This essay is telescopic. It can shrink or expand, depending on how much attention you are willing to give.
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Telescopic Content
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The best non-fiction is fractal: it holds at slogan length, essay length, book length. Alexander's "A city is not a tree" works at all three.
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Writing telescopically is Picasso drawing the bull — you must find which lines make the thing itself.
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The payoff is clarity and stickiness: the author does the compressing, so the reader inherits the shorthand instead of inventing it.
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Reading is already telescopic — skimming, summarising, chasing footnotes, reading commentary. Zoom out, zoom in.
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LLMs make all content telescopic by default, whether you consent or not. The danger: washed-out AI summaries that kill the spirit, shaping not just knowledge but taste. Once tools shape taste, there's no going back.
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So the only move left for writers is to embrace it — build telescopic by design, supplying the prompts and examples so you keep some control over how you get fractalized.
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Push it further and you don't need an essay at all. Just a title. Type anything after the slash on this site and a new essay appears, written in my voice from my corpus. Sometimes it's uncannily good.
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Which begs the question: what would a blogging platform look like if built for infinite telescopic content — readers prompting the writer's doppelganger, the writer editing after? And is it time someone built it?
Original published: February 7, 2025