The New Common Sense
Own Your Work. Own Your Audience. Own the Web.
The Rise of the Distribution-First Founder
For decades, founders followed the same script: build a product, raise a round, then worry about customers later. In the 2010s, the script evolved—thanks to the Lean Startup playbook—into “ship an MVP, test for traction, raise a round, then prep your GTM.” It was faster, leaner, but distribution was still left at the end of the process. But even this MVP-first approach kept the hardest part—finding customers—pushed to the back of the journey. That gap is what a new type of founder is closing....
The Physics of Distribution
How attention becomes motion.
The New Common Sense
Own Your Work. Own Your Audience. Own the Web.
The Rise of the Distribution-First Founder
For decades, founders followed the same script: build a product, raise a round, then worry about customers later. In the 2010s, the script evolved—thanks to the Lean Startup playbook—into “ship an MVP, test for traction, raise a round, then prep your GTM.” It was faster, leaner, but distribution was still left at the end of the process. But even this MVP-first approach kept the hardest part—finding customers—pushed to the back of the journey. That gap is what a new type of founder is closing....
The Physics of Distribution
How attention becomes motion.
>200 subscribers
>200 subscribers
Scenius is not creative clustering, cultural density, or output volume. It is the collective capacity to expand what is thinkable. The paradigm-shifting function matters more than the work produced inside it. Artifacts are downstream. Thinkability is the engine.
Scenius becomes potent when two conditions emerge together: alternative coordination infrastructure and new legitimacy structures. The Founding Fathers, Enlightenment salons, and Impressionists did not simply gather talented people. They built parallel systems to coordinate with the dominant outside power and constructed conceptual frames that made those alternatives intelligible and defensible.
Crucially, these systems provided temporal insulation. New ideas were protected from immediate suppression or premature assimilation long enough to circulate, stabilize, and eventually become mundane. That protective function allows heretical thought to survive long enough to become common sense.
Junto is engineered mutual improvement. It is horizontal, intentional, and designed to increase individual agency within an existing paradigm. It optimizes participants.
Scenius emerges when junto-like density encounters a paradigm under strain. Junto strengthens thinking inside the frame. Scenius mutates the frame itself.
Every major digital scenius to date formed on captured infrastructure. Twitter, Tumblr, Reddit, crypto Twitter. The pattern repeats: a scene forms, generates cultural and cognitive surplus, the platform extracts it, then enforces legibility through metrics, feeds, and incentives. Thinkability collapses into optimization. The scene disperses or dies.
Capture does not merely extract attention. It narrows what can be thought by rewarding what is easily measured, shared, and monetized. The platform feeds on the scene, then renders it infertile.
Farcaster is not a “decentralized social” ideology. It represents structural conditions for a non-enclosable scenius.
Identity ownership prevents account-level capture.
Graph portability prevents social enclosure.
Client optionality prevents interface monopoly.
Permissionless building prevents gatekept innovation.
Wallet-to-wallet monetization prevents value interception.
Each property maps directly to a historical platform sin. Farcaster is not virtuous. It is constrained. Enclosing the scene would destroy the conditions that make it viable. The betrayals of Web2 made this structure conceivable in the first place.
Most founders who believe they have distribution problems actually have thinkability problems. The product is not yet conceivable in the user’s mental model.
The diagnosis is simple: is this a channel problem or a thinkability problem? If the idea lacks a stable category in the user’s mind, no funnel will save it. Optimization fails because cognition fails first.
When the problem is thinkability, the move is not GTM refinement. It is finding or building the scenius where the new category can be collectively articulated and normalized. Distribution follows a paradigm shift, not the reverse.
Web2’s sins made Farcaster thinkable.
Farcaster’s structure enables non-enclosable scenius.
That scenius expands what comes next.
This is not a conclusion. It is a succession model: betrayal creates constraint, constraint enables protection, protection expands thinkability, and expanded thinkability makes the next break inevitable.
Scenius is not creative clustering, cultural density, or output volume. It is the collective capacity to expand what is thinkable. The paradigm-shifting function matters more than the work produced inside it. Artifacts are downstream. Thinkability is the engine.
Scenius becomes potent when two conditions emerge together: alternative coordination infrastructure and new legitimacy structures. The Founding Fathers, Enlightenment salons, and Impressionists did not simply gather talented people. They built parallel systems to coordinate with the dominant outside power and constructed conceptual frames that made those alternatives intelligible and defensible.
Crucially, these systems provided temporal insulation. New ideas were protected from immediate suppression or premature assimilation long enough to circulate, stabilize, and eventually become mundane. That protective function allows heretical thought to survive long enough to become common sense.
Junto is engineered mutual improvement. It is horizontal, intentional, and designed to increase individual agency within an existing paradigm. It optimizes participants.
Scenius emerges when junto-like density encounters a paradigm under strain. Junto strengthens thinking inside the frame. Scenius mutates the frame itself.
Every major digital scenius to date formed on captured infrastructure. Twitter, Tumblr, Reddit, crypto Twitter. The pattern repeats: a scene forms, generates cultural and cognitive surplus, the platform extracts it, then enforces legibility through metrics, feeds, and incentives. Thinkability collapses into optimization. The scene disperses or dies.
Capture does not merely extract attention. It narrows what can be thought by rewarding what is easily measured, shared, and monetized. The platform feeds on the scene, then renders it infertile.
Farcaster is not a “decentralized social” ideology. It represents structural conditions for a non-enclosable scenius.
Identity ownership prevents account-level capture.
Graph portability prevents social enclosure.
Client optionality prevents interface monopoly.
Permissionless building prevents gatekept innovation.
Wallet-to-wallet monetization prevents value interception.
Each property maps directly to a historical platform sin. Farcaster is not virtuous. It is constrained. Enclosing the scene would destroy the conditions that make it viable. The betrayals of Web2 made this structure conceivable in the first place.
Most founders who believe they have distribution problems actually have thinkability problems. The product is not yet conceivable in the user’s mental model.
The diagnosis is simple: is this a channel problem or a thinkability problem? If the idea lacks a stable category in the user’s mind, no funnel will save it. Optimization fails because cognition fails first.
When the problem is thinkability, the move is not GTM refinement. It is finding or building the scenius where the new category can be collectively articulated and normalized. Distribution follows a paradigm shift, not the reverse.
Web2’s sins made Farcaster thinkable.
Farcaster’s structure enables non-enclosable scenius.
That scenius expands what comes next.
This is not a conclusion. It is a succession model: betrayal creates constraint, constraint enables protection, protection expands thinkability, and expanded thinkability makes the next break inevitable.
Share Dialog
Share Dialog
Unfortunately, Farcaster has a lot of spam and people who only come here for the reward.
Friday thoughts. Scenius, Thinkability, and the First Non-Enclosable Scene Core thesis: Scenius is not creative clustering, cultural density, or output volume. It is the collective capacity to expand what is thinkable. The paradigm-shifting function matters more than the work produced inside it. Artifacts are downstream. Thinkability is the engine. https://paragraph.com/@jonathancolton.eth/scenius-thinkability-and-the-first-non-enclosable-scene
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Mind-blowing ideas! 🤯