> (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.)
Building a Scene means developing technical jargon and internal axioms which are taken for granted by most in the Scene - e.g. an x-risk researcher considers x-risk as the biggest problem facing humanity. It can be impossible or very difficult to communicate with someone deep in a Scene because of the need to do a nested unpacking of the concepts. "groundedness" is interesting because it's so perspective dependent. Free soloist climbers consider the risk of falling from unroped climbing to be an acceptable tradeoff, many would consider this insane but who makes the judgement?
I think once a Scene accrues enough money and enough mass cultural awareness to become institutionalized, it develops into a quasi-Village
Any Village has to be producing a "cultural product" but maybe at a slower rate than a Scene
Yeah just in that groups of people living together will start to accumulate .. something. Some kind of group odor that can be distinguished by outsiders
Starting to feel some discontent, huh? That's fair.
here's something this made me think about: the internet has made it a lot easier to find like-minded people, but it's also flattened everything in a way that's frankly less fun
maybe I read it or maybe it was on a podcast, but somewhere I picked up that in the music world there used to be a thing where cities were known for certain sounds
at any given time, bands would sound like Chicago or like Seattle or like New York. For those with a real ear for music, they could hear the vibes of the influences that made up each place.
now that's all gone. The internet has flattened it all out. Everyone is influenced by everyone everywhere.
I'm not sure what this means for your post, but your post made me think of this.
Economic brain drain has spurred a trend of scenification. Professionals encroaching on cities, abandoning their villages; too busy to create new ones, they compromise by making scenes out of their careers, all the while driving local villages in their new stomping grounds to extinction. Although many employers say they're a family, a village, they're anything but. The internet accelerates this further, it's a machine that converts physical villages into ever ephemeral scenes. And for preexisting scenes, it's a divider. Time is a limited resource, after all. Everyone is spread so thin, they're neither in village nor scene. We're all uninvited strangers wandering aimlessly from party to party. I don't think any social media platform has filled the fleeting role of the village.
- brain drain also makes villages a little less villagelike, since villages become selected for the kinds of people who stick around, rather than remaining a more representative swath of personality types
- occasionally a scene forms what looks superficially like a village – I'm thinking of intentional communities, camps, charter cities, artist colonies, homesteads and seasteads, communes. These are "villages" in the literal sense of the word, in that people are living close together on a small scale in communities with tight cohesion, but not in the sense of "village" I use here, because they're still hyperselected on personality. But these groups might be able to develop some villagelike traits (in my usage) in the long term, because they can introduce variation either by eventually becoming multigenerational or by developing enough inertia that longtime residents stick around even as their character traits and interests diverge over time.
conceptually precise, very nice
> (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.)
Building a Scene means developing technical jargon and internal axioms which are taken for granted by most in the Scene - e.g. an x-risk researcher considers x-risk as the biggest problem facing humanity. It can be impossible or very difficult to communicate with someone deep in a Scene because of the need to do a nested unpacking of the concepts. "groundedness" is interesting because it's so perspective dependent. Free soloist climbers consider the risk of falling from unroped climbing to be an acceptable tradeoff, many would consider this insane but who makes the judgement?
I think once a Scene accrues enough money and enough mass cultural awareness to become institutionalized, it develops into a quasi-Village
Any Village has to be producing a "cultural product" but maybe at a slower rate than a Scene
what's the cultural product of a village? the village's culture itself?
Yeah just in that groups of people living together will start to accumulate .. something. Some kind of group odor that can be distinguished by outsiders
Starting to feel some discontent, huh? That's fair.
here's something this made me think about: the internet has made it a lot easier to find like-minded people, but it's also flattened everything in a way that's frankly less fun
maybe I read it or maybe it was on a podcast, but somewhere I picked up that in the music world there used to be a thing where cities were known for certain sounds
at any given time, bands would sound like Chicago or like Seattle or like New York. For those with a real ear for music, they could hear the vibes of the influences that made up each place.
now that's all gone. The internet has flattened it all out. Everyone is influenced by everyone everywhere.
I'm not sure what this means for your post, but your post made me think of this.
Economic brain drain has spurred a trend of scenification. Professionals encroaching on cities, abandoning their villages; too busy to create new ones, they compromise by making scenes out of their careers, all the while driving local villages in their new stomping grounds to extinction. Although many employers say they're a family, a village, they're anything but. The internet accelerates this further, it's a machine that converts physical villages into ever ephemeral scenes. And for preexisting scenes, it's a divider. Time is a limited resource, after all. Everyone is spread so thin, they're neither in village nor scene. We're all uninvited strangers wandering aimlessly from party to party. I don't think any social media platform has filled the fleeting role of the village.
yeah, and a couple things off this:
- brain drain also makes villages a little less villagelike, since villages become selected for the kinds of people who stick around, rather than remaining a more representative swath of personality types
- occasionally a scene forms what looks superficially like a village – I'm thinking of intentional communities, camps, charter cities, artist colonies, homesteads and seasteads, communes. These are "villages" in the literal sense of the word, in that people are living close together on a small scale in communities with tight cohesion, but not in the sense of "village" I use here, because they're still hyperselected on personality. But these groups might be able to develop some villagelike traits (in my usage) in the long term, because they can introduce variation either by eventually becoming multigenerational or by developing enough inertia that longtime residents stick around even as their character traits and interests diverge over time.
I really enjoyed this - and it made me think about the scenes I’ve been part of. Also, perhaps Substack is a bit of an online scene, yes?
I think it's a platform that can help facilitate scenes, the way agriculture can facilitate villages
Fair enough
Always stellar — great piece!
Brilliant and thoughtful. Thankful for my village.