I keep circling an idea, that good ideas come from density. Put people close enough together and you don’t just get more ideas, you get disproportionately more. I find it convincing. But it has a hard edge that doesn’t get said as often. If closeness concentrates creativity, then distance strands it. Not because the people far from the center have less to offer. Because they were never let into the room.
I didn’t get that idea from a book, though a book later gave me words for it. I got it as a kid in the Philippines, long before anyone there was talking about the internet. What I watched was simpler, and it never left me. Some homes had reliable power, clean running water, a way to stay cool or warm. Others, a street over, didn’t. The people on both sides of that line were every bit as smart, as driven, as good. What differed was whether the basics were there for their potential to build on. Access to the essentials, not talent, was what decided whether a person got to flourish. I was too young to put it in those words, but I saw it plainly.
That’s the root of what I believe now, and it’s older than any of the technology I work on. The essentials change. The pattern doesn’t. And today, for the people I still know and work with there, the essential in question is connectivity.
Here’s the part worth being accurate about. The Philippines is mostly online now, which surprises people who assume otherwise. But “online” hides a lot. It’s mobile-thin, a real fixed connection is the exception rather than the rule, and it’s among the most expensive access in the world relative to what people earn. It thins out fast the further you get from the big cities and across the islands, of which there are more than seven thousand. So a person can be brilliant, motivated, and connected on paper, and still sit one dropped signal or one unaffordable bill away from being cut out of the thing they’re trying to build. Same line I saw as a kid. New essential.
Which reframes the question I usually hear. So much of the conversation right now is about concentrating more and bigger compute in a handful of places. I get it, I build on that infrastructure every day, so this isn’t a case against it. But it isn’t the question that keeps me up. The one that does is the opposite of concentration. What would we unlock if we got today’s essential out to the people who are already full of ideas and just waiting for a way in?
I think the answer is a lot. That density idea gave me a vocabulary for it. Creativity pools where people are close, and the hopeful reading of the same fact is that creativity isn’t scarce, it’s stranded. There are rooms full of people who would add something the center never will, if the door were only open and affordable. Not only overseas. Right here in Minnesota, past the metro, the towns the build-out skipped and the reservation that waited years for a connection the cities always had. Same pattern in nearly every state, a rural county or a priced-out block on the wrong side of the map. It doesn’t respect borders, and it’s closer to home than we like to admit.
Realistically, access alone doesn’t finish the job. Two things have to travel with it. One is the thing I keep coming back to, whether people feel they matter. A connection that doesn’t make someone feel seen is just a faster way to be ignored. The other is somewhere close to home to put the idea to work, a reason to stay and build rather than leave. Access without local opportunity doesn’t lift a place, it just exports its best people to somewhere that already had enough. So the real version is all three together. Get the essential to the edge, make it a connection where people feel they matter, and build something local worth staying for.
And the encouraging part is that reaching the edge doesn’t wait on some breakthrough that isn’t here yet. The way to do it is already showing up. You no longer have to trench fiber across seven thousand islands to put a real connection in a hard place. It can come from the sky now, reaching across water and distance a cable never could, and it gets cheaper every year. We don’t have to fix the whole map at once. We can start where it’s newly possible and let that carry us to the next place. Better a real connection that reaches people now than a perfect plan that reaches them in a decade.
None of this is fully worked out. But now that the way is finally within reach, the question I’d rather sit with isn’t how we concentrate more. It’s how we reach the people we’ve been leaving behind, the ones who’ve had the ideas all along.