I love that he points this out explicitly.

Some don't see the underlying processes of complexity within note taking methods and as a result ascribe magical properties to what are emergent properties or combinatorial creativity.

See also: The Ghost in the Machine zettel from Luhmann

Somehow there's an odd dichotomy between the boredom of such a simple method and people seeing magic within it at the same time. This is very similar to those who feel that life must be divinely created despite the evidence brought by evolutionary and complexity theory. In this arena, there is a lot more evolved complexity which makes the system harder to see compared to the simpler zettelkasten process.

This author bio had to have been modified after the publication of this article as The Shallows came out in 2010. I have to suspect that a lot of what appears here was early work and research that heavily influenced his subsequent book.

I remember discussing portions of it with P.M. Forni in preparation of his own book The Thinking Life.