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 where “aura” means vibe or presence. The boy wasn’t farming anything but joy, yet to the algorithm, it looked like he was cultivating charisma in real time.

Rayyan Arkan Dikha — now christened by the Internet as the “Aura Farming Boat Kid”— was just doing what he normally did for this traditional boat race called Pacu Jalur. He didn’t know that mil

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