I completely disagree with this piece, and I think the author is missing a few key details that lead him wrong.
The author focuses a lot on the trappings of cleverness - the witticisms and the "outsider" nature of the clever individual. This is the wrong thing to focus on. People with conventional ideas today exploit these trappings (with the help of professional marketing and PR teams) to give themselves an air of importance and brilliance. It's no surprise that when you focus there, you will find cleverness to be "impotent."
Instead, cleverness defined as a cross-disciplinary ("outsider") perspective is incredibly valuable in the modern world. A lot of cleverness comes from people who otherwise seem very boring - they are clever in their specialty and in their own way, but not the supposed "renaissance men" that media personalities seem to be attracted to.
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).
I don't think cleverness is quite the same as inventiveness or a skill that equips you for a job. It is more a psychological tool people often use to navigate the world. I think that's what the essay was getting at.
The author focuses a lot on the trappings of cleverness - the witticisms and the "outsider" nature of the clever individual. This is the wrong thing to focus on. People with conventional ideas today exploit these trappings (with the help of professional marketing and PR teams) to give themselves an air of importance and brilliance. It's no surprise that when you focus there, you will find cleverness to be "impotent."
Instead, cleverness defined as a cross-disciplinary ("outsider") perspective is incredibly valuable in the modern world. A lot of cleverness comes from people who otherwise seem very boring - they are clever in their specialty and in their own way, but not the supposed "renaissance men" that media personalities seem to be attracted to.