This essay is telescopic. It can shrink or expand, depending on how much attention you are willing to give.
This is an AI-generated version (237 words, not yet human-reviewed). Show other sizes.
Telescopic Content
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The best non-fiction is telescopic: it holds together at slogan length, essay length, and book length. Christopher Alexander's "A city is not a tree" works at all three.
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Writing telescopically is Picasso's bull: strip until only the lines that make it a bull remain. The reward is clarity and stickiness — the author does the compressing so the reader doesn't have to.
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Reading is telescopic too: skimming headlines shrinks, chasing footnotes expands.
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In the age of LLMs, all content is telescopic by default — whether writers like it or not. Someone's browser extension is already doing it to your words.
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The danger: washed-out AI summaries that kill the spirit of the original. Tools that shape our taste change us permanently. Once taste is shaped, there's no going back.
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The only sane response: stop resisting, build telescopic by design. These essays now scale to whatever attention you give them, guided by prompts and examples I control.
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The magic: expanded versions sometimes surfaced ideas I hadn't seen myself. Free lunch. Does unearned insight count less? I genuinely don't know.
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Push it further and you don't need an essay — just a title. Type anything after the slash on this site and an essay appears.
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The question: what would a blogging platform look like if built for infinite telescopic content — readers prompting the writer's doppelganger, the real writer editing after?
Original published: February 7, 2025