This wound up remarkably more complicated than I'd expected. I could follow it, thanks to philosophical training, but if you don't have that background I wouldn't expect to pick this up and find it an easy read. I didn't find it an easy read even being able to parse it.

The ideas here were interesting, although they didn't strike me as all that novel on reflection. Sampson is trying to elaborate on a theory of contagion drawing on the epidemiological models of sociologist Gabriel Tarde and the ontology of Gilles Deleuze. This makes for an interesting blend, particularly given Deleuze's writings on the "body without organs" and the rhizome, both of which are prominent here. Sampson spends a considerable number of pages in the first chapter elaborating on his premise, which is meant to explain why things are contagious without invoking modern cognitivist accounts (he takes particular aim at "ideology" and Dawkins's memes here) or the biological metaphors of microbial contagion (which he argues have defined modern discourse on computer security and from there drifted into discussions of networks in broad scope).

That's a mouthful, of course, although the gist of it for the lay-reader can be summed up more simply: we shouldn't think of contagion in society as a simple matter of ideas transmitting themselves from dead receiver to dead receiver. Instead, we're dealing with a fundamentally affective (emotional) process that is both message and messenger, operating across assemblages that are at once individual and collective. The models we use to describe this process of contagion must be similarly rich.

So that's not as "lay" as I'd wanted, but hopefully it gets the point across. "It's emotional, dummy" is both accurate (not to mention obvious) and at the same time inadequate. There is a lot of nuance to this argument and I don't mean to understate what Sampson is putting forth. I found it compelling and interesting on many levels, and am glad I put forth the effort to dig in here. The description of contagion as emotive and unconscious, exemplified by Tarde's "somnambulist" metaphor of mesmerism, struck me as especially spot-on, and the discussions of Deleuze's philosophy have given me someone else to read about in more depth.

Just don't expect it to be an easy read. ( )