A scene “is a group of people who unblock each other at an accelerating rate”
And it's composed of the people who voluntarily make it happen
I read an essay that perfectly describes why I’ve been writing RQ and why I keep encouraging other guys to write,
What is a scene? It is a group of people who are producing work in public but aimed at each other. A scene, to borrow a phrase from Visakan Veerasamy, “is a group of people who unblock each other at an accelerating rate”.
[Denniz] PoP liked to connect unconnected parts of the social graph and watch how ideas that had arisen in one part spread to the rest.
“We didn’t care about what was happening in the rest of the world. We ate at odd hours. We worked at odd hours. We slept together in weird places. It was its own universe. And what did this give us? It gave us a healthy respect for what is possible. We did things that we liked, and that we thought were funny and weird.”
Notice that this is how someone in a scene talks. It is all about trying to impress and entertain your friends, pushing each other to refine your taste and your skills. This is how you push the edges of your craft.
There was a seduction artist scene from 2006 to about 2015, consisting of “a group of people who unblock each other at an accelerating rate,”[1] and since then it seems to have, if not died, then become tragically moribund. I learned a huge amount from guys learning seduction artistry and helping other guys learn it, and the guys who participated in it were having conversations that weren’t happening anywhere else and maybe can’t happen anywhere else. The legacy media hates men and won’t have the pickup conversation. Some artistic works will correctly incorporate some elements of what real seduction is like, but most don’t, and can’t. So it’s left to us to create the scene we want. I speculate that most guys don’t care much about getting laid, and the senescence of the seduction-artist scene is consistent with that idea.
This scene needs consistent fresh talent, cause guys age out all the time... guys in their 20s seem to be the prime age for learning seduction arts. Most guys, by the time they hit 40, are thinking about their futures and family (there are exceptions, I know, you might be one... recently divorced guys are probably the most common demographic of 35+ guys). A songwriter like the Swedes from the essay can write for decades, but most guys go through a seduction artistry phase, then move on to something else, and so the scene must constantly be replenished. And the Internet decays fast. Forums go down. Websites aren’t maintained. Linkrot happens at speed. Business models change. Today’s hot rising star is tomorrow’s brown dwarf. Much of the brilliant work from not long ago isn’t available at all, anywhere, any more. Some of it gets preserved in downloaded PDFs, but most is lost. So others need to carry on, if the thing is to survive.
Which it mostly hasn’t.
Maybe it’s a victim of social media centralization. Of the preference for audio and video over text. Of video games. Of weed instead of Cialis. I don’t know for sure, only that I can sense that the thing I was learning from doesn’t seem to be here any more (if I’m wrong and it is somewhere, let me know (lmk)). I’d love to be wrong. Maybe Substack will offer rejuvenation, since the blogging culture that used to exist has migrated to Substack (dangerously... it’s dangerous to centralize on a platform controlled by someone else). Most guys aren’t going to do audio, let alone video, both because of the higher barrier to entry and the larger surface space for doxxing and reputation assault. This thing has always been mostly underground.
Maybe sustainability is hard because a disproportionate number of people attracted to learning seduction or the pickup scene appear to be goons and / or fools, which can’t be good for the long-term health of a scene. Goons and fools repel normal competent people, leaving behind... that which we see.
I’m not sure why the senescence of the seduction scene is is happening: it seems like guys simply care less about getting laid than they did, or the Internet is now so appealing that it’s replaced getting laid and interacting with people in real life for many guys. Maybe something else is going on. None of the answers I’ve seen floating around seem final to me. Could be that guys are behaving like children for longer than they used to,
and that drags into their 20s. I’ve seen guys posit answers like “MeToo” and “feminism,” but, really? If this minor fear is enough to keep guys from trying to get laid then they don’t really want to. Our grandfathers stormed the beaches of Normandy[2] and we’re afraid girls will say mean things about us? So I’m not sure what’s going on, but it does seem that the scene that existed has gone away. Maybe guys who get jacked and tan go online and don’t need strong in-person game.
A scene happens when people want to make it happen, and it’s very hard for a person to achieve as much on his own as he would in a network of competitive peers. Seduction artistry has mostly happened between a man and a woman, but, thanks to the Internet, guys can now work in public and improve in public. Open source is not only about software (without open source software, GPT3 and GPT4 wouldn’t have the programming power they do). I want to make the seduction scene happen (the free book is a substantial contribution, I think), but, like “fetch,” it may not be possible for me to make it happen. I try, but my own life points in a different direction than it did.
In reading other seduction artists, I’ve often had those moments of empathy and understanding when a person goes, “Yes, that’s just how it is.” Almost no writers write honestly about men and women. They can’t, if they’re relying on some legacy publisher. I hope other guys reading Red Quest have also had those moments of “Yes, that’s just how it is.”
If you want it to happen, make it happen. The world runs when people decide to make a thing happen that wouldn’t happen otherwise. We all have a brief period of vital energy before we are extinguished into nothingness, ideally after we’ve passed consciousness to the next generation. What do you think needs to happen?
[1]It also included a fair number of incompetents, frauds, and idiots, to be sure, but they rarely make it to the center.
[2]To defeat fascism, which is one reason I find the apologia for Russia’s invasion so bizarre. Few people have any sense of history or continuity, I guess.
It fascinates me to read things like this because it contradicts my thinking entirely. You make it sound like a love letter to a golden age, era bygone sort of tone to it. I would think with all the material out there, going back to ASF and the range of it from “easy going” literature like the No More Mr Nice Guy to more hardcore stuff like Mode One, that you’d get way more people today who are “in tune” with picking up. Not seduction, just straight pick up like ability to have a conversation, hold eye contact, make observational remarks etc.
But if what you’re saying is more on the nose then holy shit are we ever fucked.
I am proud to have been part of the PUA scene in London, from about 2006 to 2015, as RQ mentions here. It was an amazing time of guys helping each other, pushing each other and achieving incredible success in some cases. Too bad it seems to have gone mostly quiet now. But it will always be a part of me, some lifelong friendships remain and, of course, the skills and knowledge will always come in handy.