Scenes and Villages

I don't believe in intentional communities. They all happen by accident. But there are at least two kinds of accidents.

One kind is the village. You're born into it. There are aunties and dentists and storekeepers and bookish sons of family friends and gossips and nerds and basics and pranksters and legends and dead people and teacher-coaches and scolds and mystics and husbands and pals. Casseroles materialize when they're needed. People tell you to turn left where the gas station used to be.

Another kind is the scene. You stumble into it. You tell each other you've found your tribe. It coalesces in some area of a trendy city. A culture magazine puts out a lengthy piece tracing the scene's origin in a forum post from 2006 all the way up through the drama surrounding its upcoming annual convention in Phoenix. People appear, have arcs, leave. Third spaces crop up to faciliate all the parallel hero's journeys. Whatever defines the subculture – surfing, slam poetry, algoraves, DJing psytrance, standup comedy, longevity research, collecting anime body pillows – is something you can be good at and get better at, so everyone tries to. (In a village, what are you going to be ambitious at, being a person?) Teenage prodigies come and go. There's a mysterious forty-year-old who's been around forever. Your ex's ex is dating your roommate's sublettor, who's from a country you'd never known anyone from before. You met the Famous Guy once.

Scenes, especially when they grow up and develop infrastructure for everyone to live together and hang out together and work together, are marketed in the language of villages. Instead of a set of individual friends, you get a human web. You sacrifice the optionality of independence in order to weave yourself into a fabric. In lieu of a shared set of formative experiences, it's shared interest that ties the web together. And you can become relevant in a scene, work your way up, become a known figure, the way you can be in a village.

And yet. Scenes and villages have characteristics in common, but one is not the other, structurally. In a way, every village is the same; each scene occupies a distinct locale within the broader culture. But within every village, you get the normal range of personality, while scenes constitute the result of one personality thread repeated again and again and again.

Scenes are productive. They "empirically work to produce absurd miracles". They have short, blazing lifespans, attracting the people at the extreme of a particular combination of traits and amplifying them against each other to spray outsize returns everywhere. If you're pointy on some trait – and many people are – or if you're ambitious, or both, going to live among similar people is a simple way to propel yourself. The standards are higher. The tacit knowledge transmits on the breeze. You're surrounded, held, by the thing you care about.

But every scene suffers from the absence of the traits it selects against. The paucity of old people and children is common across most scenes. But each has its own vices, too. A common one is an undersupply of people who serve as social glue; scenes are often peopled by nerds or quasi-nerds, because they so heavily reward singleminded intensity of interest. But failure modes abound. An artsy or anarchist scene can end up unable to organize or coordinate groups or maintain physical infrastructure. A libertarian scene that prizes independence can fail to achieve the communitarian ties required for people to coexist in peace. A tech scene can throw party after party with no music, the vibe foundering for lack of the two or three hyperextroverts needed to imbue a gathering with life. A leftist scene bringing together all the most conscientious activists can collapse under internal policing. In an economy, you can fill in the social gaps using payment – gold miners are quickly followed by sellers of pickaxes. But you can’t outsource most social functions, because they have to be done by people who want to be in the scene anyway. Unless they’re hopelessly brain-drained, villages don’t have this problem. The natural range of human variation is enough to robustly sustain the functions of community.

(The product of the scene, cultural or tangible, can also meet with uncomfortable friction as it integrates into the broader culture, because a scene isn't a representative sample of human experience. It's like an ecosystem with only one animal. And so as the scene develops and becomes more self-contained, it becomes increasingly self-referential and loses groundedness.)

The thing you have to overcome to live in a village is boredom and complacence. Maybe that’s why so many people leave and then come back, or settle into a different village for the long haul. It’s harder without a strong sense of who you are. When you need to be molded, a village won’t do it for you. A scene will yank you in the direction of its Thing. Then you can see the ways you are built for the scene and aren’t, perhaps run through a couple different ones, and then land back in town once you’ve gotten the contours of your character formed. One thing it’s useful to pick up from a scene is ambition. But it’s difficult to sustain world-changing ambition for an extended time without living in the actual world, as opposed to a rarefied incubator.

I suspect great cities have both scenes and villages; scenes as exports, villages to keep the city human and anchor it in time, beyond the volatile epicycles of scenes. College campuses are an illustrative in-between example: their students are selected, not born, and no one stays there forever. But everyone does stay there for four years, which is pretty long for people that age. So if you're the one hand-picking the class, do you shoot for a village – a balanced mix of characters? Or for a scene – a collection of self-amplifying extremes? In practice, almost every school goes for the village approach, which is perhaps the best of both worlds: a group selected to be elite, but not homogenous. The trap to avoid here is picking a group of generic strivers who aren't actually excited enough about any one thing to adopt scenelike behaviors around it; then you get the worst of both worlds instead. But perhaps the optimum is out there.

The spirit of the village is the spirit of Humanity; the spirit of the scene is the spirit of The Thing. "There's no place in the world like this," people say in scenes; they're right. Would you rather be in a place like no other or a place that contains every other?