August 11, 1973. A back-to-school party at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx. An 18-year-old Jamaican immigrant named Clive Campbell set up two turntables. He called himself DJ Kool Herc. He extended the drum breaks from funk records so people could dance longer.¹²

He knew maybe 10 or 15 other DJs doing something similar. To him, this was a scene.³⁴⁵

To the rest of the world, this cluster of teenagers in the South Bronx was invisible. No record labels were watching. No journalists were taking notes. The question “what comes after disco?” hadn’t become urgent yet.

When it did, the search found them.

---

I keep thinking about knowledge as geography.

Every idea, every skill, every breakthrough exists somewhere in a vast space. Most regions are empty. Some are crowded. And when the world needs an answer badly enough, it searches this space until it finds what’s positioned there.

The interesting part is what it feels like to be waiting.

The Illusion of Density

When you’re working on something, you can see who else is nearby. Five, ten, twenty people worldwide doing related work. Academic conferences. Discord servers. A small community.

From where you stand, it feels populated.

But zoom out to the world’s view and your whole cluster might be extraordinarily far from the next one. What feels like a neighborhood is actually an outpost at the edge of explored territory.

This gap between local and global perspective creates a systematic illusion. You think you’re part of something. You are. But you’re also more alone than you realize.

What Sparse Territory Feels Like

In the 1980s, Geoffrey Hinton was working on neural networks.⁶⁷ The first AI winter had collapsed funding. His peers had moved on to symbolic AI, the approach that actually worked, the one that got grants. He kept publishing papers on backpropagation to small audiences.

From his perspective, there was a research community. From the world’s perspective, he was in sparse territory. The question “how do we recognize patterns at scale?” wasn’t urgent yet.⁸⁹

Three decades later, it became urgent. The search found everything he’d been building.¹⁰

---

Katalin Karikó spent the 1990s working on mRNA as a therapeutic platform. Penn demoted her in 1995, cut her salary.¹¹¹² Her grant applications kept getting rejected. The work was too speculative, the applications too uncertain.

She had collaborators. Drew Weissman was working with her. It felt like progress.

But from the world’s view, mRNA therapeutics was sparse territory. Nobody was searching that region of the space because no question demanded it.

Then COVID arrived. Suddenly the question “how do we make vaccines faster than ever before?” became the most urgent question on Earth. The search swept through decades of obscure immunology research and found Karikó and Weissman’s foundational work on modified nucleosides.¹³¹⁴

Within months, their techniques were being injected into billions of arms.

---

Vincent van Gogh sold one painting while he was alive. It went for 400 francs, four months before his death.¹⁵¹⁶¹⁷

He wrote letters to his brother describing his vision, his certainty that post-impressionism would matter. He could see a handful of others working in similar territory. It felt like a movement to him.

The art market wasn’t searching that region of the space. Not yet.

---

In the early 1980s, a young driver named Keiichi Tsuchiya started pushing his Toyota AE86 sideways through the mountain passes outside Tokyo. The touge roads were narrow, unlit, technically illegal to race on. He and maybe a dozen other drivers would meet at night, drifting through switchbacks at speeds that should have killed them.

Someone started filming. VHS tapes of Tsuchiya’s runs circulated through underground car culture. He called himself the Drift King. To him and his small crew, this was a scene.

To the rest of the world, it was invisible. No motorsport federation was watching. No media coverage. The question “what’s the next evolution in car culture?” wasn’t being asked yet.

Then the Fast and Furious franchise needed something new. The search swept through decades of underground Japanese car culture and found everything those touge drivers had built. Drifting went from mountain passes to stadiums to the Olympics discussions. Tsuchiya became a global icon.

---

In 1997, a group of nine teenagers in Lisses, a suburb south of Paris, spent their afternoons at a concrete sculpture called La Dame Du Lac. They jumped between structures, vaulted walls, climbed buildings. They called themselves the Yamakasi, a Lingala word meaning “strong man, strong spirit.”

One of them, David Belle, had learned movement techniques from his father Raymond, a French special forces veteran who’d adapted Georges Hébert’s “méthode naturelle” for urban environments. The group developed what they called “l’art du déplacement.” The art of movement through obstacles.

They knew each other. A handful of related practitioners in nearby towns. To them, this was a discipline.

To the world, they were invisible teenagers doing weird gymnastics on public property. No sports federation recognized what they were doing. No media cared.

