Aura Farming: Cultivating Your Algorithmic Presence
When online presence becomes a resource to optimize, being visible is no longer enough – you have to know how to cultivate your aura.
Tuesday evening on Earth. Sun is - finally - shining in Paris. Feel free to share and recommend.
A topic is gaining traction on forums and TikTok: the concept of aura farming.
A combination of aura – that almost magical charisma that draws attention – and farming, a term borrowed from video games referring to repetitive actions aimed at earning rewards, aura farming refers to the strategic and ongoing effort to cultivate one’s public persona, cool factor, and social magnetism.
Origins in Video Games and Anime
The term finds its roots in universes like Dragon Ball Z, where characters like Piccolo are adored not for their omnipresence, but quite the opposite - for their rare, stylized, and decisive appearances. Saving Gohan repeatedly, appearing in a halo of mystery: Piccolo “farms” his aura through calibrated, memorable, often heroic acts.
Transposed to web culture, aura farming becomes a strategy for building a memorable presence, even if it means being rare, iconic, or theatrically managing your appearances. An influencer who only speaks when “it’s necessary,” or an actor like Timothée Chalamet whose every public outing is dissected, captured, and turned into memes and gifs, are typical examples of online aura farming.
This farming doesn’t generate virtual currency, but rather aura capital – a kind of implicit score, fed by online conversations (posts, threads, idolizing or ironic comments), memes (reactions, remixes, mashups), and fan analysis (“they have too much aura,” “they lost their aura after that appearance,” etc.). This inevitably leads to a form of humor when a personality falls into overly visible performance traps.
Aura becomes an unstable but performative unit of measure: a community ranking of digital liveness. The more someone is perceived as “alive” online – present, resonant, animated – the more they exist in the collective mind. No domain escapes aura farming. Xi Jinping, for example, is the subject of thousands of TikTok videos analyzing his aura farming.
The Feeling of Liveness as a Power Issue
This shift toward quantified liveness opens another dimension: the management of one’s algorithmic presence, and more specifically, its mass production.
We’re witnessing a new form of algorithmic exploitation: not of content or raw attention, but of perceived presence. This is what might be called liveness farming – the artificial or industrial creation of moments when one appears to be there, connected, reactive. A strategy of capture, social performance, and monetization.
On TikTok, Twitch, YouTube, or Instagram Live, the pressure to be live has become central, especially for emerging creators. Platforms reward “live” content, promising more reach and engagement – but only if you’re visible, responsive, alive now.
In this context, we’re seeing the rise of:
“Sleep streams” (lives where people stream themselves sleeping),
Emoji or virtual gift battles between strangers,
Fake lives made from pre-recorded videos,
AI avatars in continuous livestreams, reading and responding to comments via voice synthesis.
All of this generates micro-revenue (gifts, stickers, tips), but more importantly, it fuels an economy of simulated contact, of performed liveness.
As early as 2023, Meta’s AI avatars signaled the rise of synthetic liveness, where superstars like Kendall Jenner or Naomi Osaka could continue building their aura via their digital doppelgängers. These AIs rely on generating real emotional affect through artificially reciprocal interactions. Digital clones respond to fans through AI-generated messages and videos, creating a feeling of closeness without any actual presence.
This is the next stage of liveness farming: beings who no longer exist (or never really did) continuing to “live” within interfaces. A kind of liveness without the living. An aura without a body.
Liveness farming expresses a contemporary anxiety: the idea that to disappear is to die socially. You must exist constantly, but with strategy. You must appear alive, but without exhausting yourself. You must cultivate your aura – without damaging it.
In a world of infinite feeds, liveness has become a precious substance – and thus, a lever of power.
But in trying to optimize it, are we not at risk of producing hollow presences, shells of attention without substance?
Or worse: an economy of liveness where the wealthiest automate their aura, while the rest farm live, out of breath, for a few likes?
The Stat of the Week: 260,000
Wikipedia relies on an army of 260,000 human volunteers to moderate the platform.
Interestingly, the use of artificial intelligence is strictly regulated.
A (rare) example of large-scale governance.
Amazing links
Archivists Aren’t Ready for the ‘Very Online’ Era (The Atlantic)
Life on TikTok Gave Him the Illusion of Love and a Sad, Brutal End (New York Times)
Inside the life of a 24/7 streamer: ‘What more do you want?’ (Washington Post)
Have a great week! This newsletter is written with love, passion, and (French) coffee. Feel free to share this newsletter, like, comment, or keep sending me emails: these notifications are a joy.
My book “Alive In Social Media” is still available on Amazon.
Super interesting! I’ve always believed that “aura” is a genuine reflection of our human spirit—so the idea that it can now be artificially manipulated in the virtual world is both fascinating and slightly unsettling. In Japan, people even have photographs taken of their real-life auras. I wonder how those images might shift once their virtual selves begin to evolve through digital “aura farming”!