Affective Toxicology of Social Media

Abstract

The toxicity ascribed to social media indicates deeper systemic problems than those usually designated as its toxic ills. Although the widespread afflictions resulting from social media consumption constitute grave social problems in their own right, they allude to a dysfunctionality that precedes and transcends the individual troubles. The ill effects not only predicate toxicity, they indicate social media as both causal factor and self-perpetuating outcome by creating the conditions of reciprocal obligation and the dependency on the “Like!” which together function as the engine behind the compulsion to repeat. Platforms seek to maximize their users’ screen-time because all screen-time is unpaid productive net-work that contributes to the platform’s capital and to its bottom line. We examine the dynamics of social media toxicity as an affective affliction using Marcel Mauss’s ideas of reciprocal obligation from The Gift (1925) and Spinoza’s Ethics (1677) as a practical philosophy that sheds light on the underlying machinism of digital social platforms and the creation of value as the space-time of social networks by way of cultivating narcissism. It does not purport to be the “be-all, end-all” explanation of the phenomenon, but seeks to produce an alternative, supplemental — albeit incomplete — image of social media use.

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https://dx.doi.org/10.15448/1980-3729.2023.1.42648
REVISTA FAMECOS
mídia, cultura e tecnologia
Revista FAMECOS, Porto Alegre, v. 30, p. 1-17, jan.-dez. 2023
e-ISSN: 1980-3729 | ISSN-L: 1415-0549
Artigo está licenciado sob forma de uma licença
Creative Commons Atribuição 4.0 Internacional.
1 Universidade Estadual do Paraná (Unespar), Curitiba, PR, Brasil.
Abstract:
The toxicity ascribed to social media indicates deeper systemic
problems than those usually designated as its toxic ills. Although the widespre-
ad aictions resulting from social media consumption constitute grave social
problems in their own right, they allude to a dysfunctionality that precedes and
transcends the individual troubles. The ill eects not only predicate toxicity,
they indicate social media as both causal factor and self-perpetuating outcome
by creating the conditions of reciprocal obligation and the dependency on the
“Like!” which together function as the engine behind the compulsion to repeat.
Platforms seek to maximize their users’ screen-time because all screen-time is
unpaid productive net-work that contributes to the platform’s capital and to its
bottom line. We examine the dynamics of social media toxicity as an aective
aiction using Marcel Mauss’s ideas of reciprocal obligation from The Gift (1925)
and Spinoza’s Ethics (1677) as a practical philosophy that sheds light on the un-
derlying machinism of digital social platforms and the creation of value as the
space-time of social networks by way of cultivating narcissism. It does not purport
to be the “be-all, end-all” explanation of the phenomenon, but seeks to produce
an alternative, supplemental — albeit incomplete — image of social media use.
Keywords: toxicity; network; aect.
Resumo: A toxicidade atribuída às mídias sociais indica problemas sistêmicos
mais profundos do que aqueles geralmente designados como seus males tóxi-
cos. Embora as aições resultantes do consumo das mídias sociais constituam
graves problemas sociais por si só, elas aludem a uma disfuncionalidade que
precede e transcende os problemas individuais. Os efeitos nocivos indicam
simultaneamente as mídias sociais como fatores causais e resultados autoper-
petuantes, criando as condições de obrigação recíproca e a dependência do
“Curtir!” que juntos funcionam como o motor por trás da compulsão de repetir.
As plataformas buscam maximizar o tempo de tela é trabalho produtivo não
remunerado que contribui para o capital da plataforma e para seus lucros. Exa-
minamos a dinâmica da toxicidade das mídias sociais como uma aição afetiva
usando o conceito de afeto do Spinoza na Ética (1677) e as ideias de obrigação
recíproca de Marcel Mauss no Ensaio sobre a dádiva (1925) como uma losoa
prática que lança luz sobre o maquinismo subjacente das plataformas sociais
digitais e a criação de valor como espaço-tempo das redes sociais por meio do
cultivo do narcisismo. Não pretende ser a explicação “nal” do fenômeno, mas
busca produzir uma imagem alternativa, suplementar — embora incompleta —
do uso das mídias sociais.
Palavras-chave: toxicidade; rede; afeto.
Resumen: La toxicidad atribuida a las redes sociales indica problemas sistémicos
más profundos que los que generalmente se designan como sus males tóxicos.
Aunque las aicciones resultantes del consumo de redes sociales constituyen
serios problemas sociales por derecho propio, aluden a una disfuncionalidad que
los antecede y los trasciende. Esos efectos nocivos apuntan simultáneamente a
las redes sociales como factores causales y resultados que se autoperpetúan,
creando las condiciones de obligación recíproca y de dependencia del “¡Like!”,
que funcionan juntos como el motor que impulsa la compulsión a repetir. Se
busca maximizar el tiempo de pantalla de los usuarios porque es trabajo pro-
MÍDIA E CULTURA
The Affective Toxicology of Social Media
A Toxicologia Afetiva das Mídias Sociais
La toxicología afectiva de las redes sociales
Felix Rebolledo
Palazuelos1
0000-0002-7058-9637
rebfel@gmail.com
Received on: Jan. 14, 2022.
Accepted on: Out. 3, 2022.
Published on: Jan. 6, 2023.

2/17 Revista FAMECOS, Porto Alegre, v. 30, p. 1-17, jan.-dez. 2023 | e-42648
ductivo no remunerado que contribuye al capital de la
plataforma y a sus ganancias. Examinamos la dinámica
de la toxicidad como una aicción afectiva utilizando el
concepto de afecto en la Ética (1677) de Spinoza y las
ideas de Marcel Mauss sobre la obligación recíproca del
Ensayo sobre el don (1925) como una losofía práctica
que arroja luz sobre el maquinismo subyacente y la
creación de valor en terminos del espacio-tiempo de
las redes sociales a través del cultivo del narcisismo. No
pretendemos dar una explicación total del fenómeno,
sino que buscamos producir una imagen alternativa,
complementaria, aunque incompleta.
Palabras clave: toxicidad; red; afecto.
The Affective Toxicology of Social Media
Despite the service orientation and obvious
benets of networked social media, users now
suer a love/hate relation with what have become
essential modes of interpersonal communication
and social interaction: users value and appreciate
the positives but are disquieted and disheartened
by the negatives. Most readers are likely aware
of the merits, advantages and rewards of social
media use, either from personal use or from the
incessant corporate public relation campaigns
touting their worth and advisability. Individual
users appreciate these internet-based appli-
cations as tools that facilitate communication
and social interchange and heighten feelings
of connectedness. Social media allow users to
maintain, preserve and renew relations with family
and friends and possibly to forge new ones: they
permit users to bolster their self-presentation, to
project themselves into the world, to cultivate in-
terests, to stay informed and widen their horizons.
At face value, the inventory of benets of so-
cial media almost precludes any criticism or
condemnation. Governments use social media
to inform their opinions to public, interact with
citizens, foster citizen participation, advance open
government initiatives, monitor public opinion
and improve their image and reputation. Law
enforcement use social media for public rela-
tions and community outreach as well as in their
investigations to monitor the activities of groups
deemed subversive or criminal. The benets also
extend to business and commercial interests who
use social media for marketing research, consu-
mer outreach, sales promotions, retail discount
campaigns, relationship development/loyalty
programs, and e-Commerce.
Yet, once we cognize the euphemistic impli-
cations of the language, we glean the double-
-faced productiveness of social media networks:
at rst view, the benets, merits, advantages and
rewards present themselves exclusively as posi-
tive attributes, but we soon come to see that the
pragmatic consequences couch less desirable
repercussions. In terms of individual users, we
notice this in the modes of self-presentation, so-
cial communication and interaction. Government
agencies, public relation rms and large corporate
entities — including the platforms themselves —
can use social media network communication
strategies as micro-targeted mass media at the
individual level. Paired with their access to the
information and data generated by third-party
data aggregators and directly from their client
constituents, the access social media platforms
oer to their users’ attention invests them with
untold reach and inuence.
Other than the platforms themselves and the
business community which has a vested interest in
the “success” of social media, not many voices are
singing its praises. Increasingly leery of the implicit
Big Brother capabilities of networked social, the
US Senate, the US Congress, the Canadian Gover-
nment, and the European Union (among others),
have been compelled by citizens and advocacy
groups to hold hearings with chief executives of
media platforms to justify the manipulation of
political discourse and process, the polarization
of society, surveillance and privacy breaches, the
unbridled monetization of users’ attention and
the disintegration of the social fabric. TheFace-
bookPapers published in October, 2021 by The
Washington Post analyzed a trove of leaked
internal documents on the use of abusive tactics
by Facebook executives, designers and engineers
to heighten engagement by polarizing discourse,
fomenting controversy and rage among users to
heighten engagement and increase user time on
the platforms. The Facebook Papers demons-
trated that the detractions were not unplanned,
random side-eects of the operation of networked