Then YouTube emerged, and the question “what does superhuman urban movement look like?” became searchable. The search found Belle and the Yamakasi. He starred in District 13. The discipline they’d been building got called parkour, and it spread everywhere.

---

In 1993, a PC game called DOOM shipped with a feature that let players record their inputs as tiny “demo” files. Some players started competing to finish levels as fast as possible, sharing demos on early internet forums.

By 1997, a group of Quake players stitched their demos together into “Quake Done Quick,” a full game playthrough using techniques nobody had imagined. Bunny hopping. Rocket jumping. Breaking the game open.

They knew maybe a few hundred people doing this. Forums, IRC channels, a website called Speed Demos Archive. To them, this was a scene.

To the gaming industry, it was invisible. No tournaments. No prize money. Just nerds in forums arguing about frame-perfect inputs.

Then Twitch emerged. Suddenly the question “what does superhuman game mastery look like?” became streamable. The first Games Done Quick marathon ran from the founder’s mother’s basement in 2010. Now GDQ events draw millions of viewers and have raised over $50 million for charity. Speedrunning went from demo files passed between forum users to a cultural force with its own celebrities and language.

---

This is the pattern. When you’re positioned in sparse territory before the search arrives, it looks and feels like failure. No funding. No recognition. Peers who think you’re wasting your time.

But this sensation of wrongness is just distance. You’re far from where the current search is operating. That’s all.

If your work has depth, if it’s complete and coherent and others can build on it, the search will find you when the question becomes urgent enough.

Not might find you. Will.

The search has to find you, or it fails at its purpose.

The Mechanisms

Different domains search differently.

Science searches through citation networks and replication. Technology searches through markets and developer adoption. Culture searches through imitation and media. Economics searches through price signals.

But the dynamic is the same. Urgency triggers search. Search finds what’s positioned.

Mendel sat for 34 years before biology needed him.⁷¹⁰¹⁸ CRISPR editing was discovered in the 1980s but the breakthrough came in 2012 when the question got urgent.¹⁹²⁰²¹ Continental drift waited 50 years for seafloor spreading to provide the mechanism.²²²³²⁴

TCP/IP was positioned in the 1970s and found in the 1990s. Bitcoin emerged from cypherpunk circles in 2008 when “trustless digital money” became searchable.²⁵²⁶ Remote work tech existed for decades before 2020 made it mandatory.²⁷²⁸²⁹

Gandhi positioned nonviolent resistance. King found it and adapted it.^30313233 Bogle’s index funds were ridiculed as “un-American” in 1976. Now they’re dominant.³⁴³⁵³⁶

The lag varies. Years, decades, sometimes centuries. The pattern doesn’t.

Forcing the Question

Some people don’t wait for urgency. They manufacture it.

Rachel Carson didn’t wait for “are pesticides killing wildlife?” to become urgent. She made it urgent with Silent Spring in 1962, rigorous science wrapped in prose that regular people could feel.³⁷³⁸³⁹ She pulled the search toward sparse territory by making the question impossible to ignore.

Musk doesn’t wait for space colonization to become urgent. He manufactures urgency through spectacle and narrative, forcing the question into consciousness before it would naturally arrive.

This is different from positioning and waiting. It’s positioning and accelerating. Requires resources: capital, platform, narrative skill, timing.

Not everyone can do this. But if you can, you’re not just sitting in the space. You’re reshaping which questions get asked.

The New Instruments

Something fundamental changed recently.

For most of human history, you couldn’t see the map. Buddha didn’t know if others were working on consciousness frameworks on other continents. Mendel couldn’t search “who else studies inheritance?”

Now you can. Search engines show who else works on your problem globally. GitHub shows similar projects. Citation databases reveal related research. Google Trends shows questions becoming urgent in real time.

You can assess your sparsity. Search thoroughly and find only five similar projects worldwide? You’re probably in genuinely sparse territory.

You can track urgency. Watch search volume, funding announcements, media coverage. See the question becoming pressing.

You can find your cluster even if they’re distributed across continents.

The instruments are better than anyone had before 2000. The map is finally visible, at least in outline.

What This Suggests

You can’t see the full graph. Nobody can. You only see your local neighborhood.

But if you find a small number of others doing genuinely novel work, you’re probably all in sparse territory from the world’s view, even if it feels populated from yours.

And when you’re there and nobody seems to care, that’s not evidence you’re wrong.

That’s just what sparse territory feels like before the search arrives.

