None of the popular internet intellectuals are actually intellectuals, they’re just edgy aesthetes—BAP, Yarvin, Land, Yudkowsky, etc—none of them are well read or innovative, nor do they inherit any tradition of thought. They’re just personas, an affect of an affect designed to feel monumental while saying nothing.
Everyone keeps yelling 'WHO IS THEN?" Well in terms of excellent recent thinkers who are "actually intellectuals;" Fisher (The real talent of CCRU), Wendell Berry, Dutton, Spengler, Girard, MacIntyre, Ellul, Ivan Illich, Baudrillard, even Dawkins and Byung-Chul Han despite how memetic they are. These are a few that I can think off of the top of my head of recent thinkers I would consider "intellectuals," thinkers who are actually interested in their ideas and the world and approaching it as something to be solved and understood. It's not about their vogue or even how right or intelligent they are, it's just the way they approach knowledge in general. On the other hand, BAP, Yarvin, Yudkowsky, and Land, are just simulacra.
BAP's ouvre could be replaced with a series of aristocratic fascist propaganda posters and the ultimate effect would be much the same. It's writing meant to invoke, inspire, and twist its sources towards a specific spiritual-aesthetic trend, it's artful but ultimately just rhetoric. Same with Yudkowsky towards his respective aesthetic, although he is far worse than BAP.
Yarvin puts much more effort into appearing intellectual than both, but it's an obvious facade, the dark enlightenment just being the right wing version of dark academia. He wants to look smart, and feel smart, but his writing all ultimately amounts to simple shallow rhetoric designed to affect a sense of dark honesty in the face of loonie leftists and an ineffectual state that could easily crush everyone's balls into oblivion. It's no surprise he made so much of his name off of critiquing wokeness and the cathedral and current institutions, because he's a simple cultural commentator with a clever aesthetic.
Land is the most well read and well-respected out of the four, but I'd argue his image is just that, his image. His actual writing got so big and is so potent because it is capable of capturing the inherent latent horror in living in a rapidly advancing technological world, trapped within an abstract system that seems to have an all-consuming machine logic that will eventually devour the Earth. His writing style supports this, everyone says it's so difficult because it's intentionally hollow, not obscuritant but empty, it lacks content because the barrenness of his overwrought style mirrors the way the logic of our system feels. It works, but it's just art, and if he were a more talented writer he would've been writing fiction all along.
As for actually well read thinkers? Rowan Williams, Charles Taylor, Harold Bloom, George Steiner, Roberto Calasso, Thomas Pynchon, Peter Sloterdijk, Ivan Illich. All thinkers who have dabbled in and become familiar with many traditions, fields, periods, and places, and are capable of drawing on them all to make points that reach across them. This is what I mean by "Well read," not simply "knowing the classics," or "having read the history of the few big civilisations," but dipping your toes in enough ponds that you can correlate, contextualise, and inform your thinking through them in concordance.
And, for what it's worth, I think the greatest living thinker is Darren Allen.
The dissident right lacks any enduring thinkers for the same reason the woke left does, these are not genuine philosophical threads but ephemeral temporal movements which serve to forcefully express a latent psycho-spiritual tension before fading into history. Both of these are merely the passing rhythm of human culture, which lives in a much smaller timeframe than the greats. That's not to say the writers involved in them are bad, I think BAP's and Yarvin's (and Mike Ma's and Delicious Taco's), works are about as good "Eat Pray Love," or "The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck," but they aren't going to last. Whatever real intellectual threads are in the dissident right have been talked about for at least a century, and will be spoken of for many more. Whatever changes the world needs to make to account for its psychological force will be made, stricter immigration, a culture that punishes speech less, a renewed veneration for virtue instead of weakness. And whatever political potential the movement has will naturally disperse as it stops being cool. This is all natural and as it should be.
Contemporary times have little worthwhile intellectuals, and as time goes on fewer and fewer people seem to have it in them to be well read. This is made much worse by academia progressively decaying from its lofty ideals to just a second round of schooling, credentialism and job preparation.