Felix Rebolledo Palazuelos
The Aective Toxicology of Social Media 3/17
media, but that they were expressly planned,
designed and integrated as operational features
of the platforms towards maximizing corporate
prot at the expense of users’ health and mental
sanity and the well-being of society.
Sharing these concerns, we investigate the
toxicity of social media platforms from a philoso-
phy of communication perspective, proposing a
critical reection on networked social media. The
problem that we identify is that users are unwit-
tingly being manipulated by digital processes and
articial intelligence, popularly referred to “algo-
rithms”, which function aectively at a subliminal
level. The function of the paper is to point out the
pragmatic eect of social media’s heavy-handed
grip on our subconscious as a dehumanizing
power by showing how they undermine our free
will as human beings, rob us of subjective agency,
and deny users any degree of negotiation as to the
mode of relation with the platforms — a relation
that is dictated to users and where content is
moderated, enforced, monitored and curated by
the platforms for their benet. We consider this
type of “my way or the highway” relation where
the user capitalizes to the unsymmetrical mutual
benets of the oering as enslavement much in
the way that Spinoza developed this concept in
The Ethics (1999). The enslavement is not descri-
bed in terms of ownership or in quantity of work,
but dened in aective terms, as a commodity
exchange of attention, of machinic enslavement,
and in terms of temporality. Thus, the aective
turn here presented tries to identify the dynamic
of aect in a “methodical” manner reliant on Spi-
noza’s theory of the aects.
The toxicity ascribed to social media indicates
deeper systemic problems than those usually
designated as its toxic ills. Although the wides-
pread aictions resulting from social media con-
sumption constitute grave social problems in their
own right, they allude to a dysfunctionality that
precedes and transcends the individual troubles.
The toxicity that social media incites presents
itself as an inventory of “side-eects”, but the
2 “A graph is typically drawn as a nodelink diagram, where nodes of the graph are drawn as points, icons, or texts and edges as a line
linking two nodes” (HU, 2018).
addiction, bullying, depression, negative self-
-image, attention decit, anger, social alienation,
exploitative hierarchizing, political polarization,
etc (SHELDON; RAUSCHNABEL; HONEYCUTT;
2019) ascribed to their use are not the problem.
If we use the analogy of tobacco addiction as
a technology of addiction, where for example
throat cancer is but an ancillary indicator of other
causal dynamics at play, we understand social
media’s functional aordances as causal of the
panoply of its toxic ailments. The ill eects not
only predicate the existence of toxicity — they
indicate social media as instigating producers
and self-perpetuating outcome by creating the
conditions of reciprocal obligation and the depen-
dency on the “Like!” which together function as the
engine behind the compulsion to repeat as toxic
addiction. As such, we examine the dynamics of
social media toxicity as an aective aiction using
Marcel Mauss’s ideas of reciprocal obligation
from The Gift (1925) and Spinoza’s Ethics (1999)
as a practical philosophy that sheds light on the
underlying machinism of digital social platforms
and the creation of value as the space-time of
social networks by way of cultivating narcissism
and enslavement.
The Toxic Nature of the Network
The rst aspect that opens itself to be proble-
matized is the nature of the network as a graphic
depiction of relational structure. We describe a
network as an interlinked surface of nodes and
links
2
resembling a net — this is not surprising as
the word “net” of network evokes the image of
a shing net as its underlying archetypal gure.
We attach positive values to the social network
in that at rst sight it is a web of inclusion: the
nodes or junctions are democratically distribu-
ted, and equally weighted, there is no centrality,
undue concentration, or preferential attachments
within the distribution of nodes. However, a ne-
twork qua network does not necessarily imply an
egalitarian democratic social structure and can
be structurally hierarchical to create eective

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apparatuses of control.
Most of us, like to foreground the social aspect
of being interlinked, of social cohesion, and mu-
tual support and the feeling of a safety net that
holds the social together and makes it resilient. If
I ask you “where do you identify within the image
of the net?”, you would likely answer that you are
one of the nodes at the intersection of a variety
of contacts. Some of you might identify with the
links, as an individual that mediates the relation
between various nodes. Or maybe you are the
host to a network and play a more important
central role and oversee its functional integrity.
Others will say that it is the technology — compu-
ter, or phone, or tablet — that is networked. Still,
some of you might be associated to the shing
industry and understand the net as a surface of
capture — and that once an individual becomes
embroiled, it becomes very dicult to extricate
oneself. But likely not many of you identify them-
selves with sh — either caught in a net or held
captive in a sh farm or religion of shers of men!
One can also see it as an attractive and seducti-
ve lure — which is the notion which informs the
symbolism of the veil, lingerie and the stocking,
and which in fact are a web, a work of webbing,
a net-work which simultaneously reveals and
hides, distracts and ensnares. Readers of Plato
(2009) can likely discern the constitution of the
universe as interlinked triangles and the concept
of the Chora as presented in the Timaeus. The
reticulated triangles
3
constitute the Solids and the
Chora as background, as space, as receptacle, as
creator of order, as sieve, as lter, as sustenance,
as matrix, as womb, as hospitable, and provides
the netting of support which provides the site
for the “social cohesion” that creates bodies and
produce objects as things which do not pass, as
things that have value and can be discerned as
having being (MOHR; SATTLER, 2010).
Another way of seeing a network is as logos
interwoven — a profusion of narrative lines linked
together by knots which need to be teased out
3 As outlandish as these ideas may seem to us today, we need to remind ourselves that 3D computer graphics are based on the
topological manipulation of reticulated triangles.
in order to reveal the network as a constellation
of ideas or beliefs — as a plane of consistency,
as a cartography of notions that support, orient
and obligate patterns of ow, of association, of
contagion, of logic throughout the fabric of reti-
culation. This confuses the line and the plane, the
threads as lines of discourse as constitutive of a
fabric as surface of composition. And along with
Deleuze and Guattari (1987), we see a dierence
between the woven, the netted and the matted.
The woven maintains the integrity and linearity
of the individual threads, whereas the reticula-
tion introduces a xed, relational triangulation of
nodes — are these not the same intuitions “that
enabled Plato to use the model of weaving as the
paradigm for “royal science,” in other words, the
art of governing people or operating the State
apparatus?” (DELEUZE; GUATTARI, 1987, p. 475).
If we take the term network at face value, we
see that the usual understanding of network as
a net-like structure of relation, where users assu-
me the role of individual nodes, does not readily
apply to social networks. The assumption is that
the mode of relation is directly peer-to-peer,
user-to-user, without any mediating intervention.
However, the relation of user-to-user in a digital
social network is never direct: it is a mediated
panoptical radial structure, by denition mediated
by the platform itself as the central hub which
mediates all relations as medium, i.e. environment,
culture, habitat and milieu. And if we imagine the
social network as ‘a working coherently’, we have
an abstract machine that is operating on a virtual
plane which maps out onto the material actuality
while discounting its concrete mediation and
immediate intervention. The resulting medium
is an operative mixt which confuses mental and
physical aspects in both human and medium into
what Gilbert Simondon calls an associated milieu
in The Mode of Existence of Technical Objects
(2019) and whose systemic confusion is akin to
the fabric of matted felt.
Conceptually, “milieu” is seen as an environ-

