PUBLISHED
September 06, 2025
KARACHI:
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 millions would see his clip before the week was out. He didn’t know that TikTok edits of his dance would cross from Southeast Asia into Seoul’s nightclubs, into Los Angeles influencer houses, into European football locker rooms. He was just performing the steps taught to him by elders during the coastal harvest festival.
Now NFL star Travis Kelce, soccer player Diego Luna are copying his steps. F1 driver Alex Albon, members of Paris Saint-Germain, as well as celebrities like BTS’s Jungkook and V, AC Milan, and others across the globe are riffing on Dikha’s spontaneous choreography.
In the economy of attention, virality is no longer a by-product. It is a currency.
Google searches for ‘aura farming dance’ surged 700% in August, making it the top trending phrase in Indonesia for that month.
Monetising the meme
What happened with the boat kid is not unfamiliar. We’ve seen K-pop choreographies cloned by schoolchildren in Brazil, or the “Harlem Shake” in 2013 turn from inside joke to global contagion. But what distinguishes this meme is how directly it translated into offline impact. Flights into the coastal town in Sumatra where the festival takes place spiked by 48% in the months following the viral moment, according to Indonesia’s Ministry of Tourism. Hotels that once relied on domestic visitors now advertise “authentic aura dance experiences. The regional government estimates the festival alone brought in $2.5 million in new spending this year — four times the usual figure.
Tourism boards are scrambling to package the festival for international audiences. A ritual that was once community-led, performed barefoot on creaking boats, is being reshaped into ticketed spectacles with lighting rigs and Instagram booths. Locals speak of a paradox: a surge of income, yes, but also the disquiet of being observed like curiosities.
Until this year, Pacu Jalur was an obscure celebration. It had always been a humble affair. Fishermen’s families painted boats in bright colours, carried offerings to the shore, and danced out on the water in thanks for abundance. Children, like the boat kid, learned the steps as a way of connecting with ancestry. They stood on the front of each boat as a sort of mascot cheering the rowers on.
One fisherman’s wife put it simply to a Jakarta-based reporter: “We used to dance for the sea. Now we dance for cameras.”
Dikha himself does not own a phone. When journalists arrived in his village with glossy printouts of celebrities imitating his moves — Korean idols on stage, American pop stars doing parodic spins — he looked blank.
He thought the clips were of “people practicing wrong,” according to his uncle.
This innocence is endearing: the child who sparks an empire of mimicry yet stays uncorrupted by the knowledge of it. The boy does not know the names of the influencers who copy him. He does not know he has been anointed by global pop culture. And perhaps that ignorance preserves something vital — that the dance was never meant to be about performance for an audience, but about harmonising with forces unseen.
The dance that moved a market
Tourism, long vulnerable to weather, geopolitics, and global pandemics, now bends to the tides of digital virality. In the past, governments spent millions on ad campaigns to lure visitors. Today, one unfiltered video can achieve the same effect — if it catches the algorithm’s slipstream.
In “meme economy” value is produced through circulation. The boat kid is, in this sense, a commodity as much as a child—his dance the raw material, the edits and remixes the manufacturing, the tourist influx the consumer demand.
The troubling question is who profits. Dikha’s family has seen no direct income beyond some token gifts from curious travellers. Meanwhile, travel agencies in Jakarta and Bali capitalize with “Boat Kid Festival Packages.” Influencers film themselves attempting the steps for clicks that convert into ad revenue. Meanwhile the child who started it all remains barefoot on a wooden deck, unaware.
Observers who attended this year’s iteration of the festival described a surreal sight: alongside villagers in traditional sarongs were clusters of foreign tourists in athleisure, holding ring lights on bamboo poles, livestreaming the proceedings.
Some locals leaned into the moment, selling T-shirts emblazoned with the Dikha’s silhouette mid-dance. Others quietly resented the intrusion, fearing that the sacredness of the ritual would be diluted. Yet even critics admit that the influx of money has kept young people from migrating to the city in search of work.
Culture here is no longer just practiced — it is packaged. What was once cyclical, tied to the rhythms of the sea and the harvest, is now scheduled to accommodate visitor calendars. There is talk of creating an “off-season” performance, staged monthly, to keep tourists flowing even outside the traditional festival date.
What does it mean that a child’s dance can alter an economy?
On one level, it is hopeful: that cultural treasures once invisible to the world can find recognition and even reverence through the connective tissue of the internet. On another, it is unsettling: that recognition arrives not on culture’s own terms, but on the terms of algorithms hungry for novelty.
The boat kid never auditioned to be a symbol. His dance was not choreographed for virality. Yet here we are, with airlines and ministries scrambling to monetize his aura.
The story reflects the broader arc of our digital culture. We live in an age when memes are not just diversions; they topple reputations, sway elections, and reconfigure the economic fate of a coastal village.
But the truth remains that the most powerful memes are often the least planned. They emerge from moments of sincerity, awkwardness, or uncalculated joy. That is why the boat kid’s dance resonated: it was raw and unpolished, most impressively unselfconscious.
In the weeks after the video spread, villagers recall Dikha asking a simple question: “Why do so many strangers want to see me dance?”
There is no easy answer. Because in that dance was a glimpse of something ancient stitched into the fabric of modern life. Because in an age where attention is the rarest resource, a child on a boat became the most valuable asset for his country.
