We are in the midst of the largest global crisis since World War II, and we need to be prepared to rebuild from it together. This essay is my attempt to provide historical perspective on scenius and a toolkit for conjuring it from the raw materials in place today: talented people united by a shared mission in an environment that demands progress.
Zooming out though, 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.
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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. It is here, on Tuesday mornings, that C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and the other members of The Inklings of Oxford met to read, discuss, and critique each other's work.
The Inklings of Oxford are part of a long tradition of scenia. 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. The similarities among them, however, remain criminally underexplored. This essay is my attempt to change that.
My belief in the power of groups is so strong that I formed a metascenius of people interested in the topic to help write this essay. Their contributions are largely invisible throughout the essay but they have been tremendously impactful in its formation.
By the end of the essay, it is my hope that you will view the Coronavirus pandemic as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to move the world forward. You will leave equipped with inspiration and a toolkit that you can use as an Archimedes lever to move the world.
It seems incredible that The Inklings produced three of the best-selling fantasy series of all time within an eighteen-year period from a small bar in a small town in a small country. But interestingly, history is full of such logic-defying combinations of place and time.
This is not an uncommon question. More recently, in their call for a New Science of Progress, Tyler Cowen, an economics professor at George Mason University and author of the popular blog Marginal Revolution, and Patrick Collison, the CEO of Stripe, pointed out that:
Community: a group of people living in the same place or having a particular characteristic in common; a feeling of fellowship with others, as a result of sharing common attitudes, interests, and goals.
Community, micro-scenius, and scenius represent three distinct phases that a group passes through. Nurturing scenius means helping a group move through the funnel from community, to micro-scenius, and then scenius.
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. No two scenia look the same; their similarity lies in the lasting transformational effect they have on the areas in which they contribute.
Throughout history, the communities that advanced through the funnel and became scenia have influenced technology, art, literature, philosophy, mathematics, and medicine in ways that we still benefit from today.
The Coronavirus pandemic has been catastrophic in myriad ways: loss of life, record unemployment, quarantine at unprecedented scale. Like any major crisis, it also represents an opportunity. In his book, The Obstacle is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Adversity to Advantage, author Ryan Holiday wrote:
You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. Things that we had postponed for too long, that were long-term, are now immediate and must be dealt with. [A] crisis provides the opportunity for us to do things that you could not do before.
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. Could these tools, processes, and norms enable us to generate the creative buzz that comes from working together in the same place no matter where we are? Put differently, might Animal Crossing play host to communal genius just as The Eagle and Child did nearly 100 years ago?
The Coronavirus pandemic has the potential to create even more impactful progress because this is the first major crisis to strike indiscriminately across country, class, and creed since the internet has become a credible replacement for many in-person interactions.
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.
Kevin Kelly, the founding editor of WiredMagazine and one of the leading writers on the intersection of culture and technology, was the first person to attempt to understand the ingredients that make up a scenius. He looked at historical examples and listed four factors that nurture scenius in a piece from 2008:
On the first, I agree that it is impossible to command a particular scenius into being without the right underlying conditions in place. As an example, he points to the many cities that have unsuccessfully poured resources into becoming the next Silicon Valley.
On the second, I agree that you cannot bring a scenius, fully-formed, into the world. 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.
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.
Since the Coronavirus pandemic will necessitate new ways of doing nearly everything - how we gather, work, learn, create, transact, and more - the stakes for understanding how to conjure scenius are high.
Will there be a suburban migration as a result of COVID? Our survey respondents were split in their predictions, but with a narrow lead, 57% believed there will not be a noticeable migration out of cities within the next 5 years
Bye office, hello offices? Only 19% of respondents think that former office workers will go back to working entirely in an office after COVID. Instead, 61% believe that office workers will work in more than one location, either primarily based at home or at an office
On Thursday, I\u2019ll write a short (I\u2019ll try!) e-mail on what I\u2019ve learned over the past year and where the newsletter is heading over the next one. In the interim, I recorded a conversation with Sid Jha, who writes Sunday Snapshots, about what each of us has learned in our first year writing.
We\u2019re all about optimism here at Not Boring, and my essay on scenius is no exception: I believe that the Coronavirus will be the catalyst for world-shaping progress by pushing the smartest people in the world to work together to tackle global scale problems. Crisis will lead to scenius.
Even if you haven\u2019t heard the term scenius, you know examples of it well: Ancient Greece, Renaissance Florence, Silicon Valley, and many more groups, big and small, that have come together to push the world forward.
This topic became more important and urgent halfway through my writing it. Most of history\u2019s great scenia have followed periods of tragedy, unrest, and destruction. Crisis is a giant reset button. It stops the inertia that pulls us comfortably along and makes us realize that there is more work to be done. New challenges present new opportunities.
I\u2019ll be honest. This essay is the hardest time I\u2019ve ever had writing. It\u2019s a massive, sprawling topic, and it was a challenge to wrangle it all into one essay. I\u2019ve gone through countless drafts, many of which were downright bad. Without the contributions of Tom White, my editor for this essay, and of Mike Madonna, Maria P, the other Write of Passage fellows, and the many others who shared inputs, wrote sections, and provided feedback, I would have either quit or given in and published something that didn\u2019t do the topic justice.
At 11,879 words, this is the longest essay I\u2019ve ever written by a wide margin, and it certainly doesn\u2019t fit in this e-mail (nor would you want to read it all in your inbox). I\u2019ve included an excerpt in the e-mail, and a link to read the entire essay below it. 152ee80cbc
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