Land and Expand
2025 · October 7 · 1 minute read
I’m very interested in how AI can augment the reading and writing process. There are many books I’ve given up on because they were too dense and convoluted for my feeble brain (looking at you Heidegger) or required a lot of background reading just to make sense of it.
Land And Expand was an experiment in reading Nick Land’s essay Meltdown with the help of Gemini 2.5 Pro.
My process was one long-lived chat where I gave Gemini the full essay as text and we went paragraph by paragraph. Gemini would proactively provide context and anytime I was confused, I would ask questions. At first the responses were pretty vanilla. But after a few iterations and provocations we were able to stabilize on the spicy-yet-true. After our very long multi-week conversation, I annotated the original text with summaries. I thought this struck a good balance of maintaining the integrity of the original while making it more approachable.
I must say I learned so much more from this AI-enhanced reading process than I would have without it, and believe strongly in the potential for AI as a reading partner, especially for dense and difficult texts. Looking ahead, what better application of superintelligence is there than education?
You can read the annotated version of Meltdown here.
