'Farming' aura: when prestige becomes a game

There are words that explain a generation better than many sociology treatises. “Farming aura” is one of those expressions. If a teenager tells us that someone has farmed aura, they are not talking about any spiritual energy or a mysterious property, we don't need to think that it has to do with esotericism, no. It means, more or less, that that person has done something that has made them gain presence, charisma, style, or admiration. They have scored points, ergo they have gained aura.The word farmejar (from the verb to farm or farming, in English) comes from cultivating, growing, etc., but, for young people, its meaning comes from the world of video games and means repeating a certain action to accumulate experience, resources, or points and increase value or level. From video games, it has jumped into everyday life and even real battles are taking place in parks and squares. The logic is fascinating because we too can accumulate social capital through gestures, ways of dressing, attitudes, phrases, looks, or situations that make us seem more interesting to others. Aura is no longer that intangible quality that makes a person acquire a certain magnetism, that which simply emanates from a person, and it becomes a kind of invisible marker.Pierre Bourdieu helps us understand that perhaps there is nothing as new as it seems. The French sociologist had already explained that prestige is not an individual property, but a form of symbolic capital, since something acquires value because a community recognizes it as such. Clothes, musical tastes, the way of speaking, the places we frequent, or our cultural references can function as signs of distinction. What changes now is the speed and, above all, the awareness of the mechanism.Farming aura has become a characteristic expression of the digital slang of generation alpha, also shared with generation z. It is no longer just about having style, but it is necessary to know how to produce it, exhibit it, and manage it. A look at the right moment, a soccer celebration, a way of walking, a witty response, or even knowing how to remain impassive in a ridiculous situation can generate "plus a thousand aura". In aura battles, this logic becomes explicit, because young people compete before an audience that decides who transmits more presence.

If we refer to Walter Benjamin, the concept of aura was used to refer to that singularity of the work of art that is linked to its unique presence, to an unrepeatable here and now. Technical reproduction, let us think of photography or cinema, radically altered this relationship with the original. The aura was linked precisely to that which could not be completely reproduced. farming aura seems to take this paradox to the extreme by reproducing the aura to make it seem unique.A certain look becomes a meme. A posture is repeated millions of times. A gesture moves from one video to another, from the video game to TikTok and from TikTok to the neighborhood square. What was meant to confer uniqueness is built through repetition. The aura is no longer necessarily the trace of an unrepeatable experience, but a performance that has learned which signs produce recognition and, in turn, an identity. This identity is based on codes that are born in an ecosystem in which social life and its representation are no longer easily separable. Because while some young people farm aura, another contemporary cultural trend proposes exactly the opposite: JOMO, joy of missing out, the joy of missing things, just as Juan Evaristo Valls has very well expressed. Faced with FOMO (the fear of being excluded, of not being there, of not knowing what is happening), JOMO claims the satisfaction of not participating, of not watching, of not being permanently available, as is the case with farming aura. They are two apparently opposite logics. Farming aura means saying, for example, look at me. JOMO means saying, on the other hand, I don't need you to look at me. But perhaps both are children of the same world.In a society in which every experience can become content, it can also become capital. We go about accumulating photographs, followers, likes, references, experiences and moments that provide us with a certain position in front of others. The problem is not that young people want to have an aura. The problem would be if we were to think that we only exist when we have an aura in front of someone.Perhaps that is why the most radical gesture today is not to achieve as many aura points as possible, but to voluntarily disappear from the scoreboard. Doing something that no one will record. Listening to a song without turning it into an Instagram story. Going to a place without photographing it. Being with someone without proving it. Doing something without it producing symbolic capital. This would be, in a way, the true JOMO, that is, recovering the pleasure of the experience that does not need to be converted into proof. And perhaps here Benjamin still has something to tell us. The aura appears when something preserves a singular relationship with a here and now. Precisely that which cannot be accumulated, repeated, or converted into points on the scoreboard of life. Perhaps the last way of farming aura is, paradoxically, to stop farming it.