All right, one more question. Matt says, "What do you think of the critique of hyperlinks expressed in the writings of Nicholas Carr?" Well, Matt, I think that critique quickly aged, it quickly aged, and the specific content of that critique is not that relevant, but the spirit of that critique is really relevant.

So just briefly, I think Matt is talking about the book The Shallows by Nicholas Carr, which is now pretty old, it's from the first decade of the 2000s, and it was one of the first books to look at the impact of content consumption online on our ability to think deeply or think clearly, and back then the studies he was citing had to do with the impact of comprehension of reading websites that have hyperlinks because you read for a little bit and then you follow a hyperlink and you follow that hyperlink, as opposed to linearly consuming information as carefully structured and written by the author.

Now, it's less relevant today because people don't read long articles with hyperlinks anymore, the technology went past that, that's an out-of-date technology, but things are even worse. So instead of now making it easy for you to escape from a carefully structured piece of long-form content, we just got rid of the carefully structured long-form content and we just read 250 characters for Twitter or captions on Instagram or we shortened that down to memes, let's just have a picture with a couple sentences on it, or videos that are incredibly tightly edited, boom boom boom boom boom, and so we got rid of the option of even not following rabbit holes by just making everything just quick rabbit holes.

And I'm sure that is amplifying the issues Carr talked about, reducing attention, reducing the comfort when it does come time to read something like a book, reducing our comfort with doing that, our mind wanders, we can't sustain attention. So yes, the hyperlink critique quickly got aged, but the underlying spirit of the medium of internet communication pushing us towards a more fragmented mind, those issues have amplified to a point that I think even Carr wouldn't have predicted in his most pessimistic moments back when he was writing that book.

(upbeat music)