Stripe press could provide low touch support to a community of frontier openers

It is feasible to consciously cultivate a scene of frontier openers

Long lived organizations need culture keepers

Scenes have low barriers to entry

Xerox PARC was not that impressive as an institution

# §Scenes
- [[Scenes are people producing work aimed at impressing and one-upping each other]]
- [[Scenes form around a shared sense of what is celebration-worthy]]
- [[Scenes push the edge of human capability]]
- [[World-class cities do not necessarily have world-class scenes]]
- [[A Florence is a city with multiple world-class scenes]]
- [[Scenes push the edge of human capability]]
- [[Effective scenes are smaller than Dunbar’s number]]
- [[A scene is world-class if people who want to do new ambitious things in a discipline try to join it from around the world]]
- [[A minimum viable scene can be created by two people]]
- [[A scene can become world class when it goes from doing things that are locally new to things that are globally new]]
- Scenes are susceptible to [[Legibility poisoning]]
- [[Scenes form around a shared sense of what is celebration-worthy]]

### Related
-

### References
- [[Visa thread on scenes]]
- [[Geeks, Mops, and sociopaths in subculture evolution]]
- [[Taste for Makers - PG]]
- [[What makes a scene with Alex Danco]]
- [[Third Places as community builder]]
- [[Visakan Veerasamy]]’s notes on scenes: [Roam Research – A note taking tool for networked thought.](https://roamresearch.com/#/app/visakanv-public/page/IAfI_5S9h)



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Geeks, Mops, and sociopaths in subculture evolution

Scenes are people producing work aimed at impressing and one-upping each other

§Scenes

Visa thread on scenes

What made Florence a Florence?

Any conversation can be a conference

What makes a Florence stop being a Florence?

# A minimum viable scene can be created by two people
### Authors
- [[Visakan Veersamy]]
### Link
[Visakan Veerasamy on Twitter: “what’s a minimum viable scene?if you have two sufficiently obsessive people who are trying to impress and outdo each other in public, two is enoughbut usually it seems that it takes a broader/wider scene to generate 2 such obsessive people… https://t.co/Y5snVVcQWE”](https://twitter.com/visakanv/status/1153708306206035968)
 
  

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Legibility forces you to fall back on conventional framings which causes you to think about the thing in a conventional way

Computing has become more stochastic over time and chemistry and biology need to become less stochastic

# Any conversation can be a conference
`Yes. A key difference between these two models is that in academia, the small-group workshops may not be open-invitation, but they are (usually) not secret, and they produce publications. That seems better.`
https://twitter.com/andy_matuschak/status/1388854060841906181

It’s fine for a conference to be invite only, but the trick is that the results need to be disseminated and published. I don’t see why a great conversation couldn’t be similar. `Proceedings of conversation between X and Y on $DATE`. Yes, it would absolutely take more work than not producing some kind of artifact and often sensitive things are discussed in 1-1 conversations so there would need to be a social tool to make sure that everybody approves of the output. 

In the same way that [[A minimum viable scene can be created by two people]]. In fact, this may be a way to kick-start a scene by giving people a bit of a window into what’s going on behind the scenes. Otherwise, in scenes that aren’t devoted to producing legible artifacts (like music or art) the loudest, most legible people tend to dominate.

Publishing results of a conversation solves some of the tension between the fact that scenes need ‘open entrance’ to be healthy[^1] but at the same time open discussions tend to suck. < [[Fully open online discussions are low quality because of trust and context]]>.

### Related
- [[Cross-disciplinary real research conferences are underdone]]
- [[Heretical scientists and cryptoacademics are natural allies]]
- [[Treat people as nodes and artifacts as edges]]
- [[Fully open online discussions are low quality because of trust and context]]

[^1]: This podcast with [[Alex Danco]] gives some good case studies about how this dynamic worked in the NYC music scene: [Alex Danco - Makes A Scene (EP.39) | Infinite Loops](https://t.co/baoQG39PFn?amp=1). 

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Intergenerational culture is like a standing wave

How often do people realize a Florence while it is still a Florence?

