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I was part of a scene. It wasn’t a big scene, it’s not a scene that gets talked about by critics like downtown NYC in the 70s or London in the 90s, but it was a scene and it was the real thing. And nothing feels more electric than that.
Here’s what it’s like. You make some kind of work - in my case, theatre - with a few collaborators. You put on a new show in an abandoned shopfront for 30 people. It’s rough and messy but it works, and you’re buzzing with success.
But meanwhile, on the other side of town - in my case, the distance between Mount Ainslie and Black Mountain in the middle of Canberra, Australia - another group of artists are making a new work. And when it comes out, it completely outstrips yours. It blows you out of the water.
So you watch their show, and you’re fuming with jealousy, you’re livid. But this other group are also your collaborators, they’re also your friends, and you’re completely proud of them even as you’re burning up with envy. And when the show finishes, you rush out of the theatre and you sit in the carpark half the night with your friends breaking their show down beat by beat. What was that trick they did in the middle? Why did it work so well? How did they do that?
Luckily for you, one feature of being in a scene is that you share the same set of influences as your competitors. You’re all reading the same books and listening to the same records - partly because you’re always loaning each other books and making each other mixtapes. That trick they pulled off on stage, you know where they stole it from. You saw that film, you played that video game too! You just never had the idea to adapt it to a live performance setting in that way.
But as good as their show was, it wasn’t all the way there. You could see what they were going for with that trick, but it didn’t quite succeed. And so you stay up half the night in the carpark, hashing it out - how could you make it work? What if you took that same trick, but doubled it up and folded it back in on itself?
Three months later, in your next show, on an improvised stage out the back of a rundown theatre, you break out their trick, but taken to a whole new level. You’ve taken their innovation and turned it inside out, you’ve made it work in a way your competitors couldn’t, and you’ve leapfrogged past them. And they’re in the audience, and you can see them cursing you, because you cracked it the puzzle they set, you solved the problem that they created.
And then the next week you go see their new show, in a tiny room in the back of a shabby cafe down by the lake, and you catch your breath. Because that thing in your last show, that trick you were working on - they’ve stolen it, put a twist on it, and they’ve made it work better than you ever imagined it could. And you’re furious but you’re delighted, too.
Next month you and your rivals will be working together on a project. The month after that you’ll be competing again. And in between, you gather in the same bars and cafes and house parties, arguing and debating and sharing ideas and getting high, and then diving back into the work. And it goes round and round without end, like a whirlpool, or a fever.
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I’m not claiming greatness for the Canberra indie theatre scene of the 2000s. I mean, it was the best theatre that’s ever been created, but I’ll never convince anyone of that. There were no critics to document it for posterity, no big producers or agents to scoop up the talent, no big institutions to acquire the breakout hits and promote them internationally. Like almost every scene in history, it was a wild outburst of creative energy that cohered for a few years, then dissipated.
To the people inside it, though, it was life and death. It was worth working the shitty day jobs, rehearsing into the early hours of the morning, spending every cent we had on hiring run-down community halls rather than being able to afford meals out - because the work was that good. It mattered.
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All this gives me a great appreciation for creative scenes. I’ll never be part of a scene again, not like that, but I know one when I see one, and it gives me a lot of joy. Creative communities of musicians, theatre artists, writers, I love seeing them cohere and watching them develop their own arcane languages, incomprehensible to outsiders. I love that fierce creative joy where everyone is intent on outdoing their peers, but at the same time celebrating the successes of the whole community.
Creative scenes aren’t just artistic. They cohere in other fields when a group of like-minded individuals come together in some loose community in some creative endeavour. There are celebrated scenes in the world of academia and technological invention - the Bloomsbury Group, or Building 20 at MIT.
Kevin Kelly gives a lovely and counterintuitive example of a creative scene - Camp 4 in Yosemite Valley. The group of climbers that occupied this nondescript campsite in the 1940s and 1950s began experimenting with new ways to scale the vertical granite walls in the valley. In semi-isolation, this loose community competed among itself to develop better techniques, new gear and alternative approaches to getting up the wall. In doing so, they developed many of the key techniques used in modern big wall climbing.
My favourite scene, and the one that I follow madly, with a fan’s obsessive delight, is the world of climate science.
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Like the 2000s indie theatre community in Canberra or the Camp 4 climbers in the 1940s, the climate science community is a creative scene. Unlike these other examples, the climate science community is geographically dispersed. Instead of gathering in community halls or shabby campsites, participants come together in conferences and around a few key journals (Science, Nature, PNAS, Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems). And instead of tens or hundreds of participants, the climate science scene includes tens of thousands of researchers.
But the same energies are at play - the same fierce creativity, the sense of experimentation, that mix of competition and collaboration. The currents feel familiar to me from my years in the Canberra scene - the white heat, the urgency, the excitement - but on a far bigger scale and with far higher stakes.
I think this is what a lot of people miss when they engage with climate science, and it’s the thing I wish I could share. From the outside, science often looks like a bloodless endeavour - the slow and steady accumulation of knowledge, the careful refinement of models, all proceeding at a steady pace year after year. It’s not at all. At the cutting edge of the field, the knowledge flows in cross currents. Scientists struggle to outdo their rivals, and then just as quickly turn around and collaborate with them. When one researcher comes up with a new trick, other scientists will immediately take hold of it, twist, turn it inside out, and push it further than the originator could have imagined. It’s a churning sea of debates and breakthroughs and disagreements. Waves slap together and splash up into the sky.
