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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Intergenerational culture is like a standing wave

Culture is intellectual dark energy

PARPA needs a constitution with checks and balances

Pay attention to DARPA’s informal process and ignore formal process

Company as a Team of Adults Working Together to Achieve a Shared Goal

# Culture is what happens when you're not in the room
In other words, culture is the emergent behavior that happens in the interactions between individuals in an organization. It’s a complex and you can control some of its inputs but not its state.

Don’t remember where this is from - maybe [[Daniel Khaneman]]

### Related
- [[Organizations always have two cultures]]
- [[Intergenerational culture is like a standing wave]]
- [[Culture is intellectual dark energy]]
- [[As a culture we are hedging our bets]]
- [[Geeks, Mops, and sociopaths in subculture evolution]]



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§Florences

# Florences pull in people of multiple disciplines
Florences pull in people of multiple disciplines because [[A Florence is a city with multiple world-class scenes]]. People want to be part of the scene so they go to the city.  ([[Geeks, Mops, and sociopaths in subculture evolution]]  ) People will only go to the place if they know about the scene so this is true only at a certain point in the city’s evolution. 

~~Hong Kong~~ and Singapore are currently a place where world-class Finance people want to go but people of other disciplines are pretty meh on them. 

### Case Studies
Paris and Florence were places that pulled world class people in multiple disciplines. Florence pulled artists, inventors, merchants, writers. Paris pulled in artists, inventors, chefs. 

A repeated pattern seems to be that [[Florences require a world-class high-profit discipline and a world-class cultural discipline]]

### Questions
- Are there counterexamples to this?
	- Are there examples where we think of somewhere as being a Florence but it is monodisciplyinary?
	- Are there examples where somewhere pulls in multiple disciplines but we don

### Related



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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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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

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

### Related
- [[Geeks, Mops, and sociopaths in subculture evolution]]

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The default state of an institution is to become a permanent thing dedicated to its own self preservation

DARPA Program managers have a tenure of four to five years

Employee-ownership could enable PARPA to align long-term incentives

Universities are able to maintain relevance because they are forced to reinvent themselves for new generations of students

Could you design incentives so everyone had skin-in-the-game around institutional purpose and mission?

An endowment that funds operations out of the interest on a large principle seems like the ideal funding mechanism for a a private ARPA

Externalized research is a buffer against B players

The Value of Vision in Radical Technological Innovation

How are Universities so institutionally and culturally stable?

NSF and DARPA as Models for Research Funding - An Institutional Analysis

DARPA Staff are Important

ICT Distillation

ICT Outline

# Intergenerational culture is like a standing wave
A standing wave is a curious physical phenomenon where instead of rushing forward with the water that it comprises, the structure of the wave stands still while water flows ever forward.[^1] [Here’s a video of a standing wave to get the picture in your mind.](https://youtu.be/vrfvhs0aFko?t=5)

Like a standing wave, intergenerational institutional culture maintains the same shape despite different people passing through and being shaped by it. <[[Institutions shape how individuals interact]]>. Most institutions that maintain long-term cultural continuity seem to have developed this phenomena.  

Coherent intergenerational culture feels like one of the hallmarks of institutions that stay relevant for significant chunks of time. It’s likely worth digging into how strong intergenerational culture works if you care about building long-term institutions. [[Alexander Rose]] seems to have done some good work here. There’s of course a question of causality <[[Counterfactuals are hard]]>, but I suspect that even if strong intergenerational cultures don’t directly add to institutional longevity, the actions you need to take to create an intergenerational culture will contribute to institutional longevity (and cultural consistency is just aesthetically appealing for some of us!)

Counterintuitively, cultures where people have a shorter tenure may maintain coherence longer. You can observe this phenomena in research labs staffed mostly by grad students, DARPA, and British-style university house systems (think Harry Potter) to name a few.[^2] In many these cases, cultural coherence has lasted more than half a century. One reason for this may be that short tenures mean that the organization is forced to refresh itself to get new people more often and in turn those people refresh the organization. [[Universities are able to maintain relevance because they are forced to reinvent themselves for new generations of students]]. Contrast to organizations that feel like they’ve outlived their usefulness — they’re characterized by sitting in a niche that doesn’t change much and bureaucracy. The latter point is crucial because [[Bureaucracies are human algorithms]], so people are fungible and you don’t need to update to appeal to them — you just get people who want a paycheck. 

[[Marissa Weichman]] independently asserted that the transient nature of graduate students also makes people want to make the most of their time. 

### Questions

Is it possible to tease out shared attributes? 

What are the things that enable it?
- Explicit culture building 
- Exclusivity 
- Culture keepers
- A way to update to new contexts

It’s also worth asking, what are organizations with the most robust cultures?

Is it important to have a few people who have been around for a long time so that the cultural wave behaves like a [[Small world networks]] in time?  [[Long lived organizations need culture keepers]]

### Related
- [[Culture is intellectual dark energy]]
- [[Culture is what happens when you're not in the room]]
- [[Geeks, Mops, and sociopaths in subculture evolution]]
- [[Many DARPA Programs are multigenerational]]
- [[The data of long lived institutions]]

[^1]:<sidenote> For completeness it’s important to note that standing waves can happen in many materials besides water and don’t always involve flows (like when they happen in strings or air.)  
[^2]: Weirdly, people tend to stick around for an average of ~4-5 years in all of these examples. Coincidence? 🤔 [[Human timescales]]



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The ability to pull funding is a clear reason to ‘black box projects’

Institutions either make things more legible or act as trust brokers

The purpose of the Scientific Paper system is to generate legible artifacts of work, award credit for them, and direct funding towards generating more legible artifacts

Legislation destroys nebulosity

Andy Matuschak Conversation 9 May 2021

Legible novelty is the worst

Tamara Winter convoversation 19 May 2021

# Legibility poisoning
Too much legibility can kill a new idea or scene, especially early on in its life. 

Legibility creates clearly defined edges and creating clearly defined edges on an idea or concept can stifle its further growth as people can confidently assert “this is what this thing is!”

Legibility makes it easier to make a claim on an idea. With many people laying claim to it, any shifting in the ideas becomes similar to decisions by a committee. [[Decisions made by committees lead to median results]]. 

On the scene front, legibility just makes it easier for people to get in, which can lead to the phenomena described in [[Geeks, Mops, and sociopaths in subculture evolution]].  Remember, [[Effective scenes are smaller than Dunbar’s number]].  

[[Making a thing legible puts it at risk of social destruction]].

[[Legible games enable people outside of an institution to control it]]

Too much legibility disavows the importance of [[Tacit Knowledge]]. ([[Tacit knowledge feels opposed to Aristotelian legibility]]). In situations where tacit knowledge is actually critical this can mean death.

On the flipside [[In order to extend a heuretic it must be legible to you]]. The synthesis might be that [[Legibility is not an inherent property of a thing — it always involves a subject and an object]]. That is, legibility isn’t a binary thing: the trick is to make the ‘right’ things legible to the ‘right’ people. 

### Related 
- 


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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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The Michael Scott Theory of Social Class

# The Gervais Principle
Book by [[Venkatesh Rao]]

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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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Benʼs working notes

Geeks, Mops, and sociopaths in subculture evolution

Published

Questions

Thoughts

Related

Authors

Link

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