Sc3nius

Web3 is different than previous Scenia in a lot of ways, but maybe the biggest is that it began its life with money baked in. While other Scenia proposed radical new ideas, it was easier for them to hide away, for a while at least, and not draw authorities’ attention. Not so for web3.

Web3 is cooperative, and it’s also competitive. It’s fueled by positive-sum competition

Less focus on credentials and more focus on doing the work means that the participants in a new scenius will potentially skew younger, infusing new creativity and energy into the scene, and blurring the lines between work and play.

I had a vague idea that web3 was at the core of a new Scenius when I started researching this piece, but what I didn’t appreciate is that web3 seems to be a toolkit for conjuring Scenius. More than financial speculation, web3 offers a set of tools that can align incentives in ways that allow groups to tap into their communal genius.

We live in exceptionally rare times. We’re a part of the first global, internet-native Scenius.

When it is all said and done, I believe that historians will look back at the Coronavirus pandemic as the greatest catalyst for progress and creativity in human history.

Throughout history, a handful of time-place combinations have punched so far above their weight in terms of contribution to human progress that their existence befuddled academics.

we’re in the middle of a Holy Grail Scenius: global instead of local, with the internet as the scene, bound only by time but no longer by space.

Those four factors -- human mixing, new educational models, institutions that encourage risk-taking, and catastrophe -- set the stage for Scenius.