Felix Rebolledo Palazuelos
The Aective Toxicology of Social Media 5/17
ment
4
in the widest ecological sense of the term,
i.e. as the locus of the dynamic interaction of
all the factors and mechanisms that participa-
te in the sustenance of an ecosystem: it is the
simultaneous heterogeneous co-arising of all
the participating or contributing entities as a
co-dependent causality of emergence. Thus,
the social medium as milieu is the setting and
environment of concretion, of aggregation of
users and technologies, which condition each
other in order to form something which in turn,
simultaneously, allows these very same things
to (in)form themselves as mediated entities as a
heterogeneous construct.5
Labelling a social network a social medium
transforms it into a mode of communication and
underscores social media’s ability to mediate rela-
tion in terms of a commons that informs a specic
mode of commonality. The social network is not
an environment that surrounds the individual
user, it becomes an abstract parallel ecology
that not only connects one user to another, but
is its very fabric of existence. This mode of being
“social” can be understood as an ecology where
the social media provide not only an environment
that environs and sustains its inhabitants, but a
milieu, a middle, a mediation, a medium, that
heterogeneously connects and associates the
material habitat and the individuals that thrive on
it, through it, with it. So that we can readily see
that any dysfunction in the milieu as medium will
prove disruptive to the social, cognitive, emotio-
nal development of its constituents and result in
serious consequences to the social fabric.
Social media go beyond serving as platforms
that connect users as a centrally-administered
and moderated network. They are parallel uni-
verses where individual users are not directly
connected to one another directly, but are radially
connected to one another by way of the central
corporate entity that reexively modulates, mo-
4 The environment is defined here as the external conditions which surround a living being or as the assemblage of material objects and
physical circumstances which surround and influence an organism. It is a dualistic ecological conception.
5 We also need to appreciate that the nature and character of the images articulating the interactive exchange are disparate,
heterogeneous and asymmetrical: disparate in that the exchange is not predicated according to relata which can be considered equal
terms; heterogeneous in that the reactions as pragmatic are not necessarily of the same nature; and asymmetrical in that the reciprocal
responses are not of the same order or scale.
derates and ultimately mediates all interaction.
The individual users are radially connected to a
central hub constituted by the corporate entity
that serves as gatekeeper, moderator, curator,
accelerant, regulator, moral compass, and rou-
ting switcher of content — the functions that
are usually ascribed to the algorithm. The radial
structure serves as a centralized structure of con-
trol where all users are subordinated to the hub
and all communications that pass through it are
under its panoptical supervision. And it is exactly
here that we need to locate the toxicity of social
networks, in the dysfunctional ecology set up for
their users through their totalitarian regulation of
interaction within the medium as milieu.
The Toxicity of Social Platforms as
Reciprocal Obligation
“A man in debt is so far a slave.”
(Ralph Waldo Emerson)
The social network as social media is creative
of a social common that exists as an ecological
economy of reciprocal exchange and not only
as a medium that joins, sustains, and surrounds
users or functions as a media that communicates.
Although all exchange on the platform is media-
ted, the relational conjunction expressed by the
term social media comprises a variety of relational
modes: the nature of the interindividual user-to-u-
ser relation is dierent from the user-to-platform
relation, which is also of a dierent nature than
the platform-to-user relation — the directionality
of the relation is signicant: between users the
relation is a symmetrical exchange of reciprocal
obligations based on the aective economy of
“Likes”; the user-to-platform relation is initially
predicated on a Gift-economy; and the platform-
-to-user relation is more of a predator-extractive
economy. Immediately, we see the disparity or
dissonance in the relational exchanges that takes

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place in the vertical relation between users and
platform and horizontally between users them-
selves, each one with its own specic character
and necessary machinic enmeshments.
Social platforms are toxic when they develop
capacities in their users to act and react that do
not lead the user to be all that they can be nor
to act in accordance with their best interests.
Spinoza would say in the Ethics (1677) that these
capacities do not lead to “beatitude” or “bles-
sedness” which he dened as “the satisfaction of
mind which stems from the intuitive knowledge
of God” (SPINOZA, 1996, p. 155)
6
. Whereas adults
have (or at least are deemed to have) powers of
discernment and discretion and can evaluate for
themselves whether or not the capacities to act
and react that are being assimilated and develo-
ped contribute positively or diminish their powers
to act in the world, many users are not conscious
of the addictive nature of engagement implicit
to these digital technologies and the negative
eects consumption can have.
The toxicity usually ascribed to social media
cannot be indicated wholesale without dieren-
tiating between the various modes of relation.
Each mode has its toxicity and specic problems.
Thus, one cannot outright state that bullying,
depression, negative self-esteem, attention
decit, addiction, anger and rage, polarization,
disconnectedness and social alienation, infor-
mal hierarchizing, etc. are the problem of social
media. Although they do constitute grave social
problems in themselves, they are not the causa
prima of the toxicity of social media. They are
symptomatic of a social dysfunctionality origi-
nating within the culture and society at large
and exacerbated by modes of interaction inten-
tionally designed into the functioning of social
media (ALTER, 2017). Despite the inordinately
large numbers of social media user/consumers
being aected negatively by and through their
6 IVAIV. Obviously this is not a religious assertion but the Spinozist expression for the perfecting of the intellect through the understanding
of adequate ideas and their joint processual operativity as leading us to freedom from the enslavement of the passions. To equate God
with a deity would be the same as equating Joyful or Sad affects with being happy or unhappy — not what Spinoza has in mind.
7 We say initially here because the feeling of debt or gratitude to the platform will be eventually replaced by the dynamic of generating
“affirmation” through “Likes”.
8 Mark Zuckerberg: ‘There will always be a version of Facebook that is free’. https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/video/mark-zuckerberg-
version-facebook-free-54375605.
interaction with social media, the eects are
felt and expressed individually. But there are so
many individuals aected that the repercussions
can only be articulated at the social level, for, as
social media, they “socialize” the individual and
simultaneously mediate and immediate a certain
mode of mass social communication germane
to that technology. And in labeling the media a
mode of communication, we underscore social
media’s ability to communicate, not only in terms
of exchange of ideas, knowledge, information,
power, etc. by stakeholders on the interindividual
level, but of mediating the transindividual relation
and facilitating aordances that inevitably produ-
ce self-sustaining social commons that inform
modes of commonality. To speak of the social, we
go beyond the spatial extension of aggregation
of individuals as a body social to speak in terms
of an immanent responsive system of reciprocal
obligations and activities which require joint par-
ticipation and enterprise on both parts as creative
of a productive space-time.
Initially
7
, the machinery of debt and reciprocal
obligation is primed by the users ‘being welcome
to the platform. The platform oers itself and its
services, and the user oers its participation and
contacts in good faith. So that for the individual
user, the user-to-platform relation is a dialogical
exchange of reciprocal obligations constituting a
non-symmetrical, non-homogeneous, disparate
contraction based on gifting, the incurring of debt
and its acquittal. Thus, the social platform “gifts”
8
its panoply of services to consumers which the
users enjoy free of charge and thereby incur
a debt of gratitude, and in return, the platform
provides the means, the media, by which users
receive the ego-gratication of peers and are
rewarded in “Likes”. But what is dissimulated in
the platform-to-user relation is that users freely
provide their user data and serve as captive au-
dience to advertising while leaving themselves

