The Future Belongs to the Scenius

What I love about the idea of scenius is that it makes room in the story of creativity for the rest of us: the people who don’t consider ourselves geniuses. Being a valuable part of a scenius is not necessarily about how smart or talented you are, but about what you have to contribute—the ideas you share, the quality of the connections you make, an... See more

Scenius is like genius, only embedded in a scene rather than in genes. Brian Eno suggested the word to convey the extreme creativity that groups, places or “scenes” can occasionally generate. His actual definition is: “Scenius stands for the intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene. It is the communal form of the concept of the geni... See more

The stories our culture tells about creativity almost always concern individuals: think Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein, Kanye West. These stories are tempting because they are simple, because they appeal to our veneration for individualism, because we love our heroes. We have very few models for storytelling that concern small groups of people, or ent... See more