In 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 and traverse. Konstadinos Bassanos notes that Gibson did not pick this term arbitrarily: “Cyber comes from the Greek word "κυβερ", which means "to govern" by means of control, and to navigate” (Bassanos, p. 84). “Cyber” was originally part of a larger term – cybernetics, the "theory or study of communication and control," as coined by American mathematician Norbert Weiner in 1948 from the Greek kybernētēs (“helmsman” or “steersman”). After Gibson’s creation of the “cyberspace” the term “cyber” began to be applied to anything related to the internet (cybersecurity, cyberbullying, cybersex, etc.).
On the other hand, the term “baroque” has an array of suspected etymologies. The most well-known origin of the term comes from the word “barroco”, which denoted an irregularly shaped pearl to jewelers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Gamboa, p. 18), coming from Portuguese “perola barroca”. However, researcher Marie-Pierrette Malkuzynski conducted a study of the logical proof “baroco”, originating from 13th century Portuguese scholar Pieto Ispano: “The first vowel (a) indicates a universal affirmative proposition in the first part of the syllogism, while the second and third (o) indicate a particular proposition. The letter b shows that it is an irregular syllogism that can be reduced to the first mode of the first figure (Barbara), and the letter c (in baroco) indicates the way the reduction is effected” (Malkuzynski, qtd. in Gamboa p. 9). Ispano’s syllogism came under attack by many Renaissance scholars, including Erasmus in his 1519 treatise Ratio versae theologiae, for being counterproductive in its rigidity. The baroco became infamous amongst scholars for being an and for being a “an intellectual gimmick” that led to “sophisms and Byzantinism” (Gamboa, p. 10-13) . 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 (a good example of a sophist is arguably Jordan Peterson), I will be using the term sophistry to specifically denote the act of tricking people into thinking that something is better for them than it is. 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. The recent intensification of the cyberbaroque’s speed and efficacy in the past few years, due to algorithmic enhancements with AI on various platforms and the appearance of short-form-content leading to the coinage of the term “doomscrolling” (or, soon, “goonscrolling”), has led to the emergence of a subsequent cyberbaroque aesthetic employed by artists, theorists, and writers to critically react to the effects of the mechanism the allegory describes.
In his seminal work The Theatre of Truth: The Ideology of (Neo)Baroque Aesthetics, literary theorist William Egginton differentiates between “major” and “minor” strategies of the baroque phenomenon and its cyclical reappearances. The “major” strategy “assumes the existence of a veil of appearances, and then suggests the possibility of a space opening just beyond those appearances where truth resides” (Egginton, p. 3). He names examples of the major strategy in architecture and painting to be trompe l’oeil and anamorphosis, both painterly manipulations that create false depth which refers to a true outside. In the major strategy of the baroque, “the recipient is drawn in by a promise of fulfillment beyond the surface, his or her desire ignited by an illusory depth, always just beyond grasp”. Gibson continues: “The Baroque becomes pertinent when, in the very midst of the performance, and in full knowledge of its artifice, the viewer becomes convinced that the artifice in fact refers to some truth just beyond the camera’s glare.” (p. 4)
The public theatre, often monetarily and ideologically controlled by noble courts, was the primary way in which the people engaged with the major strategy of the Baroque in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries. As Larry F. Norman notes, the birth of a “new large leisured class” created a world in which “distinction was no longer political or economic, but instead performative: an accomplished person of quality played his or her role in the social comedy with winning grace and wit” as the “rising bourgeoisie … increasingly mingled with the aristocracy while imitating its manners and decorum” . For these spectators, “Theater became a metaphor for social role-playing as well as a school where spectators learned to improve their own performance at Town or Court.” Theatre thus became a way of promoting and even strengthening social codes, as their performance was glamourized by and subsequently adopted from theatrical storytelling. A modern equivalent is the hook-line-and-sinker strategy of digital advertisement, in which the consumer is presented with a glowing image of a product they didn’t know they wanted, and are promised that its purchase will solve problems they didn’t know they had. The advertisement performs a better reality of glamour, fulfilment, and spiritual truth that the consumer “deserves” to have, and in turn equates its product with that image. In this way the advertisement formula, and its necessary motherhood to the content production structure of influencers (and sometimes even journalists), is a descendent of the major Baroque strategy, which forms the basis of the cyberbaroque at large.