Felix Rebolledo Palazuelos
The Aective Toxicology of Social Media 7/17
open to ideological manipulation at the same
time that they provide the content that makes
the social media experience richer.
As Marcel Mauss describes in The Gift (1925),
we have a deeply ingrained instinct to respond
in kind to what we are oered and served up as
a “gift”. So that by virtue of hosting users on the
platform, their letting users dwell on the network
and produce the content that creates the expe-
rience, of accepting and enjoying the content
that users are being oered — consciously or
unconsciously — users enter into a social contract
of reciprocal obligation as a system of obligated
exchange between users/consumers/creators,
system providers, and the media itself: “social
life is constant give-and-take; gifts are rendered,
received and repaid both obligatorily and in one’s
own interest” (MAUSS, 1967, p. 27).
The payback of the obligation and the acquit-
tal of the debt begins with the free labor users
provide to create the content that eshes out
the experience of social media. This content is
what drives user engagement and serves as the
foundation for the impulse to publish content as
the users’ currency of exchange for feelings of
belonging, of armation, sociality, acceptance,
and heightened self-esteem that is cashed out
in “Likes”. Although this exchange can constitute
the basis for morbidity, it does not necessarily
explode into a full-edged syndrome; neverthe-
less, we see this exchange of content for “Likes”
in the haphazard moderated return of the pull
of feedback (ALTER, 2017) as axiomatic to our
explication of the workings of social media in that
this mechanism trumps all others to explain the
motivation behind social media use.9 Taking this
interpretation to the limit, one could say that the
engine that drives the machine is the exploita-
tion of the unfathomable depths of the vanity of
its users – there is no limit to the satisfaction of
vanity that social media can potentially so freely
provide. This is the mechanism that will eventually
override the initial feeling of indebted gratitude to
the platforms — a mechanism whose pragmatic
9 This economy provides the fertile ground for the formation of narcissistic personality traits, their fruition into “like” addiction and
development into narcissistic personality disorders.
outcome is expressed through the operation of
the algorithm.
Based on the peer-to-peer exchange economy
of “Likes”, a social network generates no coin until
it can nd a means to cash out “Likes” into money.
It requires a dierent machinic assemblage to
convert the social network experience of recipro-
cal ego-gratication of users into fungible capital
of some sort. This conversion of user experience
into cash happens through advertising sales. But
because a platform’s income is dependent on
individual user’s consumption, platforms design
aordances and usage strategies to keep users
engaged — and this is where the toxicity is gene-
rated: it is in the platform’s attempts to maximize
engagement using techniques that will create and
foster dependency and indispensability that the
conditions for addiction are produced, aided and
abetted by the analysis of usage statistics culled
from user data. One has to wonder if toxic aspects
of social media would develop if it were left to
its own devices to function as a social network.
Social networks are Trojan horses in that the
“gift” they so freely give does not often obviate
the reciprocal obligations that the user unwittingly
incurs. With the platform, the gift of social connec-
tivity and delivery of “Likes” is combined with an
obligation to return the favor as a debt that never
stops collecting. And it is the perpetual acquittal of
this debt that creates the ever-increasing capital
that enrich the social media platforms. Google
oers a panoply of free services to users; Meta
oers sociality, a feeling of connectedness and
the possibility of broadcasting one’s life; YouTube
allows us to produce and exhibit our videos for
free and access millions of hours of audiovisual
programming; Twitter permits users to publish
the experiential unfolding immediacy of their
existence 144 characters at a time; and perhaps
more insidious are the parasitic cookies and the
data aggregators that promise to oer enhanced
user experience, functionality and convenience.
Putatively, all these services are given to users
“free of charge”, seemingly altruistically, without

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any expectation of return, despite what the Terms
of Agreement spell out in black and white (which
nobody reads nor understands the implications)
as to what acceptance of the gifts entails: nothing
other than debt incurred by the unstated contract
based on the guilt of reciprocity of gifting.
The Affective Toxicity of Social
Networks
“If you are ruled by mind you are a king; if by body, a
slave.”
(Cato the Elder)
Although the user-to-user relation of interactive
reciprocity based on “Likes” is also a gift economy,
rather than retrace this relational interchange as
gifting, we analyze it now as the emergence of
an aective machine freely using Spinoza’s Ethics
(1996) to create our argument10. The seemingly
innocent mechanism of a user liking “Likes” as
the exaltation of egotistic attributes
11
is an af-
fect-driven mechanism based on vanity
12
. It is
invisible somatic activity which depends on the
production of certain neurotransmitters (ALTER,
2017; LANIER, 2018) as the body’s response to
stimulus as imagistic process13. “Likes” produce
spikes in the individual user’s aective modulation
(aectus) that is directly interpreted somatically
as positive, as Joyful14, and which eventually re-
sults in the habitual response of the “compulsion
to repeat” the action that led to the minuscule,
barely registered heightening of our mood, of our
aective state, by the stimulus of “Likes”.
Normally, we would characterize this machinic
animation as desire, but we need to take into ac-
count Spinoza’s distinguishing between appetite
and desire: “Between appetite and desire there
10 We use Curley’s widely available English translation of Spinoza’s Ethics and freely quote and paraphrase the translated text to build
our argument of affective toxicity in social media. References to specific passages in the Ethics paraphrased in the text are provided as
footnotes in the usual notation for Spinozist scholarship to allow for direct referencing to other translations. Direct citations are referenced
as per ABNT guidelines.
11 The conceptual constellation of terms predicated by the prefix “self-“, such as self-love, self-admiration, self-absorption, self-
centeredness, self-importance, self-regard, self-interest etc.
12 “The quality of being personally vain; high opinion of oneself; self-conceit and desire for admiration”. But also, “A vain, idle, or worthless
thing; a thing or action of no value” (OED).
13 Imagistic in the Bergsonian sense as described in Matter and Memory (1988) as a stimulus, a centre of indetermination and a reaction,
even though the dynamic is exemplified here though vision and pictorial stimulus.
14 Joyful in the Spinozist sense of heightening our body’s power to act and react.
15 IIIP9S.
16 IVP66S.
is no dierence, except that desire is generally
related to men insofar as they are conscious of
their appetite. So, desire can be dened as Appe-
tite together with consciousness of the appetite”
(SPINOZA, 1996, p. 76).
15
Clearly, social media
are appetite-driven — users are trapped, fet-
tered, bound by the compulsion to satisfy their
unconscious, non-rational, aective cravings for
“Likes” which is not guided by the striving for God.
Thus, users’ net-working on social platforms is
an enslavement to the passions which in turn
becomes a perpetuum mobile, a machinelike
donkey-and-carrot assemblage, fueled by the
never-ending supply of users’ vanity (appetite)
and the quest for “Likes” (satisfaction).
Spinoza is quite explicit in also distinguishing
between a slave and a free man. The dierence
lies “between a man who is led only by an aect,
or by opinion, and one who is led by reason” (SPI-
NOZA, 1996, p. 151).
16
The engine that powers the
assemblage is somatically aective; it operates
through the body and evades the intellect; it is
not a rational process; nor one that engages the
intellect; nor the higher faculties which identify
us as human and distinguish us from the animals;
nor any of the qualities to which we ascribe the
presence or working of God within us. The user
perceives nothing clearly or distinctly, except
those things which follow from his power of acting
revealed to him through the aects.
One curiously positive aspect of this aective
user-to-user economy is that the newsfeed and
the algorithm that animates it are designed to
build on our “Likes” and not our dislikes. The social
media experience is always dened positively,
Joyfully, disregarding or discounting any nega-
tive denition of what we may like: the aective

