Abstract

Situated affectivity investigates how natural, material, and social environmental structures, so-called ‘scaffolds,’ influence our affective life. Initially, the debate focused on user-resource-interactions, i.e., on cases where individuals (‘users’) actively structure the environment (‘resource’) in beneficial ways, setting up scaffolds that allow them to solve routine problems, modify their means of coping with challenges, or avail themselves of new affective competences. More recently, cases of mind invasion have captured philosophers’ attention where the ways others structure the environment affect, or invade, people’s minds, typically without their awareness and with harmful consequences. This paper contributes to recent discussions about the variety of phenomena that can count as ‘scaffolded affectivity’ in general and ‘scaffolded affective harm’ in particular. It also addresses the emerging question of how harmful affective scaffolds can come to have a grip on people’s minds, despite their detrimental consequences. We first disentangle some misconceptions and illustrate how diverse (harmful) affective scaffolds can be. In contrast to recent approaches that have characterized scaffolds in largely descriptive terms, we then identify factors that can help explain why a given scaffold is effective in modifying people’s minds. We also try to shed light on why some agents and some social structures are especially likely to experience or cause scaffolded affective harm, respectively, by arguing that user-resource-interactions and mind invasions are not independent, but intimately intertwined and mutually reinforcing, especially in the digital domain. We conclude with a speculative suggestion for further research.