On the other hand, Egginton’s minor strategy delineates a critical aesthetic that responds to the major Baroque / normative cyberbaroque mechanism by turning its weapons on its head. For Egginton, the minor strategy “takes the major strategy too seriously; it nestles into the representation and refuses to refer it to some other reality, but instead affirms it, albeit ironically, as its only reality” (Egginton, p. 9). “Like deconstruction, the minor strategy works from the inside of a textual and social tradition, undermining the established models of truth that support its idea of reason” (Egginton, p. 37). The minor strategy is, thus, a form of productive fetishism, or even onanism. It takes the traits that the major Baroque strategy relies upon – such as theatrics, illusion, ambivalence, and excess – and fixates on their extremities in order to “reveal the impossibilities they construct for themselves” (Egginton, p. 65). In other words, it is an aesthetic of performance. In a critical aesthetic of the (cyber)baroque, we perform not to refer to a real-world truth or to affirm common values such as justice, happiness, or a selfhood. Rather, we perform to perform: the performance refers only to other performances and their tropes. An example from film would be the genre of parody films in New Queer Cinema that use a pastiche of American high school/college movie tropes to create satire about the romantic, social, and cultural roles played in heteronormative coming-of-age stories, such as Crybaby (1990), dir. John Waters, But I’m a Cheerleader (1999), dir. Jamie Babbit, and D.E.B.S (2004), dir. Angela Robinson. While Crybaby is a love story between a boy and a girl, “everyone in the film is so performative that this is effectively a queer cast”, writes Billy Stevenson. These films use exaggerated sets and costumes, often resulting in drag-like hyperfemininity, to poke holes in heteronormative “truths” about the American bildungsroman that cinema has normalized and promoted to teens.
It is no coincidence that Crybaby, along with other films that fall more generally into the high school satire genre (such as Heathers (1988), dir. Michael Lehmann, Hairspray (1988), dir. John Waters, and Jawbreaker (1999) dir. Darren Stein) have cult followings amongst what has been coined as “theatre kids”. Theatre kids can be defined as anyone who was devoted to school plays and their correlated social scene during middle school, high school, or college. They are frequently considered annoying for their inability to break out of performance, as theatre monologues, songs, and terminology become a part of their everyday speech and routines. In their 2024 podcast episode “The Trial of the Theatre Kid”, Nymphet Alumni noted the “recent destigmatization of theatre kid energy and its resurgence in mass culture”. As we’ve established, theatricality is already implicit in the tactics employed by marketing professionals and influencers, as advertisement is itself an inheritor of the “theatrum mundi” created by the stagesetters of the 16-18th century theatre scene. Theatre kid energy is thus simply an intentional fetishization, and thus, spotlighting, of the seduction tactics that are native to advertisement and influencership.
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. For Egginton, the persona is a quintessentially baroque idea, used in both major and minor tactics. He writes: “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” (Egginton, p. 17). Egginton says that 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” (p. 17). 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, such as “Mercedes 666” by Ozziline Mercedes, “an online + irl avatar developed by the Artist that embodies Her work as Erotic Labourer through the pixelation + monetisation of her human flesh”.
In his article “Do You Have to Be Hot to Get Ahead?”, Domenick Ammirati proposes a pessimistic response to the persona-based nature of social media. He writes: “We might imagine being desired as occupying a throne. Instead, being hot is being unhappily subject to the para-social whims of one’s audience. Being hot is being a court musician, piping accompaniment to the consumer’s wants in order to hold their attention, to satisfy but also to surprise, lest satisfaction congeal into boredom.”. In this process, art becomes merch – a mere signifier for coagulations of clouty power around hot and cool figures – and loses any further meaning. “The problem is that securing the bag becomes the art. Money is power, and power is the ultimate aphrodisiac, said the recently deceased war criminal. Late imperial culture – pan-electro-post-neolib-Americana – adores hustlers and schemers, con artists and cult leaders, whose techne is the epitome of image fabrication, of persona without further product.” For Ammirati, the accessibility of art to the masses, and the subsequent algorithmic power they are granted in deciding what becomes visible and what isn’t, has led to the spotlight shifting further from depth and skill and closer to the glamorous performance of depth and skill: gallerinas, literary ‘it’ girls, and other sexy sophists. This obsession with image mirrors the earlier-noted emphasis on social performance over concrete merits that emerged with the rise of a new leisure class in the early 17th century. Is it possible to use the persona as a critical tool online and both “get ahead” and retain depth? Can the rules of the algorithm be exploited to create countercultural art, commentary, and community engagement?
