Aura farming & the attention economy

Aura farming & the attention economy

It began with a boy on a boat. A grainy video, barely thirty seconds long, posted by a festival-goer in a small Indonesian fishing village, showed a boy, 11 years old, dancing as if possessed by something both ancient and absurdly modern. His hips swayed in exaggerated loops, arms slicing the air, as he stood on the nose of a longboat in front of its rowers. Online, the clip was quickly tagged as “aura farming”—a phrase born of Internet slang wh…