Felix Rebolledo Palazuelos
The Aective Toxicology of Social Media 9/17
climate that ensues from determinations based
on “Likes” would be a Joyful one. The individual
user creates posts that other users “Like” and
the “Likes” received compel the original user to
repeat the process, for the greater the number of
“Likes” a user receives, the greater the motivation
to produce new posts, which in turn generates
more “Likes”. However, this positive becomes ne-
gative by virtue of its being placed at the service
of the false economy of “Likes”. If Joy is an aect
by which the body’s power of acting is increased
or aided, and if the Joyfulness arising from social
media consumption is predicated on the fettering
of the body to Sad aect,17 the Joy that social
media instils is one which increases or aids in the
Joyfulness of the body’s enslavement.18 In the
parlance of slot machine gambling addiction, it
is a loss disguised as a win (GRAYDON; STANGE;
DIXON, 2018).
We strive to further the occurrence of whate-
ver we imagine will lead to Joy.19 Therefore, we
strive absolutely, or want and intend that it should
exist.20 For Spinoza, “desire is the very essence
of man” (SPINOZA, 1996, p. 124)21, a striving by
which man strives to persevere in his being, but
as we mentioned, the dynamic of social media
is informed by appetite for armation and ego-
-gratication. So, if a desire which arises from
Joy is aided or increased by the aect of Joy
itself, whereas one which arises from Sadness is
diminished or restrained by the aect of Sadness,
we have appetite driven by the Joy of vanity and
“Likes” and we end up with an amplication of
the body’s power to act and the perseverance
in its being but ultimately powered by Sadness.
And because we shall strive to do also whatever
we imagine men to look on with Joy,22 we apply
ourselves to the production of content that will
17 IIIP41.
18 IIIP40.
19 IIIP28.
20 IIIP28D.
21 IVP18D.
22 IIIP29.
23 IIP49D.
24 IIIP26S.
25 IIIP49D.
26 IIIP26S.
27 IIIP52D.
28 IIIP53D.
result in the expression of that admiration with
“Likes”. As such, if an individual is only versed in
the ways of the Sad aects and only knows Sad
aects to move him to act, what he produces in
terms of aect will likely also be imbued with
Sadness — thus, the “feed” functions as a ne-
gative feedback loop that seeks to amplify the
Joyfulness of the Sadness.
The participation in the economy of produc-
tion of “Likes” and the belief in the truth value
of “Likes” leads to an inated impression of self:
“we shall easily exult at being esteemed, or be
aected with Joy, and we shall easily believe the
good predicated of us” (SPINOZA, 1996, p. 63).23
And further, “we see that it easily happens that
a man thinks more highly of himself and what
he loves than is just” (SPINOZA, 1996, p. 83)
24
and understand that this overestimation easily
makes the man who is overestimated proud.
25
Pride “is Joy born of the fact that a man thinks
more highly of himself than is just” (Idem).26 And
because self-esteem is really the highest thing
we can hope for, and because the self-esteem
is more and more encouraged and strengthened
by praise, and more and more upset by blame,
we are guided most by love of esteem.
27
The
self-esteem born from unreason and the power
of acting derived from it only leads to furthering
enslavement.
Likewise, Vanity is a Sadness which arises
from pride, from man believing the heightened
self-esteem despite its being ill-gotten from
unreasonable consideration of self.28 Moreover,
insofar as a man knows himself from the unre-
asonable consideration of self, he is oblivious
to his decient and wayward character and its
increasingly progressively fettered existence. So
vanity, or the Sadness which arises from the false

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reection, or unreasoned consideration of self, is
a passion that can only lead to Sadness.29 If the
rst foundation of virtue is preserving one’s being,
and doing this from the guidance of unreason
and unfounded overvaluation of the self, one is
only striving to preserve an unwholesome and
unfounded image of self.30
The Machinic Enslavement of the
Temporality of Social Networks
“There are no secrets that time does not reveal.”
(Jean Racine)
Although the social network and the users
constitute an operative more-than which func-
tionally maps onto the physical constituent ele-
ments and ows that take place through it as
social media, the platform is also as an abstract
machine that produces what Italian philosopher
Maurizio Lazzarato in Signs and Machines: Capita-
lism and the Production of Subjectivity (2014) calls
subjectivity and enslavement.
31
If we elaborate
the metaphor of the abstract machine in terms
of gears, and express the idea of enslavement in
mechanical terms, Lazzarato’s relation of master
and slave arises not in terms of ownership, but in
terms of a subsidiary device whose movements
are directly dictated, controlled, and driven by
the movements of an external power greater
than the user’s to which he would be subser-
vient. The mechanism does not function on one
single plane, it works synchronously on multiple
levels as a meshing of gears and cogs to column
wheels, axles and drive shafts where the move-
ment is mechanically transmitted and coordi-
nated horizontally and vertically, onto dierent
“layers” or machinic strata. Everything remains
in sync through the forced coordination neces-
sary to keep all the layers running in synchrony
in order to create a self-contained operational
assemblage as expressive of the transmission
of social subjectivity and agency (LAZZARATO,
29 IIIP56D.
30 Idem.
31 If the Common can be said to function as a one, as a unit, as an agent body, what kind of subjectivity arises within the Common?
2014; YOUNG, 2013; GUATTARI, 2010; DELEUZE;
GUATTARI, 1987).
An image of a wristwatch comes immediately
to mind. The wheels and cogs of the internal
mechanism transmit and moderate power throu-
ghout the system on dierent levels, always equa-
lizing its dispensation as a distributive associated
calculus. There is a central source of motivating
power, but its nature is almost irrelevant to the
singular one that emerges immanently within
the system and is distributed by the connecting
wheels, cogs and arbors which link the various
levels of the assemblage and provide the mo-
vement of synchronous interdependent ensla-
vement which produces a movement of time.
Still, the timepiece is prima facie a revelatory
technology in that it patently points out to us
in a most obvious way the passage of time — it
makes visual and palpable the transformation of
the potential energy in the spring or battery into
kinetic energy in the radial movement of the hands
as the representational production of time. Wris-
twatches are not powered by time and they don’t
amass time, they run on the energy provided by a
spring or a battery that through some mechanical
or electrical principle motivates the machinic
device that translates energy into measured
movement — the movement of the hands is what
gives value to the transduction of the potential
energy of the spring cashed out into a mechanical
movement as the production of time expressed
by the rotating hands. In this metaphor we have
the spring as the “prime mover” whose energy is
rationally distributed by a mechanism that informs
time as a uniform, constant and measured mo-
vement that subjects the entirety of the system
to networked enslavement of wheels and cogs
as a machinic Joyfulness because it functions in
harmony with Godly order. The subjectivity that
emerges from the functioning of the wristwatch
is time, but perhaps we could also say that the
watch’s machinic creation of time as indicated
by the rotating hands is the productive operative

