Throughout history weird cults have occasionally formed.
The eastern mystery cults of the late B.C. era, the Muenster rebellion, Quakers, Shakers, dozens of cults in the Great Awakening, the Oneida, the pre-scientology UFO cults of the mid-20th century, Scientology, Jonestown, The Family, Unification Church, Rajneeshpuram, Children of God, Heaven's Gate... the juggalos? Who knows.
It happens all the time and each time the cult grows very quickly until it becomes an organism large enough that people hear of and reject it before they can be exposed to the infectious hook. Every cult has a few things to say where any reasonable person will say "huh, you have a point."
The speed of that growth phase is critical. By the mid-70s the American public knew to not listen to the guys in orange robes at the airport and the Hare Krishna plateaued.
We are still in the growth phase on the new internet meta-cult. The population as a whole is not ready to say "oh, I know there are kooks on the internet who will lie to me and I know how to recognize them."
A memetic infection is inevitably going to be worse with an internet to spread it. It's not clear when this one might fizzle because the available set of hosts is billions instead of thousands for the first time ever.
So yes. It's worse. It will probably be the most infectious cult spread since the origins of Christianity and Islam, and unlike those two it has nothing positive to offer. Without the internet it would just be a few hundred people in a compound, but now? We won't know how far it can get until it's over.
And a few decades later we'll have another, and another. It's enough to make you wonder if we've found the Great Filter.
I'd hesitate to categorically lump all of the ancient mystery religions in with the rest of your list. Some of them were pretty strange, even for the ancient world, but e.g. the Eleusinian Mysteries and Mithraism were very mainstream for hundreds of years.
Mithraism, in particular, is arguably very tightly linked to Christianity in early Christian history. By one theory, before Constantine's reforms that merged the two religions, Christianity was popular among the plebians while Mithraism was very popular among the patrician class, and the modern form of Christianity is arguably more similar to the old religion of the patricians.
Transhumanism, various neo-gnostic identity ideologies, and ideologies of envy currently in vogue and receiving the veneer of respectability from vocal segments of academia, the media, and parts of the state.
Man must worship. The trouble is he often ends up worshiping something he shouldn't, something unworthy of worship, like his appetites, like himself. He then degrades and defiles himself and plunges into irrationality, delusion, and ultimately his own destruction.
Transhumanism isn't a cult. We literally lack the technology for it to even become one, and even if we had it it wouldn't be one thing it would be hundreds of specific groups.
The eastern mystery cults of the late B.C. era, the Muenster rebellion, Quakers, Shakers, dozens of cults in the Great Awakening, the Oneida, the pre-scientology UFO cults of the mid-20th century, Scientology, Jonestown, The Family, Unification Church, Rajneeshpuram, Children of God, Heaven's Gate... the juggalos? Who knows.
It happens all the time and each time the cult grows very quickly until it becomes an organism large enough that people hear of and reject it before they can be exposed to the infectious hook. Every cult has a few things to say where any reasonable person will say "huh, you have a point."
The speed of that growth phase is critical. By the mid-70s the American public knew to not listen to the guys in orange robes at the airport and the Hare Krishna plateaued.
We are still in the growth phase on the new internet meta-cult. The population as a whole is not ready to say "oh, I know there are kooks on the internet who will lie to me and I know how to recognize them."
A memetic infection is inevitably going to be worse with an internet to spread it. It's not clear when this one might fizzle because the available set of hosts is billions instead of thousands for the first time ever.
So yes. It's worse. It will probably be the most infectious cult spread since the origins of Christianity and Islam, and unlike those two it has nothing positive to offer. Without the internet it would just be a few hundred people in a compound, but now? We won't know how far it can get until it's over.
And a few decades later we'll have another, and another. It's enough to make you wonder if we've found the Great Filter.