Well this was backwards!

"The postmodern condition has cast doubt on all intellectual authorities that would stand apart from the crowd"--aaaaand the postmodernists were who exactly? The analytic philosophers and scientists, right? Right?? No?! Gee, who were they, then?

"In hindsight, we can see how positivism opened Pandora’s box by denigrating the prospect of excellence in the arts, setting the stage for postmodern relativism"--postmodern relativism that has been embraced by...where?

"The lion’s share of the profits goes to the big tech companies such as Google, Apple, and Facebook, and to the tiny percentage of superstar creators." Completely unlike how past entertainers in other venues were tiny percentages of the total--we know thousands of singers aside from Elvis from the 60s, thousands of authors aside from Hemmingway in the early 1900s, etc.. Don't we? And, of course, Mark Rober, Kurzgesagt, Captain Disillusion, and the like, are so popular because they're cheap hacks with no real depth of talent or thought, not because despite all the capitalist push to exploit short attention spans and shallow thinking, people still appreciate expertise and being taken through complex issues in depth.

"Yet nerdom itself had to be disneyfied (simplified and sentimentalized) to appeal to a mass audience." And yet, even so, it is a glorification of the intellectual--and even Big Bang Theory in its own clumsy way humanizes the nerds and geeks and makes them companions rather than outcasts to ignore or overthrow. It embraces the elite, the intellectual, while still humanizing them (to the extent that they're not quite elite intellectuals any longer, but...hey...could be worse).

I think your credit assignment is almost entirely wrong.

You make some good points about capitalism, but this kind of capitalism is in opposition to classical liberalism because it elevates money and the exploitation of instinct above rationality and individual choice. Classical liberals generally don't accept that you can just lie about stuff and too bad if anyone believes you--"Individual citizens must be left unimpeded to pursue their conceptions of the good life." Capitalism has found a variety of ways to impede people, and to manipulate conceptions or get people to act in contradiction to their conceptions (ways that were not anticipated or appreciated by Mill etc.). If you cut out all of that stuff, it's not nearly so bad.

Singing the praises of the humanities and cursing positivism is weird unless you're going to revel in postmodern destruction of truth, because the former has been leading the charge and the latter has been resisting it every step of the way, while incidentally producing things like iPhones and space telescopes as a demonstration that to some extent they know what they're doing.

I'm all for deep thought. But I don't think you've thought deeply enough about this one.