A couple of guys goofing around in a garage led to a revolution in consumer technology that changed the course of human history. That is not an understatement. Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs were fascinated by the emerging technology of computers in the early 1970's. Woz built the Apple 1, and Steve decided they needed to sell them to other hobbyists. Apple Computers, now Apple, was born in 1975. What kind of phone do you have? These two guys were ,arguably, the most influential Creative Scene in history.
"Buck lived at a big house in the sun-kissed Santa Clara valley... There were great stables... rows of vine-clad servants' cottages, an endless and orderly array of outhouses, long grape arbors, green pastures, orchards, and berry patches."
-Jack London
From the second paragraph of The Call of the Wild, 1903, describing the Santa Clara valley, the San Jose area of California, in the 1890's, when the Klondike gold rush began
My interest in what I now call Creative Scenes began with my first BMX race, October of 1982, in Boise, Idaho. About ten of us from the Blue Valley mobile home park piled into my dad's big, silver, Ford van, to go race the last BMX race of the season. Three guys raced the week before, after we heard a track actually existed in Boise, and I tagged along to watch and coach. They all got first or second place in their novice class. We went back to the trailer park, and got everyone else stoked on the idea. So I talked my dad into borrowing the van the next week. We got there way too early, and rode around a very rudimentary BMX track, which seemed like the coolest thing ever to us.
We wore faded Levi's and T-shirts, and rode bargain store BMX frames, cobbled together with mismatched, halfway decent components, some stolen. We got pie plates with a number in marker on it, taped to our handlebars, for numberplates. The Boise BMX scene was already solid, but not fast growing. So even in our first or second races, in the novice class, we all raced some intermediates, and novices who had raced for months. The track gave trophies for 1st through 3rd place. We all went home with trophies, mostly 1sts and 2nds. Most of the kids we raced against were on $400 to $600, top-of-the-line BMX bikes, many had full racing leathers and fancy helmets. We shared a few old, heavy, motorcycle helmets we borrowed from dads in the trailer park.
All day long we kept hearing kids and parents asking the same question, "Who are all these kids on crappy bikes, and why are they all fast?" That whole summer, we had been coming out as it cooled down each evening, and riding our BMX bikes, pushing each other to get better. I later realized we had formed a little BMX scene, completely by accident. Isolated in the trailer park outside of town, from most of the people we went to school with, and the whole city of Boise, BMX became our thing. We were high school and junior high kids, and we just kept trying to outdo each other, to race faster, jump higher or farther, and learn new tricks the other guys couldn't do. By forming a little scene where BMX became our life, we improved faster than many other guys in town, who liked BMX, but also did a bunch of other activities. We were fairly focused, day after day, and hungry to be good at something. There's not a whole lot of positive reiforcment for kids in most trailer parks. So we showed up at the last race, and beat a bunch of much more experienced racers.
At first I wondered how that happened. In time, I figured out we had created a hardcore little BMX scene. I became fascinated with the scenes in BMX freestyle, and later was a part of several different scenes as I moved around over the years. In time I realized these scenes existed in skateboarding, snowboarding, surfing, and other action sports. I also realized they were similar to the art and music scenes that we've all heard of. Later still, I was a part of a few art scenes, and learned that high tech start-ups, and entrepreneurial scenes also exist. These are all different forms of Creative Scenes.
So what's a Creative Scene? My working definition is that it's a group of two or more people who get together on a regular basis, to pursue some creative endeavor.
The video above, which appears to be a segment of a larger program, starts with Mark Zuckerberg, who founded Facebook in 2004. He leaves the Boston area, home to Harvard, where he went to school, and to MIT. He moved his fledgling social media busniess to Palo Alto, part of "Silicon Valley," officially the Santa Clara Valley on the south end of the San Francisco Bay. The area is anchored by San Jose, and a bunch of suburb cities on the west side, heading up into the peninsula leading to San Francisco.
From the birth of Hewlett-Packard decades before, the area had grown into THE place for cutting edge computer technology work, by 2004, when Mark Zuckerberg took his social media platform there. From the grape arbors and fruit orchards that Jack London wrote of more than 100 years earlier, the San Jose/Santa Clara Valley area had become a massive scene of many interwoven tech scenes, some influenced by the strong counter culture wirters, hippies, and music scenes, just to the north in San Francisco. London himself, in his day, was a part of the Carmel writing scene in the early 20th century, not far to the southwest.
It was in this large, originally defense-oriented, high technology region, an area with thousands of engineers and computer scientists, that Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs were raised. They grew up in a huge a scene of interwoven high tech, and other Creative Scenes, including the R&D departments of major corporations, computer hobbyists, along with the counter culture, music, and other scenes in nearby San Francisco.
They not only had an interest in computers and new technology as young kids, but they were surrounded by a culture of many different Creative Scenes, and a big part of the high tech industry. As Steve Wozniak says, if he hadn't been surrounded by both the engineers and tech people, and his dad's other connections in the industry, his first score of 400 transitiors, and his first homemade computer, would never have happened. He would have still had the interest in computers, but lacked many of the other factors that led to his and Jobs' success later on. His story would have been much different. Being in that area was a big part of what made the Homebrew Club, one of the most legendary high tech Creative Scenes ever, to form. That was a key part of the story of Apple Computers, and many other early innovators in tech.
Creative Scenes can be as simple and small as two 5-year-olds drawing "cool cars" in the back of a kindergarten class, or two tween girls learning dance moves in the living room off of TikTok or YouTube. Or Creative Scenes can be as massive as Apple, now a $2.6 trillion company, which is a scene of probably hundreds of smaller Creative Scenes interwoven inside the business. I'm going to be writing quite a bit on the whole concept of Creative Scenes in the future, and looking at all kinds of them throughout recent history, and maybe farther back, at some point.
We are now, in late April 2023, at the edge of what I believe will be the worst recessionary period of our lifetimes. We are now in the "powers-at-be says there won't be a serious recession" part of the timeline, which happens for a few months right before every recession, then things really head down. Yes, recessions and depressions suck on many levels. But they are also times of incredible change and innovation. Recessions are a great time to try out new ideas, because a lot of old, lame ideas come crumbling down, in many parts of society. Economic down times are when lots of new ideas, movements, businesses, and industries are really needed.
This is a little look at the general idea of Creative Scenes, which most of us have some knowledge of, but I think will become much more important in the next several years. There will be much more on this concept coming in this blog, on my Patreon page, and in other my other writing. Stay tuned...
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