Info Hoarding
January 28, 2025
3-Item Status
Current Location: Milwaukee, WI
Reading: Poseidon Codex by Paul Wright (a draft of my dad’s first novel!)
Listening: Man of Ill Repute by My First Time
If you have a moment, reply with your own 3-Item Status.
Quick Notes
New Work:
This week’s Let’s Know Things is about the TikTok Deal
This week’s Brain Lenses essay is on Local Positivity Bias & the pod is about Psychological Solipsism
Info Hoarding
The Google Effect, sometimes called Digital Amnesia, refers to our tendency to treat our tools (like search engines or archives filled with captured notes) as if they are our brains.
If someone asks us what the capitol of North Dakota is, or how to format a computer hard drive, we may feel as if we know these things even if we don’t. We can quickly google or ask a chatbot, but that doesn’t mean we actually know this stuff: our brains act like we do because they’ve been trained to assume that all answers to all questions are a trivial search away—but that’s not the same as knowing something.
It’s great that so much information, so much understanding, such a variety of life experiences and art and everything else is available at our fingertips all day, every day. But this modern superpower hasn’t been incorporated into our biological setups, yet, and as a consequence, our desire to accumulate and hoard resources—including stuff that might be useful at some point, like tools, knowledge, entertainments, and so on—can negatively resonate with our persistent, always-on access to this practically unlimited library of human creation and understanding.
Our stockpiling itch has recently become auto-scratchable through the use of AI tools that seek out, soak up, and accumulate such things for us, all day, every day if we ask them to. Then can then tuck their findings away for us, in databases, archives, and personal libraries, all with the assumption that we’ll do something with our private hoards at some point in the future.
There’s value in curation, and in the repositioning, riffing-upon, and redistribution of information and existing creations. But the thoughtless stashing of a never-ending substance is of dubious value, and few people actually make use of their cache later. The parts of our brains that tell us to get, grab, and store as much of everything as we can is sated by the act of acquisition, and for most of us the drive to wade into, cultivate, curate, and otherwise make use of all that stuff later is a lot less potent, so it just sits there, taking up digital space, gathering dust, and making us feel like we know things that we don’t actually know.
Which makes sense! Think back to the Google Effect. If we build ourselves little personal databases, our brains may come to think of those databases as extensions, much like the internet itself. We may feel smarter, more inspired, and better prepared simply by possessing it.
The effort required to work through all the stuff we’ve grabbed is a lot less pressing, unfortunately, as the biological incentives pushing us to do hard cognitive labor for uncertain outcomes are far less intense than the drive to mindlessly acquire.
All tools have possible utility, and for people who are genuinely making use of such collections for practical, well-defined purposes, the novel capabilities provided by multi-limbed AI data-grabbers could be a godsent.
For the rest of us, though, the desire to use such tools to scrape and agglomerate on our behalf may be a harmful holdover from the non-digital, scarcity-oriented world, not an actual survival advantage or priority.
Before using any tool, it’s worth considering the full impact of its utility and the specific intended outcome of wielding it. And for most of us, amassing stuff for the sake of amassing stuff will be a pointless, wasteful exercise.
If you enjoyed this essay, consider supporting my work by becoming a paid subscriber, buying me a coffee, or grabbing one of my books.
Interesting Links
If you want more links to interesting things, consider subscribing to Aspiring Generalist.
What Else
It’s been a tough week. I’ve felt a near-constant simmering of anger, outrage, fear, and all the other emotions that pair with concern about my country’s violent flailing, and all the individuals who are being targeted and brutalized as a result of that flailing.
I’ve been trying to remind myself, though, that it’s important to establish a sustainable, healthful pace with everything. Sometimes the most I’ll be able to manage is just keeping myself and those around me safe and functioning, while doing work that hopefully makes things better (and bare-minimum doesn’t make things worse)—all while keeping my powder dry for the comparably few moments in which I have the opportunity to exert greater, positive leverage.
Say Hello
New here? Hit reply and tell me something about yourself!
You can also fill me in on something interesting you’re working on or something random you’re learning about.
I respond to every message I receive and would love to hear from you :)
Prefer stamps and paper? Send a letter, postcard, or some other physical communication to: Colin Wright, PO Box 11442, Milwaukee, WI 53211, USA
Or hit me up via other methods: Instagram, Threads, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, or universal library.
A comparative analysis of two drafts of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.