Intelligence Vacuum: Corporate Technology

Most of the people who rise to the top of politics, corporations, and technology firms are not the sharpest minds of their generation. What succeeds is not intelligence but a practiced fluency in the narrow game of marketing, managing appearances, and navigating entrenched systems. The result is a self-reinforcing cycle: the kind of leader produced is exactly the kind of leader those systems require, and so intelligence—if it means insight, originality, or depth—rarely makes the cut. The game rewards those just clever enough to reproduce it, not those wise enough to change it.

This explains why so many of the decisions that shape the world seem shortsighted, banal, or hollow. Power percolates upward, but intellect does not; instead, we get a ruling class selected for mediocrity disguised as competence. The spectacle of leadership is a recursive loop where marketing passes for vision and compliance masquerades as strategy. If you have not been paying attention, that’s fine—but this is the machinery we (all, now) live inside.