we remember and build upon their contributions today.

When they are in place, though, magic happens. And they’re in place right now.