In 2019, a gamer girl named Belle Delphine went viral for trolling her fans through various tricks that employed her innocent and seductive gamer girl image as bait. She sold “gamer girl bathwater” through her merch store and started a fake paid Onlyfans for which she made joke videos for, such as “Belle Delphine stroking a big cock”, in which she pets a chicken fully clothed. A large part of her audience – and male youth culture at large – was enraged with her for exploiting their attraction for profit. But that’s also precisely what made her so viral, and so addictive. EJ Dickson wrote at the height of her virality: “Such content appears to indicate that Delphine is leaning into — if not overtly parodying — the perception of the ideal girl as a hot, innocent young thing whose desire to play Fortnite is only eclipsed by her desire for nerdy gamer boy dick; so overwhelmed is she by desire that she can barely remember how to drink water. But even that added level of irony may ultimately have the effect of endearing her largely young, largely male audience — which similarly professes a love for trolling — even more, for better or for worse, says Princess Burpl. “She’s not really representing herself, but rather a persona that gets ‘the lulz.’ Which I think is the same kind of mask a lot of the toxic people in gamer culture hide behind.”. Self-professingly influenced by male content creators like iDubbbz and Filthy Frank, Belle’s “alien disney princess porn star” aesthetic combined with the trolling tactics formed a very profitable mask powerfueled by ragebait.
A 2025 cultural comparison can be made to viral pornstar Bonnie Blue, who recently had sex with 1000 men for a video for her subscribers. As Daria Blue notes for Petit Mort, Bonnie’s stunts reflect a “clinical” commitment to her craft that creates a strategically antagonistic character. “While we aren’t in the business of armchair diagnostics, there’s something telling in the consistency: highly intelligent, system-aware individuals who process empathy differently often make eerily effective sex workers. Not in spite of the emotional distance — but because of it.” However, Bonnie Blue definitely isn’t the only porn star or Onlyfans model to take marketing into their own hands these days. Many sex workers have turned to using short-form-content, especially Instagram Reels, to create teasy and often manipulative skits that bring in new customers organically. But Belle’s ragebait was, potentially, not just marketing. As According to Madeleine Aggeler, “Delphine herself has become something of an online Rorschach test, a figure in whom people see either a brilliant performance artist making a scathing commentary on the expectations of women online or someone cravenly taking advantage of misogynistic tropes of women gamers and appropriating Japanese cosplay culture.” Her satire-fueled tactics carry a lot of theatre kid energy. She took the gamer girl archetype to its distorted endpoint with her wigs and costumery, had an extremely soft manner of speaking, and sold merch that felt like movie props – that didn’t belong in the real world whatsoever. Mark Fisher writes in Flatline Constructs: “The profile is a prophecy which fulfills itself or, at least, makes any claim about its ‘accurate’ representation of reality undecidable. Since being profiled automatically makes you targeted - by advertisers, the police etc. - it is impossible to decide whether the profile solicits behaviour or anticipates it (it precisely puts just this distinction in question).” (Fisher, p. 127) Delphine used the worldbuilding potentiality of the profile to her advantage, by playing on the dream-world, isekai expectations of gamer boys, weebs, and other media-addicted young men in order to construct her brand as a content creator and as a performance artist. While it is hard to claim that her work is radical –for sex workers, women as a whole, users of the internet, or anyone else – she presents an interesting case study of cyberbaroque tactics being used to create parody. At the very least, she successfully poked fun at male expectations regarding the gratification of their own desires, the presentation of female desire, and female appearance.
In “Perpetual Provisional Selves: A Conversation about Authenticity and Social Media”, an article from 2014, OG web 3.0 artist Amalia Ulman, who created characters for her instagram as performances, notes that the creation of personas online and subsequent affective labour is somewhat of a continuation of the free housework that housewives performed for their husbands. She says:
“It feels as if this "feminization" of labor, especially in terms of cognitive work, has appropriated the successful system previously imposed on housewives by capitalism. All digital content is produced out of love therefore social recognition should be enough payback for cognitive workers. Such a system promotes effortlessness because this sort of creativity has been transformed into a naturalized activity: everyone likes expressing themselves, producing content, making videos of their cats, reviewing cosmetics, writing tutorials…
In this sense, it is funny that the ones who very easily saw the constructed-ness of the characters, and the effort behind them (from outfits, to make up, hair…) were women, maybe because women have previously seen themselves in a similar system where all these efforts were concealed under the illusion of the naturalization of their bio-femininity.”