Felix Rebolledo Palazuelos
The Aective Toxicology of Social Media 11/17
logic of enslavement of all the parts to the whole.
If the horological movement rationalizes the
brute force of the spring held captive by transla-
ting the potential energy stored in the spring into
the serial unfolding of time as expressed by the
circular movement of the hands on the dial, we
can extend the metaphor of orrery as analogous to
the work of God as prime mover of the universe’s
machinic unfolding and the material universe as
expressive of time through the perfection of God’s
divine plan. Where the interlinked processual
workings of the Universe under God’s rationality
gives Natura Naturans as the perfect working of
a celestial technology productive of God’s boun-
tifulness of Natura Naturata, when we transpose
God’s model of Nature to the temporal work of
mundane social media, not only do we see the
shortcomings of their functional operativity, their
inadequacy, and mendacity, we see that they are
also not driven by God’s divine rational perfection
but by an inadequate Joyful machinism created
by Man and animated by the sad aects of vanity,
greed and enslavement.
The workings of social media do not constitute
one machine, but two machines that work in uni-
son. The social media aspect of the individuals
users and their interaction among themselves
produces one machine; the platform as a cor-
porate entity that exploits the attention of its
consumers through data mining and the mani-
pulation and sale of attention entertains a second
that subsists on the rst. The rst machine would
likely do well on its own devices as a money-less
economy of “Likes” and the reciprocal intercourse
of users; but the second depends on the rst ma-
chine to produce income in terms of money and
is entirely dependent, and therefore machinically
enslaved, to it — thus the strategies to always
increase numbers — membership, postings, in-
teraction, engagement, etc. Thus, the equation
“time is money” is directly validated by the relation
of the user and the social media: the productive
time of users in front of their screens interacting
with each other while consuming advertising
and creating data is the resource platforms have
been so successful in marketing. In contrast, the
signicance of the equation that time is money is
lost on users in that they fail to see the value of
their time spent on the platform and are satised
with their compensation in “Likes” in the aective
economy of trinkets for gold of social networks.
The quality that makes us unable to scape
time is the commonality from which we cannot
escape: Time is Time; time in front of the screen
is time in front of the screen. And it means dif-
ferently, depending on which side of the screen
one is sitting on. The life-time users spend in
front of the screen is the time of consumption of
social media; of user’s life-time being used-up,
consumed through consumerism’s consumption.
If Deleuze urges us to articulate any intellectual
problem in terms of time, we need to nd the
eect of time which embroils users and makes
it common in social media. It is not only because
time is the ultimate preoccupation of philosophy
but because it is the preoccupation which is
common to us all — it is that link to temporality
which communicates us above all else, and to
which any other common or shared feature must
be subsumed.
There is an adage circulated on the internet
as a meme, attributed to Marthe Troly-Curtin,
that states “Time you enjoy wasting is not was-
ted time” which applied to our theme can be
made to mean that the user’s leisure time will
be transformed into task-specic time at the
service of platforms. Users spend time on social
media, but that time binds them to a machine
which ‘winds up’ users, cranks them up, so that
they become more energetic and thereby more
productive so they engage more wholeheartedly
— the aective power of users to act and react is
heightened but hardly what one would expect in
terms of Godly Joy.
Specic time universes bind people, spaces,
and things together in a manner that enables
coordinated action to take place — a point on
which sociologists of time would most certainly
agree. But more than this, specic time univer-
ses organize people and their actions in such
a way as to maximize their capacities toward
productivity (ADKINS, 2018, p. 2).
But this machinic assemblage driven by vanity

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does not only enslave the individual user as an
indentured slave to its master. The individual
users are machinically enslaved socially as the
networked constellation of wheels and cogs, etc.
that together produce a clockwork that creates
the rational operativity as a production of time in
front of the screen as the necessary enslavement
of the parts into the functional operativity of the
whole as subjective existence, as social media.
The irregular working rhythms and hours of the
individual net-workers is oset by the workplace
being always open and welcoming — hours and
tasks uctuate, but the peal of “Likes” is potentially
always there, waiting patiently for anyone looking
to spend time making time. “We are concerned
simultaneously with time-sense in its technolo-
gical conditioning, and with time-measurement
as a means of labor exploitation” (THOMPSON,
1957, p. 80). Users interacting with social media
is the ideal captive workforce of capitalism in its
purest form – the emptiness of time as producer
of value. The unpaid net-worker that toils freely,
day in, day out, that produces socialized time in
front of the screen is the singular manifestation
of value-creating transformation of time as the
social phenomenon of occupation as networked
machinic enslavement
32
as constitutive of the af-
fective machinic economics of social media where
“Social intercourse and labor are intermingled”
(THOMPSON, 1957, p. 60).
The Toxic Extraction of Value
“If our brains convince us that we’re winning even when
we’re actually losing, how are we supposed to muster
the self-control to stop playing?”
(Adam Alter)
The assumption here is that the network works
as a peer-to-peer, one-to-one relational me-
dium much the same way that a social network
of peers works in the “real” world. In the human
setting, one-to-one relations are conducted as
if members are of equal status, ability, or rank
so that no one domineers anyone else. But that
32 If social media create or produce the conditions for unpaid enslaved labor, children have no place there.
ideal conception of sociability is soon replaced
by a dierent order where the ideal dening
premiss remains actual, but another pragmatic
relational structure installs itself, over-coding
the original. This second, superimposed order
is more representative of how the social group
actually functions, both as to how the individual
members interact among themselves and how
the group represents itself as a whole. In social
networks, by virtue of each user having a singular
account per platform, the mechanism of “one
person, one vote” appears to be in place so that
any user, in theory, has no more power than any
other. There are ways to circumvent singular
identity safeguards so that a singular user can
work multiple identities or accounts on a variety
of social networking sites or a single site, or that
a motivated coordinated organization can mo-
bilize armies of sham, robotic accounts towards
a unique end or goal and multiply the eects of
inuencing and manipulating large numbers of
unsuspecting users by circulating vast numbers
of postings containing disinformation, fake news,
or outright lies as strategically coordinated poli-
tical or public relations campaigns (ROMANOV;
SEMENOV; MAZHELIS; VEIJALAINEN, 2017; PRICE
et al., 2015).
The operative system in the production and
circulation of content in social media is not a
simple system of economic exchange in that, for
the most part, there is no monetary or nancial
exchange between users and the platforms.
Users unreservedly produce content and freely
contribute to the capitalist wealth of the pla-
tform by contributing their life-force in terms of
creative time and energy thereby heightening
the platform’s experiential value for other users
— they willingly provide the raw material for the
experiential richness and entertainment value that
constitutes the unique selling proposition of these
networks and ultimately their bottom-line prots.
In terms of the contractual obligation of recipro-
city, the social media’s responsibility to the user
is to provide the best user experience and most

