The problem is not stupidity. Stupid ideas, taken individually, are manageable. They can be argued with, filtered, contextualised, ignored, or simply outgrown. Human cultures have always contained vast quantities of nonsense and survived quite well. That is not what is new.
What is new is scale. A tsunami is not dangerous because each molecule of water is powerful. It is dangerous because of volume over time. Height—salience, shock, brilliance, outrage—is secondary. What matters is wavelength: the persistence, repetition, and saturation of the same low-grade signals across every available channel. Nothing needs to be clever. Nothing needs to persuade. It only needs to keep arriving.
This is exactly how contemporary communication systems operate. They do not primarily spread ideas; they flood bandwidth. They do not optimise for truth, insight, or intelligence; they optimise for continuity, speed, and frictionless replication. Dumb ideas are not selected because they are dumb, but because they are cheap—cheap to generate, cheap to process, cheap to transmit. At sufficient scale, cheap beats good every time.
Once saturation sets in, the system becomes unmanageable. You cannot correct it, because correction is just more content. You cannot resist it, because resistance increases turbulence. You cannot “opt out,” because the system is globally integrated: there is nowhere left to push the cost. No margin. No externality. No delay loop. The stupidity does not belong to anyone in particular anymore; it becomes ambient, like background radiation.
This is why the current fixation on “superintelligence” and “artificial general intelligence” is so badly misframed. Whether genuine superintelligence exists or ever will is almost beside the point. What will be recognised, celebrated, funded, and deployed as “superintelligence” is whatever integrates most smoothly into this saturated communicative field. And that will almost certainly mean systems that reproduce the same low-grade patterns faster, cheaper, and at greater scale. Intelligence, in the deeper sense, will not be legible to the system that claims to have created it.
People inside this environment are not choosing stupidity. They are trapped in field conditions that make intelligence non-functional. Belief stops being a matter of judgment and becomes a matter of occupancy: whatever fills the cognitive space feels true because it is everywhere. Original thought becomes rare not because people are incapable of it, but because the system cannot afford it. Depth is slow. Novelty is expensive. Both are selected against.
Yes, this dynamic can be exploited. Vast amounts of money and power can be extracted from saturation. That is clearly happening. But it hollows out the foundations of the system itself. Complex systems that optimise for throughput at the expense of coherence eventually lose the ability to coordinate, adapt, or correct. They do not fail because they are attacked. They fail because they consume their own substrate.
From a systems perspective, this trajectory is unsustainable. It does not stabilise; it accelerates. The communicative field keeps hollowing itself out until it crosses thresholds it cannot recover from. Collapse does not need to be dramatic or singular. It can arrive as cascading failures, misalignments, and systemic blindness—economic, political, ecological, cognitive—compounding each other.
This is not a moral argument and not a call to action. It is an observation. In a globally integrated communicative system, once volume overwhelms sense, intelligence ceases to function as a regulating force. At that point, even understanding what is happening no longer grants leverage. The system continues, not because it is intelligent, but because it has learned how to keep going without intelligence at all.
That is the situation.
Daedelus Kite 