Sorrel Salb

In 1997, historian David Banks argued in “The Problem of Excess Genius” that, “The most important question we can ask of historians is ‘Why are some periods and places so astonishingly more productive than the rest?’" 

1. Mutual respect and appreciation.  The first and possibly most important condition of collaboration. When departments even appear to be in opposition, the conditions for scenius collapse quickly.


2. Rapid exchange of tools and techniques.  At the heart of the open-source software movement is Github, where coders share

The Eagle and Child played host to scenius , the major driving force behind much of the world’s progress. It is possible that future historians will write the same thing about The Hype House. It is difficult to realize in the moment when and where communal genius strikes, but identifying a potential scenius and nurturing it has the potential to

But today, you don’t have to live in California, Manhattan or Paris to find your people. You don’t even have to live in the same town or street of your people.

Look at  Austin Kleon , Lisa Congdon, Wendy MacNaughton,  Maria Popova , Oliver Jeffers,  Amanda Palmer …  Tim Ferriss ,  Ryan Holiday ,  Chase Jarvis ,  Seth Godin ,  Ramit

Scenia do not start fully-formed. Instead, they evolve through three stages: communities, micro-scenia, and scenia. 

Community: a group of people living in the same place or having a particular characteristic in common; a feeling of fellowship with others, as a result of sharing common attitudes, interests, and goals.

Examples: early personal

Zooming out though, The Hype House is part of a millennia-old tradition of collaboration among those at the avant-garde of new forms of media, technology, and thought. Outsiders like me have always dismissed the novel as silly, faddish, or worse. When those inside the cutting-edge scenes band together to support, teach, and create with each other,

In Eno’s words: “If genius is the creative intelligence of an individual, Scenius is the creative intelligence of a group.”

Looking backwards, it’s striking how unevenly distributed progress has been in the past...the discoveries that came to elevate standards of living for everyone arose in comparatively tiny geographic pockets of innovative effort.