“[I]n an information-rich world, the wealth of information consumes something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients.”
Herbert A. Simon, “Designing Organizations for An Information-Rich World” (1971)

Poverty of Attention is a blog about society and technology.

It is written by Lucille Nguyen, a developer, technologist, and data scientist who has worked in the public sector (before being displaced by Elon Musk’s DOGE-led cuts to state capacity) and the private sector in technology management and consulting.

Why Start Yet Another Blog?

We live in an information-rich world. The spread of telecommunications and computing technologies throughout the world has resulted in an unprecedented explosion in data. In 1998, there was 1 mobile cellular subscription for every 100 people in Sub-Saharan Africa. According to the most recent data from 2023, that rate is now 89 for every 100 people.

This technological explosion has resulted in major social changes. Some of these have been positive. For example, in his study of the adoption of mobile phones by Indian fisherman in Kerala between 1997-2001, Robert Jensen wrote in the Quarterly Journal of Economics that:

[T]he adoption of mobile phones by fishermen and wholesalers was associated with a dramatic reduction in price dispersion, the complete elimination of waste, and near-perfect adherence to the Law of One Price.

It has also resulted in negative outcomes, including:

fabricated text and image “slop” on social media generated by artificial intelligence tools
opaque algorithms deciding criminal sentences, choices by financial institutions, and increasing parts of everyday life
increased coordination capacity for genocides and ethnic cleansing
pernicious effects on shared concepts of truth, increasing polarization in political life, and yet-to-be-determined effects on social life

I believe that the only way to understand this information-rich world is through the lens of information processing. Humans consume information, like the words in this blog post. But that information also consumes us — it consumes our limited attention and focus that could have been spent on something else, it consumes our limited time it takes to understand it, and it consumes our resources to store and transmit it that could have been put to other purposes.

The posts in this blog are my attempts to apply that lens to various topics relating, broadly, to society and technology. In my youth, I used to work with wedding photographers. I’d run like mad with my lens bag over one shoulder, trying to provide the right Canon camera lens at the right distance and focus as events demanded. I’d like to think of this blog as continuing in that tradition: trying my best to capture, however imprecisely, an image of the chaotic events happening around us.

What Information Consumes

Why Start Yet Another Blog?

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