Concept
A human has finite time, effective mental hours, and capacity to absorb new information. The constraint is real but not fixed — education, vocabulary, and accumulated structure expand the capacity of each hour, even if the hours themselves are fixed. Want is the gate that decides what the budget gets spent on, which is what makes the medium-shapes-want loop a receiver-budget mechanism rather than just a content one. Ch 11’s decompression-on-demand is the first structural softening of the per-claim cost the book has been able to name, conditional on faithful LLM substrate custody. Ch 4 (optionality-vs-access) shows the same constraint reflected in artifact design — the optionality-vs-access curve is the receiver-budget constraint refracted into how artifacts have to be designed for their intended audiences.
Connections
- Defined in: The limit on how much information a human can incorporate
- Discussed in: Ch 11 — AI as a New Kind of Node, Virality Trade-off, Ch 3 — The Human Time Budget, Ch 12 — Infrastructure for Integration, Ch 4 — Optionality vs. Access, Ch 8 — Preservation vs. Training
- Evidenced by: An epidemiological approach to model viral propagation of memes
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