>Our popular media are drenched in contrived knowingness and irony. And cleverness has become something like a currency online, where hordes of commenters and commentators compete for likes and subscribers with world-weary analyses and smug jokes. What should we make of this apparent degradation?

That those people are clearly not clever at all and most can’t think for themselves so they just parrot whatever they heard from others? Trying to feign cleverness and actually being clever are not the same thing.