<p>Contemporary debates on digital ethics often frame algorithmic power in terms of manipulation, addiction, or failures of self-control. Such approaches implicitly assume that desire preexists technological mediation and becomes problematic only when it escapes the governance of the will. This article challenges that assumption by arguing that digital platforms intervene at a more fundamental level: they reorganize the causal conditions under which desire itself is formed and sustained. Drawing on Spinoza’s distinction between passive and active affects, the article reconstructs algorithmic environments as structures that systematically produce desire determined by passive affects, not by suppressing agency, but by shaping desire through opaque external causation. After offering a descriptive account of algorithmic environments, the article develops the theoretical core of this argument through a systematic reconstruction of Spinoza’s ethics. It then diagnoses algorithmic capture as a contemporary form of affective passivity and outlines a Spinozan ethics of digital engagement centered on transformation rather than restraint. The central ethical question, it argues, is whether digital desire remains an expression of the agent’s own power of acting, that is, becomes increasingly self-determined rather than externally organized.</p>