Bay Area Wiki

Megascene

The megascene (or "the scene") is an amalgam of overlapping Bay Area cultural scenes adjacent to the technology industry.

Its ~1,000 members are thought to constitute the densest extant non-academic network in the West, with few members separated by more than 2 degrees of connection.

Composition

🟠 Wing One: Creative Technology

  • The oldest of the three wings; its culture has defined the Bay Area for decades. Extremely generative - projects are frequently done out of curiosity, rather than commercial interest.
  • Sub-wing A: Whimsy tech
    • Largely kept alive by Waterloo and MIT new grads. Waterloo in particular has made outsized cultural contributions (Socratica, Playspace, etc.)
    • Also tends to overlap heavily with the flow arts & fire-spinning community, who tend to be unusually interested in hardware tinkering. This group and the Burning Man crowd are the bridge between Wings One and Three.
    • Example projects: anonymous art installations, city-scale pranks, cute robots, provocative software
    • Aesthetics: Light academia, boba, comic sans
  • Sub-wing B: Schizo tech
    • Example projects: NFC chip hand implants, discovering prime numbers via brain-computer interface
    • Aesthetics: punk, subversion, transhumanism

🟣 Wing Two: Reason and Humanity

  • Sometimes pejoratively referred to as TESCREAL.
  • Concerned with thinking clearly, and seeing far.
  • Sub-wing A: Rationality, Effective Altruism, AI Safety
    • Keywords: utilitarianism, Scott Alexander, Eliezer Yudkowsky, FOOM, Bayes Theorem, The Sequences, LessWrong, "timelines"
    • Aesthetics: bohemian bugman, warm minimalism
  • Sub-wing B: Neo-intelligentsia
    • Keywords: History, western classics, Palladium, Progress Studies, Tyler Cowen, Long Now Foundation
    • Aesthetics: Greco-roman, western intellectual tradition

🟢 Wing Three: Well-being

  • Interested in maximizing well-being by connecting with oneself and with others.
  • Keywords: embodiment, inner work, spirituality, mysticism, ritual, authentic relating
  • Sub-wing A: Academic woo
    • Interested in understanding the human experience (through mind and body), constructing psychotechnologies, and dissecting why a particular healing modality may or may not work.
    • Comfortable with ambiguity and hazy semantics, often adds '-ness' suffix to words.
  • Sub-wing B: Soft woo
    • Interested in leveraging the shared emotional metabolism of a community or relationship to process complex emotions, mysticism, healing.

The labels of each of these wings represent the extreme ends, which one need not identify with to be part of the scene. Instead, membership is implied largely by familiarity with the language used here.

Twitter People

Ribboned through the scene, like marbling in steak, are the Twitter People. While much of the megascene uses Twitter heavily, the Twitter People relate to the platform somewhat differently.

Within the core wings, engagement with a core domain of interest produces "exhaust" that inevitably flows to Twitter. For the Twitter People, Twitter itself (including its banter, memes, etc.) is a domain of interest.

One may be a Twitter Person while also being squarely within one (or more) core wings - membership is not mutually exclusive with that of the wings. Like the core wings, the Twitter People can be divided into two types:

  1. Just having fun (often anonymous on Twitter)
  2. Amassing capital via Twitter (rarely fully anonymous)

The Twitter People appear the most socially "normal" and likely to host parties (with even gender ratios), consume alcohol, etc. They often maintain contact with the traditional economy (e.g. working in venture) and society in general.

One can imagine the core wings as the "primary sector" of the megascene economy, and the Twitter People being the secondary sector - adding value to the raw materials (i.e. ideas) sourced from the core wings, and packaging it for wider distribution.

While in some cases they may resemble MOPs, Twitter People play a crucial role as funnels for capital (social and financial) into the scene. In return, they skim off the transaction volume they create; captured value is often in the form of status, and sometimes carry.

Group Housing

Living with roommates, and forming a group house, is extremely common - it is done less out of economic necessity, and more out of desire to welcome serendipity and conversation into daily life.

People within the megascene are unusually interested in experimenting with unorthodox living arrangements and lifestyles due to pathologically high openness.

Connection to the technology industry

Many people within the megascene are working on startups, personal projects, or employed at an AI lab. It has uniquely few people working in traditional 'Big Tech' - though many did at some point.

TPOT

Many members of the megascene consider themselves part of ("adjacent" to) TPOT ("This Part of Twitter"): an amorphous Twitter-based community. This overlap is heaviest in Wings Two and Three.

For the sake of illegibility (see section below), TPOT is often not described in great detail.

Note that around 2024, the term TPOT expanded in common vernacular to refer to "Tech Twitter" broadly, a change considered regretfully dilutive by people within the community.

Notable spaces

A large constellation of group houses and other private spaces are frequented by members. Most of these cater to specific cultural wings:

  • Lighthaven - Wing Two
  • Avalon - Wing Two
  • The Alembic - Wing Three
  • The Center (closed) - Wing Three
  • The Commons - Wing Three
  • Vivarium - Wing One
  • TIAT - Wing One
  • Mox - Wing Two

Notes on legibility

Many within the megascene have an understandable allergy to legibility. Labels sometimes become boxes that subconsciously constrain thought. Further, legibility may remove the friction in finding and entering a specific scene, thereby diluting or destroying the scene itself. This page carefully omits specific details to minimize both of these risks where possible, while capturing essential matters.