Dissimulated intelligence percolates to ascendance in this way because it more readily recombines with the plethora of similarly vacuous artefacts, entities and systems within which we are currently inundated.
The role of (inter)networked communications systems in this drift through technological entropy into lowest common denominators is clearly that of transmission medium but it is also worth considering the inverse. That is, an overwhelming tide of uninspired linguistic artefacts may also in some sense be an optimal transmission medium for the sustainable continuity of the communications networks. Causality, like Janus, looks both ways; in and as autocatalysis.
The linguistic artefacts are the microstates through which the recursively self-propagating communications system (as macrostate) optimally self-propagates. Communication becomes much less about meaning or intent, much more about the blind self-replication of a gestalt. As a consequence, human intelligence might quite easily devolve and – as intellect and collaborative knowledge is a function of the broader probabilistic fields of information within which it transiently persists – it becomes a question as to whether or not we will notice this devolution as it occurs.
Daedelus Kite 