The case for provincialism and creativity.

Ideas, especially new ones, need controlled environments to grow. If they are immediately compared to established ones, they will almost always be discarded in favor of a safer, already accepted alternative. New ideas don’t come from the epicenter of society; they take form in provinces where they have enough moat around them so they can grow and mature before being critiqued. From there, they spread to cities where they are refined and capitalized by tacticians and culture vultures.

In the 60s in Jamaica, thousands of miles from the hubs of music in Los Angeles, London, and New York, producers like Lee Scratch Perry and King Tubby combined modern recording equipment and synthesizers with an emerging evolution of ska and calypso called rocksteady. Reggae, their new creation, took hold on local radio stations and dance halls before spreading internationally in the 70s thanks to Bob Marley and Peter Tosh. Along the way, Lee Scratch Perry started messing around with reverb and playing back old portions of other songs, and in the process invented sampling, the backbone of modern pop, electronic, and rap. From the Caribbean, this new form of music followed the Jamaican diaspora to New York, Detroit, and London, where it directly inspired hip hop and techno. Throw a dart at a top 40 hit today, and there is a 95% chance that it traces its lineage back to a small island nation in the Caribbean.

At around the same time, across the Atlantic, Italian filmmakers were experimenting with various tropes of Americana and filming low-budget films in remote regions of central Spain. Called Spaghetti Westerns, this new genre of filmmaking, led by Sergio Leone, embraced new structures of narratives, styles of editing, composition, and camera equipment. They had fewer rules, fewer expectations, and took more chances, eventually eclipsing the very genre that inspired them. Without Spaghetti Westerns, there would be no Tarantino. In his slew of interviews, he talks about the importance of these movies at length. Other modern directors reference these movies often. That chase sequence in One Battle After Another that everyone says is so groundbreaking and original, watch the end of The Good, The Bad and the Ugly and compare the two scenes.

The most influential musical artists of the 20th century is a very contested topic, but out of curiosity, as I was writing this piece, I googled it and eventually found this consensus list. Here are their names and where they are from: The Beatles (Liverpool, England), Elvis Presley (Tupelo, Mississippi), Bob Dylan (Duluth, Minnesota), Michael Jackson (Gary, Indiana), Chuck Berry (St. Louis, Missouri), Aretha Franklin (Memphis, Tennessee), The Rolling Stones (London, England), Jimi Hendrix (Seattle, Washington), James Brown (Barnwell, South Carolina), Miles Davis (Alton, Illinois). Regardless of the nuances of the list and some pretty glaring omissions, one thing is astounding to me: only one of them is from a major entertainment city; the rest are from the provinces.

As a dyslexic that only really started reading for fun in my 20s, I spent a lot of time listening to audiobooks. Works by Hemingway, Cormac McCarthy, Hunter Thompson, and Edward Abbey, to name a few. They provide the soundtrack to my drives and background to my chores. By and large these prolific writers all lived away from the fray of Los Angeles or New York and kept to themselves in places like Key West, Woody Creek, Colorado, and El Paso, Texas. They relied on rich inner worlds and travels for inspiration, not siphoning off energy from the predominant cities of the 20th century. They crafted their work in relative seclusion, refining and rewriting before bringing it to the world once they were ready.

The same concept can be extrapolated and applied to the internet and modern connectivity. Now, distinct styles and dialects aren’t geographical but exist in tranches of the internet like gaming, Reddit, fashion, and 4Chan. Ideas are immediately compared to millions of other ones, with new creations often getting discarded in favor of older, more established. Things move faster; memes and neo-internet vernacular spread like viruses. In order to engage in the conversation, artists and creatives are forced to learn the new dialect and alter their art to fit in. Short-form content, vlogs, TikToks, and selfies—these forms of self-expression have replaced others because this is what the algorithm likes. Not engaging in this cycle is the geographic equivalent of leaving the hustle and bustle of the big city and moving to Wyoming.

I was born in 1988, and my formative years happened as the Internet was growing from an idea into reality. It was hailed as this blank space where increased connectivity would level the playing field, creating new forms of art, elevating new artists, and ushering in new economic models. Now, some 20 years after the birth of social media, things are mature enough to see what has happened. A few months ago, I was drinking my morning coffee, reading through Reddit, and came across a few articles highlighting the most streamed albums of 2025. The most streamed hip hop album? Kanye West’s 2007, Graduation. Across the board, catalog music, i.e., music older than 5 years, accounts for 50-70% of total streams, and this percentage is only going up. Although depressing, that doesn’t surprise me. On the level playing field of information where new creations are just as equally accessible as old ones, people of all ages, including the youth, are looking back in order to find creations that don’t reek of the algorithm.

Barreling in on 40, all of my friends are married and have kids. Unless you have serious generational wealth or struck gold working at massively successful startup, life in big cities is prohibitively expensive for young families. In catch-up calls with old friends around the country, talk often turns to the topic of pulling up stakes and moving to a new place. All of us did time in big cities, places like New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and London. Splitting rent four ways in a fifth-floor walk-up is no longer feasible. When the conversation takes a defeatist tone, with the vibe resembling the description of a tactical retreat, falling back to a defensible position that’s better situated to fight off the wave attacks of modern life, I’ll provide an alternative view. If time allows, and I’m properly caffeinated, I’ll dive into the points outlined above. “Not only can you barely afford to live there and own a nice place, unless you’re some tech-dick-head, but those cities are like content platforms; they take new ideas, and before they can really shine, they grind them down to smooth objects that resemble all others. Fuck that.”

I have no crystal ball, and I certainly can’t predict what AI will do to our lives or how we will stay relevant, but I imagine the value of the human intellect in the next few decades will be in creativity away from the hive mind. Large Language Models, are like the super cities of the last 30 years. They are mesmerizing, powerful and enthralling, their size and scope truly a wonder to be hold. If the theory outlined above holds true, they won’t really bring anything new to the table. They hoover information, tweak it slightly and spit it out in marginally more consumable forms. They will prove to be the JJ Abrams or Drakes of their respective fields, creating countless hits and selling billions at the box office, but contributing very little culturally in proportion to their commercial success. The real new ideas will continue to come away from the hive mind, in the provinces. I might eat my words on this one, but I doubt it.