Online syncretism: omnicause, omniconspiracy, omnigrievance, and the "black pill"
Much has written about the "omnicause" - a neologism which describes the phenomenon where various social justice issues are considered so interrelated to the point where activism on one issue requires activism on all -- to the detriment of each one.
On the political right, there is a similar phenomenon - "omniconspiracy" - which describes the online amalgamation of various conspiracies about events in American history (the JFK assassination, the Apollo program, the Great Recession, 9/11, the COVID pandemic, vaccines, the death of Jeffrey Epstein, up to and including the 2020 election). Conspiratorial thinking is not uniquely right-wing, but it has become the domain of the American right due to their embrace of Donald Trump who brought along a conspiracy theory of his own -- the Big Lie.
Both of these phenomena have arguably been helped along by the internet itself, which has allowed extremely online niche activists and conspiracy theorists to collide and remix their ideas through suggestive algorithms. Hence, omnicause on the "left", and omniconspiracy on the "right."
This is the syncretic effect of the internet, and not all these effects can be described on a right-left political axis. Enter the omnigrievance, or the blackpill: the worldview of isolated, downwardly mobile young men with mental/physical health problems and few financial or romantic prospects. This population exists everywhere and society is particularly cruel to them; their isolation and grievances are nothing new.
What is new is the extent to which the internet has allowed these individuals to connect to each other and allow their grievances to evolve and merge. Historically these men are prime targets for radicalization; today the NEET/incel/blackpill nexus has become a cause of its own. Men who once thought of their problems as economic now understand themselves to be "incels" as well. And more individuals who would have described themselves as incels are making the choice to drop out of society and become NEETs.
When the world is visited by an attack of mass violence, such as the violence in Austria today, other groups seek to disavow the violence and put some distance between themselves and the attacker -- while men in this subculture claim the attacker as one of their own (accurately or not) and elevate him to "sainthood."
This virus is airborne. It has gone global. And perhaps it is one of the many ways the web is making us unwell.