PhronesisDigital abundance has reversed a fundamental scarcity that organised most of human information behaviour: the cost of acquiring and storing information has collapsed toward zero, while the cost of attending to it remains fixed at one moment of attention per moment of time. Chronic digital hoarding is here formally reconceptualised within the Displacement Framework as a wrong attractor W in the landscape of intentional cognitive engagement—a locally stable state in which the accumulation of saved, downloaded, and bookmarked material substitutes for actual engagement with it, driven by a scarcity-simulation mechanism that fires indiscriminately in conditions of genuine digital plenty.
The healthy ground state S^0_curation—calibrated intentional curation—is characterised by selective acquisition proportional to anticipated genuine use, and by the presence of actual engagement as the terminal act of the acquisition loop. In the wrong attractor, acquisition itself becomes the terminal act: the loop closes on saving rather than on reading, watching, or using. Nine propositions formalise the accumulation self-reinforcing loop, the access-without-use foreclosure basin by which digital abundance forecloses actual experience, the scarcity anxiety that drives the mechanism even in conditions of surplus, and the exit dynamics of intentional curation.
We draw on the hoarding disorder literature, information overload research, digital anxiety studies, and the phenomenology of JOMO (joy of missing out) to close with a characterisation of the return path.