"Scenius" is a portmanteau of "scene" and "genius" coined by Brian Eno and popularized by Kevin Kelly, Michael Nielsen, and others. A scenius is a time and a place responsible for inordinate technological or cultural progress. Classic examples are Renaissance Florence, 1920s Paris, Silicon Valley in the 1970s, and many others. They can be as large as a city or as small as a group of friends. It's a fuzzy concept like that. On an individual level, a scenius feels like an environment that helps elicit your latent potential. A pithy way to remember it: **if genius comes from your genes, "scenius" comes from your scene**. It's a fundamentally hopeful and empowering idea. The implication is that individual talent is overrated, and that you can achieve greater things by modifying your environment. Sociology, like all social sciences, is delightfully fuzzy and imprecise (well, depending on your perspective). Nevertheless it's fun to speculate about the causal mechanisms of scenius. I have a pet framework for what I believe makes a scenius. I generated it by listing potential factors and "unit testing" each of them. A factor had to be both present and seem material to the success of each of 6 archetypal sceniuses to be included. The 6 scenes are the Inklings, the Impressionists, the Homebrew Hacker Club, Xerox PARC, Steve Brodie's lab lineage, and Renaissance Florence. Then, I tested the counterfactual. If I imagine removing that factor, do I think that scene might still have been successful? If this is true for each of the 6 scenes, then the dimension would pass this test, too. Most of my ideas didn't survive these tests. [Packy McCormick's](https://www.notboring.co/p/sc3nius)'s dimension of "occurs after a crisis", for example, is maybe present in 1 or 2 of these 6 scenes. Another idea that didn't pass is "the presence of great talent scouts", among about a dozen others. Here are the 7 dimensions that did pass: - a creative frontier that is large, relative to the number of people involved (h/t [@michael_nielsen](https://x.com/michael_nielsen) - a contrarian oasis with common knowledge about the adjacent possible - mostly dedicated people: geeks that can't stop creating - peers that empower each other or expand each other's concept of the possible - encouragement to experiment and take risks - a social structure of squads and/or competitive duos - intellectual safety in the innermost circle - channels for going public with their work Again, sociology is such a high-dimensional space that it's difficult to study and impossible to make airtight claims. Nonetheless, I find this list inspiring for the design of the Neighborhood. --- [See this Twitter thread for more context](https://x.com/jasoncbenn/status/1466216535987425281). Resources: - Structure of Scientific Revolutions - Collaborative Circles - Powers of Two (meh) - Organizing Genius (meh) - *Find my own notes on scenius google doc* #Research More notes, from [Kevin Kelly](https://kk.org/thetechnium/scenius-or-comm/): ![[Pasted image 20240606131852.png]] Some [back of the napkin math by Michael Nielsen](https://github.com/mnielsen/finding_scenius/blob/master/finding_scenius.md): ![[Pasted image 20240606132033.png]]