Felix Rebolledo Palazuelos
The Aective Toxicology of Social Media 13/17
entertainment value possible on the platform so
that both parties maximize their benet. This is
their contribution to the exchange and constitutes
the basis for the “contraction” that binds the two.
The exchange would normally stop there as the
intercourse of two parties. But the providers of
the system in turn monetize the relation as ba-
sis for exchange with a third party. They create
a derivative mode of exchange which sidelines
the relevance of users’ postings — where users
participate in social media for postings, for the
platform, users’ postings simply exist as lures to
hold them captive and captivated for delivery
of advertising. In traditional media, the media
would have to purchase the content in which they
would spike advertising, but in social media, the
platforms spike the “freely-availed” content feed
with advertising. The function of user content is
to oer variety and options for the algorithm to
tailor feeds according to a user’s type and his-
tory of “Likes” and provide the stream into which
advertising can be inserted.
The relational modes of social media work han-
d-in-glove to produce automatic subconscious
responses to individually-tailored, micro-targeted
inuence (KAISER, 2019; WYLIE, 2019) whether
it be through the targeted content users are
served through the computational machinations
of the algorithm, through the strategic volition
of advertisers of all types, or a coordination of
both. But in this case, the micro-targeted adver-
tising model tries to emulate the eectiveness
of the peer-to-peer connection by wanting to
establish rapport, trustworthiness, familiarity,
concern, empathy with individual users to model
communicational strategies. Networked social
media expose us to insidious manipulation by
providing pinpoint targeting of messages de-
signed to trigger an immediate response. This
correspondence of stimuli and response is based
on mass data culled from users or amassed from
aggregators that oer windows to our uncons-
cious decision-making processes based on the
33 This economy provides the fertile ground for the formation of narcissistic personality traits, their fruition into “like” addiction and
development into narcissistic personality disorders.
34 An imaginary social currency, which can be acquired by doing good deeds or earning favor in the eyes of another.
complex reciprocal interchange of conditioned
aective responses as an embodied logic that is
operative at an infra-conscious level and fetters
us, binds us, enslaves us body and soul to an
aective economy of bondage and servitude.
The payback of the obligation and the acquit-
tal of the debt begins with the free labor users
provide to create the content that eshes out
the experience of social media. This content is
what drives user engagement and serves as the
foundation for the impulse to publish content as
the users’ currency of exchange for feelings of
belonging, of armation, sociality, acceptance,
and heightened self-esteem that is cashed out
in “Likes”. Although this exchange can constitute
the basis for morbidity, it does not necessarily
explode into a full-edged syndrome; neverthe-
less, we see this exchange of content for “Likes”
in the haphazard moderated return of the pull
of feedback (ALTER, 2017) as axiomatic to our
explication of the workings of social media in that
this mechanism trumps all others to explain the
motivation behind social media use.33
What value can be ascribed to the freely-gifted
unpaid labor of enslaved users of social media?
In terms of producing content as raw material
from the social media experience, users’ hourly
wage at everyday workplace rates could serve
as benchmark. Thus, a woman who is gainfully
employed at $20 per hour and spends two hours
per day on Facebook is contributing $40 dollars’
worth of value day in, day out, or donating 700
hours, or more than 15 weeks of free labor per
year, thereby contributing upwards of $14,000
to Facebook’s bottom line and making it an ex-
periential value-laden proposition! One could
say that her goodwill contribution of her time,
discernment and “Likes” to making Facebook
a rich, value-laden experience makes life more
pleasant and rewarding for others, but other than
paying out in “brownie points”34 as a misguided
karmic investment, the only return is ego grati-
cation which can plausibly lead to egotism and

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narcissistic issues if the aective system does
not work in favor to the woman. But her free con-
tribution doesn’t stop there. By interacting with
other posts, she is furnishing data about herself,
about her preferences, her “Likes”, her habits, her
aliations, her character, her desires, etc. in order
to produce a picture-perfect virtual avatar of her-
self. This data is aggregated into a body of data
points from various sources which when taken as
a whole create a computational model of herself
whose pragmatic functionality is likely truer to the
woman’s essence than the woman herself can
ever express. This virtual avatar of the woman as
a high-resolution image of what she is can then
be used to ascertain the platforms’ reactions in
order to sharpen its predictive powers, tweak its
suggestions and heighten its manipulative power
by educating its understanding of us. And apart
from training the AI of the algorithm to make it
more eective in selecting and oering content
both from other users and from advertisers, the
net eect is to make us more pliant, receptive,
and more susceptible to the wiles and manipu-
lation of those seeking to change how we think,
decide, and act in the world. The issue here is
not solely the consumption or depletion of the
net-worker’s life to unwittingly produce wealth
for the social media’s owners, but in the owner’s
repudiation of the net-worker’s consumption of
social media as the site of actual creation of value.
This repudiation functions jointly with the negation
of the creation of value in content production, the
conversion of the users’ attention into cash and
their dismissive and contemptuous rejection of
accusations that they maximize revenue through
devious stratagems to kindle addiction under the
guises of fostering engagement.
Narcissistic Addiction
“A hurtful act is the transference to others of the de-
gradation which we bear in ourselves.”
(Simone Weil)
What at rst blush appears as a functional
dissonance provides the two sides to an imagistic
mechanism of control based on the wanting to do
right through an internalized obligation towards
reciprocity for the gift of social media and the
heightening of the aective enslavement of users
to a toxic economy of dependency of “Likes”. It
is a dynamic of conceptual substitution, of retail
bait and switch, where users are sold one bill of
goods in order to install a dierent order — in
social networks, the premise sold is heightened
sociality and armation, and it serves as lure to
keep users captivated and captive to consume
advertising and mold ideology while furnishing
personal data to better manipulate and subju-
gate them.
Our use of social media allows inuencers of all
types, whether they are individuals, advertisers,
government regulators, political interest groups,
media conglomerates, agents of disinformation
and propagators of fake news to better mani-
pulate us into reaching choices, conclusions
and decisions through embodied mechanisms
rather than rational consideration that reect their
wishes and interests. All this is at our expense,
and to add insult to injury, the manipulation that
is taking place is not operative on the level of
conscious rationality. The mechanisms that we
are describing here, the culturally inbred guilt
to reciprocate a gift and the neurotransmitter
micro-doses associated to the neurochemical
dependency of “Likes” works at an infra-conscious
level unbeknownst to our awareness.
What appears to distinguish our engagement
with social media from other modes of enga-
ging and experiencing life is that our mode of
engagement with social media all too often falls
outside the realm of rationality or intentionality.
Like when we drive a car, an (subconscious) au-
tomaticity sets in that takes over and does not
engage our conscious rationality to determine
our actions — only when something unusual or
unexpected arises that our rational willful cons-
ciousness kicks in and the activity becomes an
object of thought (WHITEHEAD, 1978). Spinoza
oers a second denition of appetite in somatic
terms as an active seeking in the Ethics IIIP9S, so
that when “striving is related only to the mind, it
is called will, but when it is related to the mind