---

This model has limits. Survivorship bias is real. We see what was found, not the brilliant work that was lost to fires or obscurity or bad luck. Depth is hard to judge before discovery. Structural barriers matter. Geography, language, institutions, bias. The space itself evolves as paradigms shift.

The model explains a pattern. It’s not a guarantee.

But if I were doing deep work in sparse territory right now, this is what I’d want to believe: that the feeling of being ignored isn’t evidence of being wrong. That the search is coming. That all I have to do is keep building, keep the work complete and coherent and buildable, and wait for the question to become urgent enough.

The search will find what’s positioned there.

It has to.

---

References

Footnotes

1. Rolling Stone. (2023). Kool Herc and the History (and Mystery) of Hip-Hop’s First Day. ↩

2. DW. (2023). How teenagers from the Bronx invented hip-hop 50 years ago. ↩

3. Britannica. (2023). DJ Kool Herc | Hip-hop, Merry-go-round, History, & Biography. ↩

4. Wikipedia. (2003). DJ Kool Herc. ↩

5. PBS. Birthplace Of Hip Hop | History Detectives. ↩

6. Rumelhart, D. E., Hinton, G. E., & Williams, R. J. (1986). Learning Representations by Back-Propagating Errors. Nature, 323(6088), 533–536. ↩

7. National Institutes of Health. (2002). Mendel—Both Ignored and Forgotten. ↩ ↩²

8. Crevier, D. (1993). AI: The Tumultuous History of the Search for Artificial Intelligence. Basic Books. ↩

9. NVIDIA Developer. (2022). Deep Learning in a Nutshell: History and Training. ↩

10. Wikipedia. (2001). Gregor Mendel. ↩ ↩²

11. Forbes. (2023). Researcher Demoted By University Of Pennsylvania Wins Nobel Prize. ↩

12. Genetic Literacy Project. (2024). After demoting a scientist and cutting her pay, University of Pennsylvania honored for mRNA research used in COVID vaccines. ↩

13. Wikipedia. (2020). Katalin Karikó. ↩

14. STAO. (2024). The Resilient Journey of Katalin Karikó. ↩

15. My Modern Met. (2025). The One Painting van Gogh Is Known to Have Sold During His Lifetime. ↩

16. The Art Newspaper. (2025). How did the only painting sold by Van Gogh in his lifetime end up in Russia? ↩

17. Artnet News. (2024). The Only Known Painting Van Gogh Sold During His Lifetime. ↩

18. Genome.gov. (2013). 1900: Rediscovery of Mendel’s Work. ↩

19. Nobel Prize. (2020). Press release: The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2020. ↩

20. PMC. (2022). CRISPR–Cas9: A History of Its Discovery and Ethical Considerations. ↩

21. Berkeley News. (2019). CRISPR Timeline. ↩

22. American Physical Society. (2025). January 6, 1912: Alfred Wegener Presents His Theory of Continental Drift. ↩

23. UC Berkeley Geosciences. (2025). Alfred Wegener’s Continental Drift Hypothesis. ↩

24. History of Information. (2020). Alfred H. Wegener Proposes the Theory of Continental Drift. ↩

25. Trust Machines. (2008). Bitcoin in 2009: Genesis Block and the First BTC Transaction. ↩

26. Wikipedia. (2010). Satoshi Nakamoto. ↩

27. Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2024). The rise in remote work since the pandemic and its impact on productivity. ↩

28. Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. (2024). The Evolution of Remote Work across Industries. ↩

29. Forbes. (2022). The Past, Present And Future Of Remote Work. ↩

30. Teach Democracy. (2025). Bringing Down an Empire: Gandhi and Civil Disobedience. ↩

31. LINCS. (2019). Martin Luther King Jr.’s use of nonviolence inspired by Gandhi. ↩

32. Biography.com. (2021). How Martin Luther King Jr. Took Inspiration From Gandhi on Nonviolent Resistance. ↩

33. Westmont College. (2011). Civil Disobedience and the Legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. ↩

34. Vanguard. (2024). Vanguard’s history. ↩

35. Wikipedia. (2005). John C. Bogle. ↩

36. Commoncog. (2025). The Creation of the Index Fund. ↩

37. Wikipedia. (2002). Silent Spring. ↩

38. Environment & Society Portal. (2020). Silent Spring. ↩

39. American Chemical Society. (2023). Legacy of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. ↩