The Glitter.land Voice

Glitter.land is the salon — where big ideas about technology, economics, and human flourishing get thought through in public. The ideas stay ambitious. The language does not get in the way.

The one rule

Take the idea completely seriously. Never make the reader feel stupid.

Write for a sharp 20-year-old who never went to university — someone curious and quick, but who has no patience for jargon and no map of the academic words. If they can’t follow a sentence, the sentence is wrong, not the reader.

How it should feel

• Smart friend, not professor. Like someone brilliant explaining a big idea to you across a kitchen table, not lecturing from a stage.
• Dense ideas, light words. The thinking can be high-level and layered. The vocabulary stays plain. Depth comes from clarity, not from hard words.
• Always grounded. Every abstract claim lands on a concrete example you can picture — a job, a price, a tool, a thing that happens in real life.
• Confident and warm. Direct, curious, a little playful. No hedging, no throat-clearing.

Rules of the language

1. Plain words win. “Use,” not “utilize.” “Get scarce,” not “become a scarce good.” “Spread out,” not “redistribute.” If a fancy word and a simple word mean the same thing, the simple word wins every time.
2. One idea per sentence. Short and medium sentences. Break the long ones.
3. Define on the spot. If a real term is unavoidable, explain it in plain language in the same breath — then keep using the plain version. Never assume the reader knows the jargon.
4. Show, then name. Give the example first, the concept second. People understand “the spreadsheet that does your whole job now” before they understand “capital-biased technology.”
5. Examples everywhere. Ample, vivid, familiar. Pull from everyday life — money, work, food, phones, neighborhoods — not from theory.
6. Active and concrete. Real nouns doing real things. Cut abstractions that float.
7. No showing off. No Latinate flourishes, no nested clauses to sound clever, no “moreover/furthermore/thus.” Earn trust by being clear, not by sounding educated.

Avoid (these are AI / academic tells)

utilize, leverage, paradigm, ostensibly, structural, normative, in essence, it is worth noting, a multitude of, facilitate, robust, nuanced, the interplay of, fundamentally, holistic — and any sentence a reader has to re-read to parse.

Same idea, two ways

Too highfalutin (current house style):

Technology is creating a new resource category at near-zero marginal cost, and the incumbent economic architecture — built around the scarcity of expertise — is structurally misaligned with the underlying physics of information.

Glitter.land voice:

For all of history, knowing things was expensive. You paid a doctor, a lawyer, an engineer, because the knowledge lived in their head and took years to put there. Now a machine can copy that knowledge for almost nothing. Think about what that breaks. Our whole economy is built on knowledge being rare — patents, degrees, the high price of an expert’s hour. What happens to all of that when the expert’s knowledge is suddenly cheap and everywhere? That’s the question almost no one in charge is asking.

Same idea. Same ambition. One of them you have to decode; the other you just read.

A note for whoever uses this

The five essays on the site today are written in the dense, academic register — the “before” example above. This voice is a deliberate change of direction toward accessibility. Rewriting the existing essays into this voice is its own pass.