James Lindsay wrote about the same thing a couple of years ago in an excellent piece written somewhat less flowery academic language, but he seems to have deleted himself from the internet so that article is gone, I guess. Basically, he characterized this movement as an ideologically motivated moral community, which is something discussed in his books on religion. Religions are also IMMCs, but so are political parties, sports fan groups... lots of things that are organized around orthodox sacred values, taken seriously to varying degrees.
If I remember right, he thinks this trend in human psychology is also what allows humanity to function the way that it does and foster co-operation to achieve goals among groups that aren't biological families (in other words, what separates us from the animals) - it's just a piece of software that doesn't run very smoothly in modern society. I can't remember if that's something borrowed from The Righteous Mind. I think so.
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"The great promise of the Internet was that more information would automatically yield better decisions. The great disappointment is that more information actually yields more possibilities to confirm what you already believed anyway." - Brian Eno
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