Legibility poisoning

Culture is what happens when you're not in the room

Florences pull in people of multiple disciplines

# Geeks, Mops, and sociopaths in subculture evolution
- Subcultures die when they start getting interesting because they are invaded by outsiders who ruin them.
- Calls the outsiders “muggles”
- Outsiders are either mops or sociopaths
- This was influenced by [[The Gervais Principle]]
- Subcultures grow from scenes
- Scene is a group of creators who invent a New Thing
- The group of creators riff off of each other in a scene
- Scenes draw fanatics
- Fanatics don’t create but contribute energy and resources
- Creators and fanatics are geeks - they love the thing for the thing’s sake
- The scene often draws mops
- Mops are fans who want to get as much out of a scene while contributing as little as possible
- Mops turn a scene into a subculture
- Mops dilute a culture
- Mops can cause fanatics to quit
- Creators in a subculture generate social capital 
- Sociopaths mimic the creators but better
- Sociopaths fool the mops and monetize them
- If a creator can give the New Thing mass appeal they can escape the trap
- From pure social value the cycles are good because there are many more mops
- Ways of excluding mops can save the subculture but keeps it niche
- Optimal mop to geek ratio is 6:1
- Recognize sociopaths and eject them
- Subcultural mode died around 2000
- Geeks need to adopt some sociopathic tendencies
### Published
## Questions
## Thoughts
## Related
- [[Scenes are people producing work aimed at impressing and one-upping each other]]
- [[A minimum viable scene can be created by two people]]
- [[Visa thread on scenes]]
## Authors
- [[David Chapman]]
## Link
https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths



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Scenes push the edge of human capability

Maverick work is lonely and DARPA provides peers and community

Could you build a community the same way you build a zettlekasten?

Podcast List

David Lang conversation 20 Apr 2021

# Scenes are people producing work aimed at impressing and one-upping each other
A direct result of this is that [[Scenes form around a shared sense of what is celebration-worthy]]. The only way that 

One-upmanship has a nuanced relationship to competition. It is certainly a form of competition — there’s an inextricable sense of comparison in oneupmanship and I would argue even the

### Related
- The bloomsbury group 
	- [Visakan Veerasamy on Twitter: “I don’t usually think of John Maynard Keynes and Virginia Woolf at the same time, but they were basically twitter mutuals. Shame you can’t just search from:keynes woolf to see what their correspondences were like https://t.co/EPqSjShQcS… https://t.co/n7jxscUmWu”](https://twitter.com/visakanv/status/1250414684215234563)
- [[By definition outlier analysis can’t rely on data as comparison to other organizations]]
- [[What made Florence a Florence?]]
- [[A players hire A players and B players hire C players]]
- [[Why will people become PARPA PMs?]]
- [[A scene is world-class if people who want to do new ambitious things in a discipline try to join it from around the world]]
- [[A minimum viable scene can be created by two people]]
- [[Scenes push the edge of human capability]]
- [[Scenes form around a shared sense of what is celebration-worthy]]



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# Visa thread on scenes
- [[Scenes are people producing work aimed at impressing and one-upping each other]]
- [[A minimum viable scene can be created by two people]]

### Thoughts
[[Effective scenes are smaller than Dunbar’s number]]
### Related
- [[A minimum viable scene can be created by two people]]
### Link
[Visa is fixing the typos in his ebook on Twitter: “one of my recurring talking points to anybody who’s willing to listen: any small group of people loosely-but-truly aligned on something can create powerful vectors by producing public-facing work that’s directed at each othertalking about the creation of scenes, basically”](https://twitter.com/visakanv/status/1153706486586994688)

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§Florences

# What made Florence a Florence?
# What made Florence a Florence
What made Florence so absurdly productive during the 15th century?
ie. What made Paris the center of culture during the 19th century?

- [[People who aspire to  be world-class flock to do groundbreaking things  flock to Florences once they become well known]]
- [[A Florence is a location in time and space]]
- [[A Florence is a city with multiple world-class scenes]]
- [[Florences pull in people of multiple disciplines]]
- [[Florences are sticky]]
- [[Florences require a world-class high-profit discipline and a world-class cultural discipline]]
- [[A city can become a Florence multiple times]]

There’s also a sense that places are primary in something and secondary in other things. For example, LA and NYC feel secondary in tech industries but equally primary in fashion. 

