PERSON

Ann Blair

The Harvard historian who proved that information overload is not a modern malaise but a structural constant of every information expansion—and that the human response has always been the same: not less abundance, but better curation.

Ann Blair is the great historical detective of too much to know. Her landmark 2010 study traced information overload from antiquity through the Renaissance, discovering in each era the same structural pattern: whenever the supply of available knowledge expands dramatically, the labor of acquiring it falls and the labor of evaluating it rises, producing a net increase in cognitive demand—what she called the abundance paradox. Her fieldwork is archival and granular: the actual practices of Renaissance scholars managing floods of print, the commonplace books and florilegia they invented, the debates about alphabetical versus thematic arrangement. Blair arrived at the AI moment as the one scholar who had already mapped the territory: the crisis was structurally identical to the one Conrad Gessner documented in 1545, and the resolution would require the same kind of institutional investment in curatorial judgment that the first information age eventually produced. What made every previous expansion survivable was not the technology itself but the curatorial practices

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