Aura farming sparks debate over viral public humiliation

Aura farming: the syndrome of the permanent show
There have never been so many cameras and so little reality worth recording. The latest phenomenon making headlines for weeks now is "aura farming", a practice that involves behaving absurdly or deliberately provocatively in public to gain status on social media. What used to stay within a small circle of friends is now recorded, shared and multiplied before thousands of anonymous viewers.
The controversy is not aesthetic but generational. Some argue it is the same old silliness, amplified by the digital megaphone; others see a deliberate plan to keep young people entertained and politically harmless. The theory of engineered distraction recalls the techniques that, it is argued, were used on the hippies in the sixties to neutralise a generation.
What aura farming is and why it unsettles people
Anyone who has ever played a video game understands the metaphor: farming means repeating an action to accumulate resources. Here the resource is aura, a unit of charisma or popularity in teenage slang. The videos show young people clowning around in public spaces, sometimes at real risk, almost always with the aim of going viral. Interpretations range from humour to alarm: for some it is "the new military service", for others "the new way of chatting someone up". No laughing matter, in any case, is the reference to civil war that some invoke to explain what would astonish their great-grandparents.
Mass distraction or plain silliness?
The most conspiratorial reading holds that nothing happens by chance: if young people thought instead of fooling around, they would end up starting a revolution. That sentence condenses a theory that is gaining traction: the powers that be encourage this nonsense to keep young people absorbed in the spectacle. On the other side, the sceptical view reminds us that public ridicule is as old as humanity and the only novelty is the scale: now the audience is the internet. Some voices add an uncomfortable nuance: "they are like this because the ones who won, won", as if the state of affairs were the outcome of a conflict already settled.
Somewhere between the farce and the sociological warning, the phenomenon leaves an open question: are we looking at the latest youthful trinc or the most efficient way to neutralise a generation? The answer, in all likelihood, will be recorded on video.