Felix Rebolledo Palazuelos
The Aective Toxicology of Social Media 15/17
and body together, it is called appetite” (SPINOZA,
1996, p. 76), and if there is appetite there must
be a mechanism that nourishes and satiates that
hunger: the feed of the timelines in social media.
And so, we wish to come to terms with appetite
as motivating or animating our engagement and
identify that appetition that compels us to repeat,
to remain engaged with social media.
The semi-conscious automaticity of reaching
out for our phone and launching Instagram or
Facebook upon waking up in the morning to
directly check on the number of “Likes” our pos-
tings have received overnight at the expense of
everything else is an example of this unconscious,
subconscious enslavement to an economy of
“Likes” that happens directly through the body
without the participation of the rational mind. It is
a dependency that expresses itself as an unwilled
automaticity that undermines our understanding
of the human as a rational, consciously willful
agent in control of his actions. If the exploitation
of users’ vanity is the engine driving the abstract
machine of social media, we need to keep in
mind that the payo is at the level of the barely
perceptible, of the sub-liminal micro-dose of
neurotransmitter release that is operative. Cancer
patients routinely become addicted to opiates
delivered at micro-dose levels through morphine
pumps, likewise, neurotransmitter micro-doses
of dopamine associated with the neurochemical
economy of “Likes”. Awareness of these appetites
or automatic somatic responses is what mindful-
ness tries to develop, yet to become aware of the
aective modulation, the actual ow of aectus,
is at another level of mindfulness altogether and
what is properly known as Vipassana meditation
within Buddhist practices. And it is the awareness
of these appetites and what drives them that
mindfulness reveals and permits us to liberate
ourselves from the enslavement to the passions.
Overestimation of the self easily makes the
man who was overestimated proud, and when
the mechanism that drives that overestimation
falters, frustration and anger ensues, and narcis-
35 IIIP40DS.
sism rears its ugly head. The “Likes” that foster
self-esteem need to be constantly supplied, and
when they are not forthcoming, those who once
supplied support and adulation now become the
targets of hate. “The striving to do evil to him we
hate is called anger; and the striving to return
an evil done us is called vengeance” (SPINOZA,
1996, p. 92)35. The frustration of the machinic as-
semblage animated by “Likes” as the satisfaction
of narcissistic impulses alimented by vanity can
lead to the Seven Deadly Sins of the Narcissist:
Shamelessness, Magical Thinking, Arrogance,
Envy, Entitlement, Exploitation, Bad Bounda-
ries (HOTCHKISS, 2003). And it is these “sins”
as extreme extension of the aective economy
based on “Likes” mapped onto the functioning
of social media that cause so much malaise
in susceptible individuals. Using social media
motivates narcissistic predispositions in users
to exact vengeance from followers unwilling to
acquiesce, submit, or participate in the economy
of “Likes”. This subconscious economy of “Likes”
has an ethics of obligations and expectations
which surpass appetition as a passive dynamic,
to one based on an aggressive expectation of
reciprocity commensurate with one’s growing,
unwittingly egotistic, inated self-image. It is here
that the toxicity becomes expressed as a willful
aggressiveness and a compulsion to hurt those
whom users perceive have slighted, diminished
or belittled by not responding in due manner to
their posts as a direct extension of their inated
self-image. The aggressive reactions to this frus-
tration brought on by the exacting expectations
and demands provides the causal dynamic behind
the panoply of symptoms imputed to social media.
There also has to be receptive a predisposition
of aordances in individual users that facilitate
the plug-and-play modularity of social media’s
toxicity. If social media are widely held to be res-
ponsible for the social ills that are attributed to
them, it is because society itself is predisposed to
full that role and would indicate that there exist
social preconditions within the culture that sustain

16/17 Revista FAMECOS, Porto Alegre, v. 30, p. 1-17, jan.-dez. 2023 | e-42648
the widespread susceptibility to the workings of
social media. The ills that social media seem to
produce do not indicate that social media are
broken, but that they are exceedingly ecient
in what they do. This is operative at the level
of the aective and as such can be intuitively
back-gridded to establish the workings of an
unobservable processional logic that leads us
to conclude certain pragmatic results. But if the
reaction of the user is a pragmatic outcome of
the stimulus delivered by the platform to the user,
the platform knows “P therefore Q” as an image
point in the user. And if the platform amasses
thousands of these imagistic data points on one
user, as Alexander Nix36 claims, the platform will
likely have a full picture of how the user’s mind
functions and how to modulate the (in)formational
content of what it delivers as stimulus so as to
improve the eectiveness of direct voter contact
and produce the response it is looking for.37 W W
Spinoza S?
38
Things which are of assistance to the
common society of men, or which bring it about
that men live harmoniously, are useful; those on
the other hand which bring about discord betwe-
en men and to the state, they are evil, if anything,
because they lead us to live by inadequate ideas
and irrationality. It is interesting to note Spinoza’s
prescience in identifying the Common Idea of
Aect which is operative in these processes is
still operative even if couched under the guises
of a digital matrix.
Conclusion
Networked social media platforms produce
self-contained, autonomous, self-sucient mi-
lieus which function as ecologies of debt and
addiction. Their existence not only predicates the
existence of addiction, they are the technology
of addiction itself that mediates and immediates
its possibility — they are both instigating produ-
cer and self-perpetuating outcome by creating
the conditions of reciprocal obligation and the
36 Ex-CEO of Cambridge Analytica, “a UK data-mining company that attempts to use “psychographics” to sway voters based on analysis
of big data, social media, and pushing propaganda back at the potential voters via “microtargeting”. CA evolved to convince people to vote
against their own self-interest in support of ultra-conservative causes.
37 Of course, it only needs to be sufficiently efficient to swing the undecided and susceptible persuadable electorate to carry an
election — usually by a small percentage of the vote.
38 What would Spinoza say?
dependency on the “Like!” which function as the
engine behind the compulsion to repeat. These
mechanisms operate somatically on subliminal
registers, barely making an impression on our
consciousness or awareness, but the ethical lo-
gic that these phenomena generate work on an
aective level that sidelines our rationality and
taps into abstract machinery that undermines
our subjectivity — we only know we are being
manipulated and exploited by the description and
accounting of our relation with the technology
and not by any direct consciousness of its so-
matic eects. The entanglement of engagement
that social networks produce as heterogeneous
confusion between platform and user results in
the individual user’s cognitive transformation
that engagement produces is simultaneously
productive of time and the production of time
itself. The network is both network and net-work: it
embroils us spatio-temporally by simultaneously
constituting both space and time of engagement
as the processual medium of a self-contained
social common as productive transformation
that creates value in exchange of users’ life-ti-
me — consumption is consumption and creator
of value. Thus, platforms seek to maximize their
users screen-time because all screen-time is
unpaid productive net-work that contributes to
the platform’s capital and to its bottom line. What
at rst blush appears as a functional dissonance
in the connection between users and platforms,
provides the two sides to an imagistic mechanism
of control based on the wanting to do right throu-
gh an internalized obligation towards reciprocity
for the gift of social media and the heightening of
the aective enslavement of users to a toxic eco-
nomy of dependency of “Likes”. It is a dynamic of
conceptual substitution, of retail bait and switch,
where we are sold one bill of goods in order to
install a dierent order — in social networks, the
premiss we are sold is heightened sociality and
armation, where in fact the premiss functions

Felix Rebolledo Palazuelos
The Aective Toxicology of Social Media 17/17
as a lure to keep users captivated and captive to
consume advertising and mold ideology while
furnishing personal data to better manipulate
and subjugate the individual user.
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Felix Rebolledo Palazuelos
PhD in Social and Institutional Psychology from the Uni-
versidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), Porto
Alegre, RS, Brazil; postdoc in Communication Studies
at the Federal University of Santa Maria (UFSM), RS,
Brazil. Interdisciplinary Master in Fine Arts and Bachelor
in Fine Arts with Specialization in Cinema Production
from Concordia University, Montreal, Canada. Bachelor
of Science in Civil Engineering from the University of
New Brunswick, Fredericton, Canada. Professor in the
Cinema and Audiovisual Program at the Universidade
Estadual do Paraná (Unespar), Curitiba, PR, Brazil.
Mailing address
Felix Rebolledo Palazuelos
Curso de Cinema e Audiovisual
Universidade Estadual do Paraná
Sede Boqueirão, Campus de Curitiba II, FAP
Salvador Ferrante Street, 1651, 2nd block
Boqueirão, 81670-390
Curitiba, PR, Brasil
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