Imitatio Affectuum

Spinoza observed that human beings necessarily imitate the affects of beings they perceive as similar to themselves. The imitation operates below the level of conscious decision and cannot be prevented by resolution or willpower. When a builder posts about extraordinary productivity at three in the morning, every reader who perceives the builder as similar feels, to some degree, the same affect — the joy of expanded capability, the competitive excitement, the implicit reproach that her own output is inadequate by comparison. This contagion is not intended by the poster. It is not communicated explicitly. It is produced by a mechanism Spinoza identified three centuries before social media made it operational at planetary scale. The discourse around AI is a field of contagious passions: triumphalist excitement, elegist grief, Luddite anxiety — each spreading through perceived similarity and each producing affects experienced as authentic assessments rather than as passions produced by contagion.