Ulman’s statement about the feminisation of labour online can be seen as a precursor to the “girl theory” trend that began in 2023 with researcher Alex Quicho’s well-known statement that “everyone is a girl online” due to the tactical seduction that we use to navigate social media. The girl theory nexus of researchers and artists constitute, largely, a purposeful employment of the cyberbaroque, in which the internet’s algorithmic nature becomes a source of play, bargain, experimentation, and even eroticism. In December 2023 I co-founded the project Everyone is a Girl, named after Quicho’s article, with Sofya Rakitina, Paloma Moniz, and Julia Halasy. Our opening statement on Instagram was our first step in connecting the figure of the girl to the cyberbaroque allegory:
“girls online birth a new landscape: the 𝒸𝓎𝒷𝑒𝓇𝒷𝒶𝓇𝑜𝓆𝓊𝑒….in this project, we aim to record and weave the thought done by girls online as well as their predecessors in cyberfeminism. we discard the priority/possibility of authenticity online, if at all. instead we yield to the pearly cavern of artifice, play, and swarm that might reveal that there was no true self in the first place.”
Since its conception, Everyone is a Girl has unfolded into quite a diverse and communally engaged attempt to employ a critical aesthetic of the cyberbaroque in the context of theory. More specifically, it’s what Mark Amerika and Gary Hall have called a theory-performance – an attempt to ask and investigate theoretical questions outside of the traditional text format (Hall, p. 9). EIAG attempts to question the delineation between theory and art by intentionally appropriating formulas from academic institutions in order to create work that appeals to youth culture: employing “presentation night” style symposia that feature a mix of academics, writers, artists, and students; curating zine publications that feature theory, theory-fiction, and fine art; interviewing academics and writers on a loosely organized podcast scheme. At the same time, much of our social media output is memes created by followers of the collective that we then repost, in between promotion graphics and quotes from papers and books. Toeing the line between meme curator, indie publisher, and university-affiliated institution, EIAG parodies everybody at the same time.
In an interview with Geert Lovink, media theorist Vito Campanelli posited that aesthetics was the most powerful answer to the “violence of mass communication”: “The only alternative to the effects of mass communication is a return to an aesthetic feeling of things, a kind of aesthetics not so much ideological, but rather more active (e.g. Adorno) – a kind of aesthetics able to bring again into society and culture feelings of economic unconcern (rather an unconcerned interest), discretion, moderation, the taste for challenge, witticism, and seduction. Aesthetics is exactly this.” Within EIAG, aesthetics function to create as much ambivalence as possible for what it means to research and what it means to create art online. Its strategic engagement with the algorithm means that it swings both ways: the hyperfeminine “i’m just a girl”, meme maker, internet native graphics lure spectators-turned-participants into a critical engagement with their own experience online, and ongoing collaborations and conversations with institutional academics, think tanks, and studios despite our status as an independent art project run by girls in their 20s leads to questions of how theory is qualified, who is considered an expert, and what role affect plays in institutional research at large. At its core, Instagram is a game of gestural improv. If you want to be or appear to be X person, which other people will you engage with? What will you post that you represent to or that you relate to? How do you make people believe you are exactly who you want to be? It’s essentially a theatrical question, and EIAG makes use of this. Though faceless, the art project has become a game of approximating the purest, most total girl, while still retaining theoretical clarity and specificity. Retrospectively speaking, it sometimes feels like an illegitimate kitten-child of the 90’s CCRU and its concept of hyperstition, which Mark Fisher referred to when he wrote:
“Certainly, it is now no longer adequate to consider fiction to be on the side of the false, the fake or the imaginary. It can be considered to belong to the artificial, once we understand … that the Real, far from being opposed to the artificial, is composed of it.” (Fisher, p. 156)
Egginton writes something similar about the line between artifice and nature: “...the nature of human being is to be naturally incomplete, there is an originary lack, as Derrida would say, that allows the supplement of artifice to appear as a kind of natural corrective force.” (Egginton, p. 23). This is a very pro theatre kid hypothesis. Just as Plato once called theatre a pure lie, many have criticized social media for its inability to depict people’s “real lives”, leading to content such as body positivity images and day in the life videos, which have ironically both been further glamorized and commodified as formats. By instead turning Instagram into a theatrical space through which to curate and effectively create a locus of girl theory centred content, EIAG satirizes the claim that social media can ever be real. It risks, and indeed is infected with, sophistry for the sake of the “brand”, but its submission to the algorithm in this way is tactical in order to create a strategic unfolding of the area between theory, art, and consumer content. Whether a manipulation of the cyberbaroque it is effective or radical in the long term is unclear, but Deleuze’s definition of the project of both poetry and philosophy, in relation to the baroque pleat after Leibniz, provides a sublime comfort:
“Up to what point can we unfold the line without falling into an unbreathable void, into death, and how to pleat it without nonetheless losing contact with it, in constituting an inside co-present with an outside, applicable to the outside?” (Deleuze, qtd. in Probyn, p. 120).
