NSmolenskiFan on Nostr: The criticality of serendipity in spurring creativity and innovation is why the ...
The criticality of serendipity in spurring creativity and innovation is why the development of a “scene” is the one of the most important contributors to rapid progress in any human endeavor. A “scene” is much bigger than whether people work remotely or in an office; it is the social condition of possibility for rapid breakthroughs that create cultural inflection points.
“Scenes” are not architected top-down, but emerge as a result of both intentional and unintentional incentives that draw people to self-select into communities that are doing something similar, exciting, and hard together. Success builds on success, attracting more talent over time.
Scenes are communities of purpose and doing; while people in them may have cultural similarities, they are not identity communities. They are *about* something that participants in a scene can feel, even if they can’t describe it.
Scenes are extraordinarily economically generative, and financial incentives may be a part of the incentive structure that brings them about, but the sense of purpose that gives a scene its vitality is not primarily financial. Scenes are characterized first and foremost by a sense of purpose that far exceeds any straightforwardly or immediately measurable outcome.
Scenes tend to attract grifters and performers who replace actual generativity with its illusion. These may be governments looking to collect rents, investors wanting to squeeze every last bit of profit out of a generative venture, and an endless retinue of hangers-on wanting to “ride the train” as long as it’s moving. Even some of the most generative and original contributors to scenes can become captured by their own success, becoming grifters and performers themselves. These are predatory forces that drain the life out of scenes.
The other main reason that scenes die is that people participating in them usually don’t have a good account of why they happened in the first place. This means they often make poor executive decisions: trying to control the scene or “keep it going” through magical thinking or heavy-handed intervention. Instead of prioritizing purpose—“what is the next calling or endeavor that I can now devote myself to that is only possible because of the breakthroughs generated by the last scene?”—they prioritize nostalgia, “keeping the band together,” or otherwise trying to replicate the past.
The only thing that “keeps a scene going,” in other words, is keeping alive the devoted, purpose-driven, productive but unpredictable and risky conditions of its origination. A scene that is alive keeps generating new scenes out of itself; it reinvents itself in ways that it cannot predict or imagine in advance.
The scene is the condition of “serendipity.”
“Scenes” are not architected top-down, but emerge as a result of both intentional and unintentional incentives that draw people to self-select into communities that are doing something similar, exciting, and hard together. Success builds on success, attracting more talent over time.
Scenes are communities of purpose and doing; while people in them may have cultural similarities, they are not identity communities. They are *about* something that participants in a scene can feel, even if they can’t describe it.
Scenes are extraordinarily economically generative, and financial incentives may be a part of the incentive structure that brings them about, but the sense of purpose that gives a scene its vitality is not primarily financial. Scenes are characterized first and foremost by a sense of purpose that far exceeds any straightforwardly or immediately measurable outcome.
Scenes tend to attract grifters and performers who replace actual generativity with its illusion. These may be governments looking to collect rents, investors wanting to squeeze every last bit of profit out of a generative venture, and an endless retinue of hangers-on wanting to “ride the train” as long as it’s moving. Even some of the most generative and original contributors to scenes can become captured by their own success, becoming grifters and performers themselves. These are predatory forces that drain the life out of scenes.
The other main reason that scenes die is that people participating in them usually don’t have a good account of why they happened in the first place. This means they often make poor executive decisions: trying to control the scene or “keep it going” through magical thinking or heavy-handed intervention. Instead of prioritizing purpose—“what is the next calling or endeavor that I can now devote myself to that is only possible because of the breakthroughs generated by the last scene?”—they prioritize nostalgia, “keeping the band together,” or otherwise trying to replicate the past.
The only thing that “keeps a scene going,” in other words, is keeping alive the devoted, purpose-driven, productive but unpredictable and risky conditions of its origination. A scene that is alive keeps generating new scenes out of itself; it reinvents itself in ways that it cannot predict or imagine in advance.
The scene is the condition of “serendipity.”