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A recent example is the recent debate around climate sensitivity.
The latest IPCC assessment report in 2021 incorporates outputs from a new generation of climate models (CMIP6). These models include better physics of cloud behaviour, which makes them better at predicting short-term weather. A number of these new models also predict greater levels of future warming, suggesting that the climate is more sensitive to increases in atmospheric CO2 than previously predicted.
At the same time, a number of studies have been released suggesting that these so called ‘hot models’ are less effective at reproducing historical temperatures, which raises questions about their accuracy.
These models have sparked a heated debate in the climate science scene about climate sensitivity. Storied climate scientist James Hansen and colleagues released a paper in November 2023 arguing that doubling atmospheric CO2 will warm the climate by as much as 4.8°C (plus or minus 1.2°C). The same week, another paper by Cropper et al suggested that climate sensitivity is only 2.8°C (plus or minus 0.8°C) for a doubling of atmospheric CO2. This is a huge disparity - the difference between massive floods in low-lying cities and completely redrawing the map of the world. Two other recent papers find climate sensivity of 3.4°C and 2.9°C.
In many cases, the authors of these papers are referenced in the other papers. These scientists are collaborators and peers, even when they vehemently disagree with one another. The discussion surges back and forth. Waves slap together.
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We don’t see much of this dynamic play out in public. Climate scientists tend not to contradict each other in the public sphere. This is partly because these debates are quite technical - but more than that, I think, it’s because of how climate denial has framed the subject of climate change.
Until the late 2010s, the media tended to present climate change stories as a culture war conflict between scientists and climate deniers. When climate scientists appeared in the news, the question was not, ‘Which scientist’s theory is closer to the truth?’ but ‘Is climate change real or not?’ If any climate scientists dared to disagree with each other in public, deniers were waiting to take their words out of context and misuse them.
So for the most part, climate scientists have kept their disagreements within their own community, presenting a relatively unified front to the public. (Compare this to, say, the fiery public debates between evolutionary biologists Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould, or the clashes between competing schools of Economic theory.)
It’s far from the worst consequence of climate denial, but still, it’s a shame - it robs people of the opportunity to see these debates and disagreements within climate science playing out in front of them. As a result, people are often unaware of how fast this field is moving, and how much has changed in our understanding of the earth system in even the last five years.
Climate scientists know far more about how the world is changing than they did even in the early years of the pandemic. The frontiers of human knowledge are expanding every day, but not in a smooth or predictable way. The edge of our understanding is a messy space of experimentation, discovery, setbacks, mistakes, arguments, debates and excitement. It’s a scene, crackling with fierce energy and urgent joy.
As you read this, a scientist has just read a research paper by a colleague that pulls off a whole new trick. And that scientist is simultaneously laughing with delight and fuming with jealousy, and they’ll be staying up all night tonight with their collaborators figuring out how to take that trick and push it further.
These moments of discovery are worth the hard work, worth the long days, the late nights, the misunderstandings and disrespect from the outside world, the politics, the funding cuts, the stress and the panic - because the work is that good. It’s the exhilarating rush that knocks you off your feet. It’s life and death. It matters.
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NEWS AND PROJECTS
I’m currently in a quiet season, in preparation for a flurry of productions and shows in the second half of the year. So right now it’s long weeks of meetings, planning, budgets, schedules, and writing.
The writing is the central thing, the thing that everything else orbits around. And it’s the hardest thing, it’s slow and it’s a struggle, it’s like wrestling with ghosts. But here and there, there are good moments, an hour or two where it all comes together, a few lines or an idea that swims into focus and feels good. One or two of those a week is enough to live on. So it’s a good winter.
RECOMMENDATIONS
Rebecca Giggs - The snake with the emoji-patterned skin
This is the most exciting thing: Rebecca has been working on this extraordinary essay for the New Yorker over the last few months, including a trip to North America’s largest reptile dealers’ conference. This is an incredible bit of writing, and an amazing deep dive into a truly wild subculture at the intersection of art, animals, technology and money. It will make you feel some kind of way, trust me.
Georgina Voss - Systems Ultra
This is a long awaited book from one of my favourite thinkers, and it does not disappoint. Voss applies a systems lens to the world of internet pornography, air traffic control, car accidents and Las Vegas trade shows. It undercuts a lot of the mechanistic worldview of systems thinking, and restores a sense of humility to how we view complexity. And it’s very, very funny. Highly recommended.
Anuraag - ani/live Seven (live at Inner Varnika 2022)
Seefeel - Spangle (Autechre remix)
Shackleton - Deadman
Twine - Twine
Two moments in Anuraag’s DJ set for Inner Varnika utterly melted me. The first is the opening, when she segues from an Autechre remix of an old Seefeel track to Shackleton’s Deadman, with its haunting ‘everyone starts from point one’ sample. The second comes two and a half hours in, when the beat drops away, and you’re left hanging with a drifting organ tone, ghostly voices and stuttering percussion. It took me a moment to recognise it - Kalea Morning, off Twine’s 2002 self-titled album. This is an old and dear favourite, an eerie IDM classic, and I highly recommend going and soaking up the whole thing.
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As ever, you can get more background on my practice in my New Rules for Modelling series, or you can check out my website. And if you have any questions or offers that might make my life more interesting, feel free to get in touch.
Peace!