### Case Studies from the present
Let’s think about the exceptional places in the world today and why people wanted to go there.
- San Francisco is the center of the software industry and weird discursive projects. World class people who want to build software, fund software, and collaborate with weird people do. Locally, Berkeley and Stanford both pull in world-class academics who has an interest in commercializing things. 
	- It pattern matches against the high margin industry leading to people donating to universities
	- The tech billionaire version of patronizing might be angel investing
- Los Angeles pulls in world class people who want to be part of the fashion industry (is this true?) and movie, tv, and content production industry generally.
	- Do world class technology people go there?
- New York pulls in world class people in Finance, Writing, Theater, Music, Art (is this still true? Probably in Brooklyn), Fashion, 
	- How important are the colleges 
	- Julliard seems important 
	- It pulls 
- London pulls in world class people in Finance, technology, cooking, 
	- It  feels like the proximity
- Boston for people in biotech, academic minded research people 

### Case Studies from the Past
- Amsterdam in the 17th century?
- Tokyo in the 1980’s?
- Prague at some point?
- Vienna in early 20th century
- Edenborough during the 18th Century
	- Smith
	- Hume
	- Hobbes
- Athens in 2nd Century AD

### Observations from cursory Case Studies

- None of these places seem to pull in people for manufacturing but many got their start doing that
- Being centers of trade seems really important

Is the fact that these places tend to center around industries a cause or an effect or both? The industry clusters may also be an artifact of how I’m defining “world class” because I think of world class as people who want to be the best at what they do.  Thinking more it’s how I perceive these people’s decision making process around somewhere being “the place to be” without sacrificing their careers.

In the early 21st century, it feels like there are many world-class cities but San Francisco

- [[A Florence needs accessible low-cost-of-living lifestyles]]
- [[Florences are going to have a lot of inequality]]

### Research Questions
- [[Has anybody studied what made Paris Paris?]]
- [[How often do people realize a Florence while it is still a Florence?]]
- [[Why do people go to a Florence?]]
- [[What is the difference between a Florence and simply a ‘top city?’]]
- What are other historical examples of places?
	
- Is there something in the nature of the high margin industry? ie. Silk was probably a high Margin industry but you didn’t see a cultural center there
- I wonder if the people who did the research for civilization V would know more
- Are there necessary cultural preconditions or does it change? [[Culture is intellectual dark energy]]
- Are they always coupled to a specific new thing?
- Has anybody mapped the top cities over time?
- Could you strictly look at net immigration to a city? High-skilled immigration?

### Related
- [[A minimum viable scene can be created by two people]] and the idea of scenes in general. 



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A Florence is a location in time and space

# What makes a Florence stop being a Florence?
# What makes a Florence stop being a Florence
Two hypotheses are the classic stories about being killed by your own success.  One has to do with increased risk aversion and one has to do with dilution.

### The Risk Aversion Story
1. [[A Florence is a city with multiple world-class scenes]] and [[Scenes push the edge of human capability]] so Florences at first are coming out with crazy new things.
2. These scenes will necessarily be experimenting, taking risks, and failing. [[To make new things you need to take risks]] ([[Safi Bahcall on Why You Need to Take Crazy Risks]]) 
3. Once the scenes become *recognized* as world class, the expectations on them will increase.
4. The intense pressure to produce amazing things will cause risk aversion and kill new-thing creation.  The Florence will become a franchise. ([[Innovators and franchisees]]).
5. Once a Florence becomes a franchise, it is no longer a Florence - it’s just a world-class city. ([[World-class cities do not necessarily have world-class scenes]])

### The Dilution Story
1. [[A Florence is a city with multiple world-class scenes]]   - at first these scenes are small ([[A minimum viable scene can be created by two people]] and [[Effective scenes are smaller than Dunbar’s number]].) 
2. But [[A scene is world-class if people who want to do new ambitious things in a discipline try to join it from around the world]] so obviously more people will continue to join the scenes. 
3. This can go on for a while - the scenes can split and create new scenes, the core scene can ignore the extra people.
4. At some point though, the scenes may get overwhelmed by scenesters and the city stops being a Florence but instead is just a World-class city. [[World-class cities do not necessarily have world-class scenes]]

### The External Factor Story
There’s also a story where factors external to the nature of The Florence are what cause it to stop being a Florence. If [[Florences require a world-class high-profit discipline and a world-class cultural discipline]] is true, Economic forces that kill the world-class high-profit discipline will also kill the Florence. 

These need case studies 



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Benʼs working notes

A minimum viable scene can be created by two people

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Link

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