I am of course, leaning towards an intellectual millieu; not this stale, anecdotal reality we live. One theory as to why this void exist has to do largely with the neo-liberal lobotomy we have been coercively subjected to undertake. The highly financialized system has corrupted many a system, especially academia(highly credit based business) no longer a haven for the akward and eccentric and therefore thwarting intellectual breakthroughs
For as much as I know, characters like a Eugene Debs, a Karl Marx, a Martin Heidegger, a Cornelius Castoriadis, a Michele Foucault, a John Maynard Keynes have yet to surface.
I'm hoping with an ecosystem like Steemit or something alike, we can start seeing more and more ideas bridge together at a faster rate. Why? Well let's be honest, their is nothing special about the characters just mentioned. Their ideas were from others talking about it in coffee shops, in anarchic sects, in sharing information. The only the reason for their historical remembrance was because they beat to the punch first at telling their ideas to the masses.
That no longer seems to be the case. I've seen it happen multiple times, where P2P contracts are engaged instantenously, or contracts are packaged inside another in infinite count, and intellectual content building is rewarded based on its effectiveness to impact the system. Volunteerism is a fundamental reaction to a contract. We are no longer analog creatures, stamping into and out to work. We are modular workers, and at a higher level we are working towards target not time. Meaning that in a ecosystem like this, ideas are never really wasted.
I'm hoping with these new mechanisms in place, new profound ideas are established and formed. I am hopeful, Karl Marx wrote Das Kapital during a tumultuous time, so to shall we and have seen great theoretical breakthroughs emerge from post 2008.