Wondering: Is good spelling just a form of social control?

Riding to work this morning past a government building known by some as Galactica, I noticed some graffiti on the side that said "gang-bang your colleages".

Now I charitably assumed that the graffitist was talking about a completely consensual act and was in fact being somehow intelligently subversive - you don't generally see the word "colleagues" in low-brow graffiti after all - and inwardly bemoaned the fact that this subversion was diminished by the fact that they had misspelled "colleagues"

Which started me thinking - sure, good spelling is a key component of communication and sharing ideas and information as it helps to avoid confusion over the intended word. But what if near enough is good enough?

It would be easy to introduce a slippery-slope argument here and ask where does it end (and this is something I don't have an answer for) but surely intent is sometimes just as important as correct use of language and grammatical structure? What are we losing out on by diminishing our view of someone's ideas because they missed a letter or two?

Is there, underlying all this, some unseen, unspoken pressure to conform? Maybe we need to have a fair degree of commonality to function better as a society but what if this stifles new ways of seeing things?

This lead on to thoughts about how people have been eternally complaining about the deterioration of language - the rise of text speak and leet-speak, Americanisation of vocabulary, the "verbing" of nouns and so on. Much of which suggests a natural evolution of language - partially emerging from the expansion of ideas that the cyber-sea of information has brought us, partially coming from a need to be seen to have new ideas and perhaps also consciously coming as a form of rebellion, a rejection of the forms that have come before. (Thinking particularly about leet-speak here I guess, with it's heavily keyboard oriented shifts and the substitution of numbers for letters and randomisation of capitals)

Is leet-speak freer or is it bound by the same rules and conformities - if you started bandying around terms like nube instead of newb or n00b, would you be ridiculed or rewarded?

Funny the way the mind wanders on a bike ride. (Personally I like good spelling but I can't help wonder if it's something I've been conditioned into)