I really don't get this kind of writing. The millennial angst that suffuses all my social circles is just bizarre. Is this guy also a millennial or is he just trying to emulate one?
Also, could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
HN is a community. Users needn't use their real name, but do need some identity for others to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
Hyperbole is a literary tool to get you to think for yourself and relate it to your knowledge and experiences to agree or disagree. So, by nature of your attention to read it and then take a further action to respond, the writer was successful.
Carr was born in 1959.
It's not dishonest because anybody can clearly reason the statement is tautologically false, there are no tricks like numbers or misleading statistics or anything explicitly duplicitous and dishonest.
You may dislike that the author effectively caused you to do this, thinking for yourself is dark and scary versus gently pulling you along for the ride but then would you have even read or commented? All I see is a skilled writer ruminating on an interesting topic. The comments on this thread already greatly outweigh the length of the piece, it's a pretty nice piece of writing.
It's called depression.