You're hitting the right point in that it's focusing on the first type of cleverness, but that's because that's the type of cleverness that society and social n

You're hitting the right point in that it's focusing on the first type of cleverness, but that's because that's the type of cleverness that society and social networks find to drive "engagement" and therefore it's treated as far more important than your second definition of cleverness, which is the type that provides progress to technology and society and politics and so on - but it's boring because society's issues that need solving are so deep and complex and niche that any cleverness in the solution is lost to anyone but experts in the same field. And so what the layperson sees, because it's what's chosen by the engagement maximising algorithm, is only ever type 1 cleverness. Hence it's the topic. Which is ironic in itself, a well written article about the focus being wrong because the focus is wrong. (My pithy summation is also such an example, it's clever but adds or solves fucking nothing, welcome to my career).