You make an excellent point about how information couldn’t propagate before the information age.

I think we can give Randall credit for knowing this but making an editorial choice for brevity, particularly due to the scope of the rest of their work … on the other hand, that makes the ‘um, actually’ more fun and satisfying.

(Honestly, mostly just spelling this out in case others who aren’t as familiar with XKCD (hi user from ‘all’) have context)