Infolust
Infolust is Ann Blair's term for an information obsession — a cultural appetite for more knowledge that operates independently of the technologies that feed it. The concept reframes the standard causal story about information overload by locating the drive for comprehensive knowledge in human culture rather than in any particular tool. The printing press did not create the desire for total knowledge; the desire was already present in the encyclopedic ambitions of medieval compilers, the universalizing aspirations of classical scholarship, and the human appetite for understanding that no amount of information has ever fully satisfied. Each new information technology satisfies the existing hunger, and the satisfaction intensifies the hunger rather than sating it — because what infolust seeks is not a specific quantity of information but a feeling of comprehensive command over available knowledge that recedes with every expansion of what is available.
In the AI Story
The concept directly challenges techno-determinist accounts of information overload that treat the experience as a consequence of specific tools. Blair's historical evidence shows that the feeling of too much to know appears continuously across centuries that had nothing in common technologically. The common element is the appetite — the libido sciendi, in the older theological vocabulary — that drives scholars, readers, and now AI practitioners to engage with more than any individual mind can absorb.
The implications for the AI moment are precise. The productive compulsion that The Orange Pill documents — the builder who cannot stop, the developer who works through the night, the writer who cannot leave the draft — is not caused by AI. It is a contemporary expression of infolust, now fed by a technology that makes the feeding frictionless. The compulsion's intensity reveals not a flaw in the technology but the scale of the underlying appetite.
Infolust has a paradoxical relationship with the tools that serve it. Every curatorial technology is designed to manage abundance by reducing it to navigable subsets, yet the use of such technologies typically expands the reader's sense of how much remains beyond reach. The commonplace book makes the scholar aware of all the material she has not yet excerpted; the search engine makes the user aware of all the pages she has not yet clicked; the language model makes the practitioner aware of all the prompts she has not yet tried. The tools feed the appetite in the very act of trying to tame it.
Blair's framework suggests that the abundance paradox — the fact that more supply produces more cognitive burden rather than less — is partly a consequence of infolust. A mind content with partial knowledge would not experience abundance as crushing. The crushing is the weight of the appetite, not the weight of the information.
Origin
Blair introduced the term in Too Much to Know (2010) and developed it further in subsequent lectures and essays. The concept draws on earlier traditions — Augustinian reflections on curiositas, Renaissance humanist anxieties about unproductive reading — but gives them a specifically historical and psychological formulation appropriate to the comparative analysis of information technologies across time.
Key Ideas
Appetite precedes technology. The desire for comprehensive knowledge is a cultural constant; specific technologies feed it but do not create it.
Feeding intensifies hunger. Satisfaction of infolust through better tools expands the perceived horizon of what remains unknown, intensifying rather than calming the appetite.
Compulsion is culturally shaped. The productive compulsion observed among AI-augmented workers is the contemporary face of a centuries-old cultural formation.
Limits must be chosen, not discovered. Because infolust has no natural satiation point, any sustainable relationship with abundance requires deliberate limits that the appetite itself will resist.
Debates & Critiques
Scholars have debated whether infolust is best understood as a psychological disposition, a cultural formation, or a theological condition rooted in the Augustinian tradition of curiositas. Blair's formulation is deliberately ecumenical, treating the term as a useful historical description that does not require commitment to any particular etiology.
Appears in the Orange Pill Cycle
Further reading
- Ann Blair, Too Much to Know (Yale, 2010), introduction and conclusion.
- Ann Blair, "Information Overload, the Early Years," Boston Globe, 2010.
- Neil Kenny, The Uses of Curiosity in Early Modern France and Germany (Oxford, 2004).