I Lost Track of What is Real

Ester Freider is a writer and digital curator based in London.It’s real folks:Marie Antoinette (2006) dir. Sofia CoppolaIn his thesis on the re-emergence of the baroque in 21st century media, Xavier Gamboa notes the allegory as the baroque literary tool “par excellence” (Gamboa, p. 167). This essay very brashly attempts to cram a homemade term into the already bursting stomach of neologisms overfed by today’s internet theorists – and there is no way that every one of them are “inventing new concepts” the way that Deleuze would have hoped for philosophy (Deleuze and Guattari, p. 9). Going forward, the 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 term “cyber” was first applied to the internet by notorious sci-fi author William Gibson in Neuromancer (1984), in which “cyberspace” referred to a digital space that humans could bio-mechanically “jack in” to…