If I read Parfrey correctly, the point seems to be that as there are no longer any grand systems of thought dominating Western intellectuals, cerebral anarchy and short attention spans rule the day. In this environment, the intellectual with the greatest freak show wins. P.T. Barnum, Rod Serling and Hegel. The man can't be beat when it comes to collecting outr oddities. But it turned out not to be a problem.
New times come around and there are new problems.
People are not centered. It's not like just because you show this new manifestation of weirdness and end beliefs that they won't come up in a new guise in 10 years. There's always a new guise. I'm not too impressed with the idea that everything's on the Internet. It's one thing to have a couple of creep-heads talk about something in a discussion group.