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Ester Freider (b. 2002) is a Russian-American writer, digital curator, and 'creative academic' residing at the intersection between philosophy and literary studies. She writes autotheory, poetry, and experimental prose; curates and produces live events; creative directs publications; operates as a creative consultant for brands and galleries; makes performance art on the internet. She is a co-founder and lead curator of Everyone is a Girl. She lives and works in London.
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Alex Quicho, ‘Everyone is a Girl Online’, Wired, 13 September 2023, https://www.wired.com/story/girls-online-culture/.
Amalia Ulman and Rob Horning, ‘Perpetual Provisional Selves: A conversation about authenticity and social media’, Rhizome, 11 December 2014, https://rhizome.org/editorial/2014/dec/11/rob-horning-and-amalia-ulman/.
August Kaasa Sundgaard and Ruben Stoffelen, ‘Gooning By Design’, 23 June 2025, ‘https://networkcultures.org/longform/2025/06/23/gooning/.
“Belle Delphine signed Holy Bible (Plushie Gun) USA NEW with Stickers!”, Worthpoint, https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/belle-delphine-signed-holy-bible-3242458303.
Billy Stevenson, ‘Waters: Cry-Baby (1990)’, Cinematelevisionmusic, 27 June 2017, https://cinematelevisionmusic.com/2017/06/27/waters-cry-baby-1990/.
Daria Blue, ‘Leave Bonnie Alone! Unless you just want to make her richer.’, Petit Mort, 23 July 2025, https://www.petitmort.com/post/leave-bonnie-blue-alone.
Dominick Ammirati, ‘Do You Have to Be Hot to Get Ahead?, Spike Art Magazine, 2024, https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/do-you-have-to-be-hot-to-get-ahead.
E. J. Dickson, ‘Is Belle Delphine, a.k.a. Bathwater Gamer Girl, the Greatest Troll On the Internet?’, Rolling Stone, 11 July 2019, https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/belle-delphine-bathwater-gamer-girl-troll-857192/.
Elsbeth Probyn, ‘This Body Which Is Not One: Speaking an Embodied Self’, Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, 6(3), 1991.
@everyoneisagirl, ‘welcome 2 𝑒𝓋𝑒𝓇𝓎𝑜𝓃𝑒 𝒾𝓈 𝒶 𝑔𝒾𝓇𝓁….’, 14 December 2023, Instagram.
Gary Hall, Masked Media: What It Means to Be Human in the Age of Artificial Creative Intelligence, London: Open Humanities Press, 2025.
Geert Lovink, ‘Web Aesthetics Interview with Vito Campanelli’, Institute of Network Cultures, https://networkcultures.org/geert/web-aesthetics-interview-with-vito-campanelli/
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, New York: Columbia University Press, 1994 [1991].
James R. Hamilton, ‘Philosophy of Theater’, 2019, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/theater/.
Konstadinos Bassanos, ‘Gilles Deleuze's Baroque Fold and the Transparency Effect: Essential Elements for a Contemporary Discourse on Baroque and New Media’, PhD thesis: University of Southampton, 2010.
Larry F. Norman, ‘The Theatrical Baroque: European Plays, Painting and Poetry, 1575-1725’, University of Chicago: Fathom Archive, https://fathom.lib.uchicago.edu/2/10701023/.
Madeleine Aggeler, ‘Who Is Belle Delphine, the Gamer Girl Selling Her Bathwater?’, The Cut, 8 Oct 2019, https://www.thecut.com/2019/10/belle-delphine-bath-water.html.
Mark Fisher, Flatline Constructs: Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction, New York: Exmilitary Press, 2018 [1999].
https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/belle-delphine-signed-holy-bible-3242458303
Nymphet Alumni, ‘Ep. 73: The Trial of the Theater Kid’, Podtail, 13 February 2024, https://podtail.com/podcast/nymphet-alumni/ep-73-the-trial-of-the-theater-kid-2024-02-13/.
Ozziline Mercedes, ‘Mercedes 666’, https://mercedes666.net/Mercedes-666.
Tanya Gold, ‘‘The internet raised me’: the strange world of online star Belle Delphine’, Spectator, 12 December 2020, https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-internet-raised-me-the-strange-world-of-online-star-belle-delphine/.
William Egginton, The Theater of Truth: The Ideology of (Neo)baroque Aesthetics, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010.
Xavier Gamboa, ‘Baroque Worlds of the 21st Century, Phd thesis: University of Western Ontario, 2012.
Genius, as usual
beautifully put together x