Sc3nius

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.

Brian Eno: I became (and still am) more and more convinced that the important changes in cultural history were actually the product of very large numbers of people and circumstances conspiring to make something new. I call this ‘scenius’ - it means ‘the intelligence and intuition of a whole cultural scene’. It is the communal form of the concept of... See more

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

Anish Agnihotri built PartyBid, for example, while a student at the University of Waterloo, and has more demand for his talents than any degree could bring him (he’s now an associate at crypto VC, Paradigm)

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.

The best ideas win, no matter who or where they come from, and those ideas are mashed up and remixed into more and more novel ideas. That’s contributed to an explosion of creativity in the space and will lead to enormous outcomes for the protocols and projects that embrace diverse participants.

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.

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

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.