There are however things worth tackling in the long run, things we're grappling with right now. For quite a while this was the increasing totality of the system, the ability for pure abstractions to increasingly encroach upon our personal lives in a way that has only ever been felt by emperors, court eunuchs, and Buddha and Laozi, until modernity. Guy Debord is perhaps the grandfather, and Baudrillard is perhaps the father here, but Fisher, Byung-Chul Han, Ellul, are all tackling this from a lofty theoretical perspective, and I'd argue Berry, Illich, and even Ted K are tackling it from another more naturalist hermeneutic, and Darren Allen is the final boss which syncretises both strains with mysticism. I would argue the "pinetree movement," for example was specifically downstream of this, a movement which ultimately ended in everyone involved simply logging off.
Then there's the whole crisis of meaning, which seems to have inspired the current right's love of aesthetic, traditionalism, and mysticism (Although those are all secondary to its love of cruelty freedom of speech). It's related to the whole "simulacrum and spectacle," but unless our civilisation collapses it will be a deeper and more difficult question to tackle in the long run, and one we've been trying to tackle for a long time. What can life mean when we're no longer struggling to survive? When our problems are abstract instead of immediate? Although it's more difficult to talk about, I think it is something we're much more resilient to. It seems that no matter disconnected Man becomes, lost in the machine, the fact that we can still fall in love and create and fight will keep us going through any wasteland.
If you ask me the next big thing is reenchantment, which I see as a repaganisation of society. Postmodernism has completely collapsed in on itself, because anything which fundamentally seeks to deconstruct and render the world relative will eventually run into the hard problem of "What if this thing is actually just real," and in the end it can only serve to reinvigorate what cannot be destroyed. All that can remain is the inherent facts and tendencies of our psychology and the world we live in. Having finished the quest of destroying all of our ideals, now living in a fragmented world, we're left with meta-modernism and re-enchantment both of which represent a sort of return to old school superstitious and magical thinking, but this time with the self awareness which we have no way to stuff back into Pandora's box.
And so all of a sudden we're seeing what are essentially folk religions pop up everywhere on Earth. Trad-Catholicism, Rationalism, Tianmudaoism, 'Woke,' whatever the hell 'Scientism,' is. These are all folkish manifestations of magical thinking which intimately reflect and answer to the cultures that spawn them, and they're all in their early hyper-specific seedling stages before they morph and grow and plant roots. Not too dissimilar from say, the Hundred Schools of Thought era. What makes this so interesting to behold is how much ontological breadth there is to the world now. The original Pagan religions all operated off of a set of universal instincts, animism, the dead realm and spirit realm and human realm, cyclicality, and Gods as represented manifestation. All of these felt so akin because they were planted within the same fertile soil of living sensate natural reality.
As the world changed and civilisations went steady we can see this started to change. Religions quickly became more and more abstract and disembodied, which gave them a great deal of power as what I would call "institutional technology." Christianity and Confucianism are the heights of this. Meanwhile we also see a rise of systems which directly address this through personal cultivation, mysticism, and epistemological critique. Daoism, Buddhism, even Native American religion which is almost a post-apocalyptic religious answer to a fallen world. However even within each strain we can see this struggle play out, hence Christianity has saved countless souls and has its own mystics, and Confucius was revised into a Daoist sage. Meanwhile Daoism turned into mercury slurping cults, Buddhism into life-denial and Asia-spanning institutions and politics. This is the Axial Age.
Eventually a few of these won, and things seemed quite stable for a few thousand years, but post-modernity has gone far enough to destroy any sense of the immortality of old institutions. We live in a hyper-abstract hyper-fragmented world, and so for the most part our new folk religions go further than those of the axial age. They're largely theoretical, playing off some key instincts or cultural trends here or there, but otherwise extraordinarily distinct. Rationalism and Woke and Trad-Catholicism for example seem to hold entirely different paradigms and values; and although they ultimately boil back down to base human instincts—hierarchy and desperation for meaning and a desire to impose order—they're disconnected enough in the abstract that I can't imagine any of them defining a civilisation. The language of the future is flexibility and raw power, not ideology or institution.
It remains to be seen which ones will survive or influence the future and which ones will evaporate, but rest assured it will be the ones with the most recursive meta awareness, whether its of the human soul or its own abstractions. Something algorithmic and inward-facing, like Rationalism, has a better chance of surviving than something particular and reliant on empty faith, like Scientism. There will also be a similar bifurcation as there was during the Axial age of strains which seek to exploit this movement and strains which seek to cure it. Solipsism vs embodiment, institution vs enlightenment. All of these however will be much less important than the folk wisdoms which shall endure generations from now, things like "organic foods are good for you," and "plastic is the devil." Stronger institutions than Rome for sure.