The reading list in Chrome is a psychological masterstroke - It is a curated gallery of our own aspirational intelligence.

In behavioural economics, we often talk about the gap between our "wanting self" and our "doing self." The wanting self sees a 5,000-word deep dive into the socio-political implications of 14th-century Estonian pottery and thinks, “I must consume this to become the person I wish to be.” The doing self, however, usually just wants to watch a video of a seagull stealing a tourist’s dinner.

The genius of the Reading List is that it allows us to bridge this gap through a process of Cognitive Placebo. When you click that little star or the Add to Reading List button, your brain releases a tiny, illicit hit of dopamine. For a fleeting second, the act of saving the information feels indistinguishable from the act of acquiring it. You haven't read the article, but you have successfully "indexed" yourself as the kind of person who would read it. It’s a great psychological hack - we are solving for the feeling of being informed without the high cost of actually thinking.

In the old world, we had coffee table books. Huge, unread doorstops like A Brief History of Time that sat there primarily to signal to guests (and ourselves) that we were intellectually formidable. The Reading List is the digital version of this, but it’s even more efficient because it’s private. We aren't signaling to others; we are signaling to our own egos.

We are effectively outsourcing our intelligence to the browser. As long as the tab is open, or the link is saved, we feel as though we possess the knowledge contained within it. It’s a form of transactive memory where Google Chrome is the partner that knows all the smart stuff, so we don't have to. The danger, of course, is the "Tab Debt." Eventually, the list grows so long that it becomes a source of ambient anxiety - a digital pile of unwashed laundry. But until that breaking point, enjoy the bliss. You didn't read that article on the future of decentralised finance, but you saved it. And in the economy of the self, that’s almost the same thing.

We used to collect encyclopedias we never opened, now we collect URLs we’ll never click. The medium changes, but the human desire to look smart to ourselves remains gloriously intact.