Thoughts editor MEDI SMITH ruminates on the culture of “data-collecting”.
Part of the deal is that “aura” cannot be put into words. You know aura when you see it, or rather, feel it. Aura is non-physical, but aura is felt. Circa 2018, in its last internet life cycle, the Instagram shamans decreed that aura could be photographed. Take a polaroid and discover your own unique shade of aura. Aura is red, purple, yellow. The fascination has been around for some time.
The idea that people all have “An Aura” is widely understood, but this is a characteristic: it is not evaluative. A subtle emanation around the body, essential to everyone. Aura has been trending online recently to gesture at something along the lines of presence, magnetism, perhaps an otherworldliness: a sublime quality. Notable bearers include Cristiano Ronaldo, Spider-Man, the Pope, boyfriend-era Justin Bieber, Tony Soprano, Genghis Khan, Donald Trump, and, lest we forget, the late Michael Jackson—there seems to be a general consensus that the King of Pop has a firm seat in the aura hall of fame.
In an effort to further interrogate the notion, I take to the TikTok search bar. Attempts to explain aura are often substantiated by a single video clip; captioned “AURA.” , a shot of Cristiano Ronaldo, soundtracked by Yeat, exiting the pitch after scoring the winning penalty, a tail of photographers behind him; or, similarly, Ye navigating through a mob of fans, parting the crowd “like the red sea”. Both take on a biblical magnitude.
@c7epic.aep Mr. Aura 🤯 #cristiano #ronaldo #aura #soccer #newtrend #viralvideo #fyp
I find a more serious video attempting to delineate a real anatomy of aura: a boy in his late teens speaking in half tones at the camera propped up on his desk. He is talking with his hands, like a pastor preaching to his assembly of bros what he has come to learn about the texture of power. Aura is something you can both gain and lose. You gain it by doing something that makes you look cool, you lose it when you look lame. Aura is numeric. It starts at zero and grows “logarithmically”. And crucially, aura can be negative (…)
Responses are varied:
“Nahhhhh aura is more like unspoken rizz”
“THIS IS NOT AURA!!!! You can’t gain aura like in a video game”
“Bro is –100000000000 aura for posting this”
I find no resolution in the comments. I consult Know Your Meme:
“Aura – a slang term…often used to compliment men” (I’m starting to get it) “for their charisma or presence.”
As is true of much internet vernacular, mainstream usage of “aura” on TikTok and Twitter is downstream from a wider discourse in the sports and gaming community. The term was first popularised online on Premier League Twitter, with users commending Liverpool’s Van Dijk for his aura. In May 2024, instances of aura referenced outside of a sporting context began rising exponentially. Here, aura evolves into the social credit system that has become more popularly memed on TikTok. The first noted viral video on the topic, posted by @etcestok, starts “day in the life of aura”:
@92gcorp 📈📉📉 @CringeMasterTik @Mika @morgane 😀 @agathe @clement #fyp #aura
Perfect dap with bro +200
Speak to 👩: +1000
She doesn’t even recognise you bro: -5000
Result: -3800
In another skit, one user explains: “I need at least 20 people on ‘delivered’ at all times for maximum aura, it’s nothing personal”. I encounter instructional videos on how to gain aura “points”, with back-and-forth discourse in comment sections on how to cultivate aura: debates on whether a positive move can offset a negative move.
Obviously, it is just a j-o-k-e. The aura-phenomenon is very very tongue in cheek. It is not lost on the kids making these videos that the aura points system is a neurotic approach to analyzing day-to-day life; that’s why its so funny. But for the thousands who view these clips, the point system is often received as a prescription, as evidenced by the contains of the comment sections. On a particular corner of the internet, aura points are taken very seriously. It is the same corner of the internet where you might hear discussion of “looksmaxxing”. This domain is occupied largely by young men; teens being the demographic who rule the internet space (who else has enough spare time to be that online?). They are also a cohort with some of the highest levels of status anxiety.
What started as a meme rooted in an understanding of the mysticism and unintelligibility of aura soon devolved into an attempt to deconstruct social status by reducing it to a sort of data analysis. If you can turn life into data, it becomes transparent, discernible— but also can be calculated and manipulated. This is gamifying aura as an attempt to freeze the incessant currents that make social status. It turns life into a series of data points that can be computed as a means to make decisions. One video titled “Dude obsessed with having aura” features a boy explaining that “You can’t show your face at every function that’s how you lose your aura”. How dysfunctional.
I’m reminded of Italian philosopher Federico Campagna’s book Technic and Magic: The Reconstruction of Reality (2018), in which he proposes magic as a lens through which to interpret reality, an alternative to what he calls “technic”. If technic is the essence of technology, magic is the essence of poetry. Magic as a “reality setting”, just as technic is the logic of the technology age. Campagna calls for a return to the lost idea of magic, the ineffable, which has been forgotten in the information age. Magic is about leaving the world of information, a world wholly dedicated to data.
Martin Heidegger, who wrote extensively on the dangers of the technological age, spoke of a similar concept: “Gestell” — the essence of technology. Literally translated as “enframing”, Gestell is a kind of totality of what-is. Simultaneously, a mode of human existence. Heidegger notes how technology can change the way we engage with the world, and constrict our understanding of things as they really are. He argues that technology’s elevation of “calculative thinking” has turned everything in nature into a “standing reserve”; in essence, we see nature and people only as raw material for technical operations.
The logic of “technic” can be seen clearly in gamers. One sets about to accrue XP (experience points) by gathering resources and completing challenges; a means of “levelling up” as an end in itself. The logic of technology pervades everything we do, but gaming specifically demonstrates how technic plays a part in modern socialization. For the last twenty or so years (the first Call of Duty was released in 2003), gaming has constituted a huge part of adolescence, in a way that’s hard to overstate.
A return to magic, Campagna argues, is necessary to counter the technic that dominates and subsumes all areas of modern life. Magic is something like what Heidegger called “openness to the mystery”; what Pseudo-Dionysius would call the “divine darkness”; the Wittgensteinian idea that there is a limit to language, and hence, a limit to our understanding.
Fixation on aura is the latest in an attempt to “tame” the ineffable. We seem to cycle through a new variant on this theme every 6 months (“vibes” have become ubiquitous and “rizz”’ elected by Oxford dictionary as 2023’s “Word of the Year”). Vibes, rizz and aura are essentially stand-ins for coolness, status, power; concepts with actionable steps to achieve. Simply look at the men who are commonly cited as possessing aura. Men with power, men who get girls etc. A Platonic ideal of masculinity. Team Trump has cashed in on this phenomenon. In the run up to the election , they released a video of the now president-elect captioned “infinite aura”. It currently has 2.7 million likes.
@teamtrump AURA. #fyp #aura #trump2024
Of course, there may be another reason that the language of our zeitgeist is so “vibes”-oriented. It may just be a crude attempt at a sentimental vocabulary for the illiterate age. Or perhaps the prevalence of this mystical language might be indicative of a common understanding that there is a spiritual element missing in the way we approach the modern age. A longing for the esoteric. Something the mechanisms of the internet cannot capture.
In his 1936 essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction Walter Benjamin uses the term “aura” in reference to an integral quality of an artwork. He argues that “even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: Its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.”
If you take a person living their life to be art, and social media to be the reproduction, then aura does not translate to the online space. The temporal, invisible, unintelligible element cannot be reproduced through a series of symbols, language and code. You can get close, but the magic will always be missing.
Featured Image source: WikiHow.
