The Snopes article has him saying, about the article, "I was clearly trying to be provocative…". I would interpret that as being humorously contrarian.
He actually revisited the 1998 article in a 2023 NYT column:
The productivity numbers show he wasn't as wrong, economically, as folks try to make him out to be, which point (4) goes into. The research on computers and productivity goes back decades: