Here I overload “blue-collar innovator” to mean anyone producing stuff using an emerging medium of any sort, not just physical making. So early bloggers or first cohort of bands in a new music scene count. Sorry if that offends your class sensibilities but it’s the best term.
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Modern startup ecosystems and open-source communities before large-scale financialization are of course the most familiar example of BCIMINs, but it’s a more general phenomenon. See for example steam engines after James Watt’s patents expired: https://www.jstor.org/stable/23603566?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents …
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Robert Allen called BCIMINs “collective invention settings” (his concept is the basis for the paper above). A more contemporary model is settler phase of Cringley’s pioneer-settler-town planner model which
@swardley incorporated into his mapping model. https://blog.gardeviance.org/2015/03/on-pioneers-settlers-town-planners-and.html …Show this thread -
The model applies to cultural production too. See the idea of scene-hacking from
@sebpaquethttps://www.slideshare.net/mobile/vgururao/scene-hacking …Show this thread -
And to general intellectual production. See Fred Turner on “network celebrity” https://fredturner.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/Turner-Larson-Network-Celebrity-PC-2015.pdf …
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See also
@Meaningness on the underlying social evolution process.https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths …Show this thread -
BCIMINs are a *natural* expression of human motivations. When they are repressed, potential blue-collar innovators turn to crime and other pathological activities. You can’t get rid of the 9%. See this Baumol paper. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2937617?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents …
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For fun fictional portraits of a BCIMIN era, try Terry Pratchett’s Raising Steam or HBO’s Deadwood. Let’s finish with some subtle takeaways.
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1. Innovation watchers often uncritically fetishize either credentialed expertise or unqualified blue-collar doerism. Nope. BCIMINs run on expertise (credentialed or not) *slumming at blue-collar levels*. Get this wrong and you’ll end up either academic posturing or JohnHenryism.
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2. The 90% normies often assume the 1% pioneers are the only ones who matter and form “scenes” of personality cults around them. The 9% BCIMIN types are often viewed with suspicion and become targets of societal policing. This never works. They just turn to crime etc.
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3. Unlike the 1%, who have a love-hate tortured relationship with fame and the attention of the 90%, the 9% neither attract, nor crave the spotlight. But they will not toe the lines or conform to societal norms or social proof either. They’ll tolerate some spotlight as a burden.
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4. They aren’t a community. They are a network of competing/cooperating individuals stealing tricks from each other. Ideas diffuse slowly through the BCIMIN, as each skeptically tests tricks before adopting. It’s not viral meme floods. It’s a slow network with fad defenses.
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All this is fairly well-known and uncontroversial to students of innovation history. But people who enter BCIMINs attracted by 1% personality cults or with an uncritical fetish for either credentials or blue-collarism invariably don’t last. They crash and burn as scenesters.
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End of conversation
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