At the beginning of this book, I mentioned the character Cliff Clavin from the classic television show Cheers, the local know-it-all who routinely lectured the other regulars in a Boston pub on every subject under the sun. But Cliff couldn’t exist today: at the first claim of “it’s a known fact,” everyone in the bar could pull out a phone and verify (or more likely disprove) any of Cliff’s claims. Put another way, technology has created a world in which we’re all Cliff Clavin now. And that’s a problem.
