I Lost Track of What is Real - Personas, Sophism, and the Cyber-Baroque
cyberbaroque is not an attempt to create a new concept. Rather, it’s an allegory for how social media algorithms keep one’s attention captured through systemic sensory opulence.
The baroco became infamous amongst scholars for being an and for being a “an intellectual gimmick” that led to “sophisms and Byzantinism”. From an architectural standpoint, the term “baroque” was used mostly pejoratively to signify ridiculousness, excess, and needless indulgence until the mid 1800s, when it began to denote a historical period of aesthetics.
Therefore, the cyberbaroque is an allegory that refers to control or governance through sophistry.
While a sophist is just someone who uses clever but false arguments to trick you into believing them, or believing they are smart.
After all, that is the core rule in the world of influencers, advertisers, and developers: to bloat the product – whether that be content or a physical object – into taking up as much time and space in a scroller’s brain as possible.
Within the critical aesthetic of the cyberbaroque, does intentional theatrics employed online create a potency to misuse or mock the platforms on which we operate, and the economic logics they rely on? To further advance this question, we must consider the profile-based nature of social media and the sense of self it produces.
The persona is a quintessentially baroque idea.
What distinguishes this person, what makes him persona, in other words, is his ability to use the spatial play of the baroque to entice the participation of his fellow players as participants in his representation, to capture their commitment, their belief, and ultimately their libidinal investment through the manipulation of strata and appearances that we have identified as baroque
The role of the persona is “to convince the greatest number of people possible that his character is his character all the way down. That there is no other self, or actor, to ground it to the world and limit the eternal sounding of his resources
The persona can be seen in commercial pursuits such as mainstream influencership, OF models, and the more recent “NPC” influencers seen on Tik Tok Live. Taken to its theatrical extreme, the persona can be practiced through cosplay, LARPing, and online character performances that reflect on the nature of affective and cognitive labour.