Technology needs amateurs.
It’s a simple idea that everyone forgets. Progress and invention often rely on a passionate group of outsiders gathered together purely for the joy of some new technology.
This fact gets packaged into pithy statements like “the next big thing will start out looking like a toy” or other heuristics for startup spotting, but that’s a limited view. Amateur technology scenes1 do more than incubate companies, they create the social context for new tools — discovering a sort of technology/culture fit.
Professionals may start and build companies, but amateurs invent (and reinvent) entirely new industries. We need them now more than ever.
Why write about amateurs?
Our lives are wound up with our tools. It's true on a personal level and a societal one. The stakes of this relationship — between technology and culture — have never been higher, whether that's deciding the role that large language models will play in our lives or trying to understand how to electrify our urban infrastructure.
I'm hesitant to add another voice to the issue. Many capable journalists and writers are covering startups and corporate maneuvering. Scientists continue to publish mountains of papers on the latest methods and applications of technology to scientific research, including a robust scholarly field devoted to the history of science and technology. Even the skeptics and critics are more emboldened.
Plenty of good ink has been spilled. But there's one consistent oversight by all the professional opinion-havers in tech. They always discount the amateurs.
Amateur technology scenes play a critical and underappreciated role in building and maintaining our modern world.
They don't have the budgets of federal research labs or the hype of well-funded startups, but amateurs often find the future before anyone else. They’ve been at it for more than a century, with consistent results and minimal fanfare. Origin stories like the Homebrew Computer Club are the norm, not the exception. Understanding why these amateur technology scenes have been so productive can give us clues to improve our organizations, governments, and society.
I’ve seen first-hand how these scenes get misunderstood. And it's important to set the record straight.
This Substack is a work-in-progress. I plan to gather the stories of these scenes into a (hopefully) coherent argument for how and why they work. It will be full of essays and interviews, histories and profiles. Occasionally, I’ll write about my other research interests — science and philanthropy — but always with an amateur eye.
I hope you stick around.
Here’s how I define amateur technology scenes.
