Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Kayleigh Donaldson | Miscellaneous | July 29, 2026
This week, the luxury gym brand Equinox pulled an advert for its company after it was called out for racism. The ad in question featured an AI-generated image of an Asian woman's head atop a metal pole, with a man's finger suggestively placed inside her mouth. For months, dozens of content creators have called out the deeply creepy ad for its blatant fetishization of Asian women. it only took until now for Equinox to remove them. The image, a transparent attempt at shock value, was a porno-esque evocation of the historic sexualization of Asian women and girls. That it was AI-generated was but the icing on the cake for Equinox's recent marketing campaign that is equal parts baffling and maddening.
Their current advertising push features AI pictures contrasted with "real" people showing off their gym bods. In response to the many Asian people who called them out for their ads, a spokesperson said, "This content creator is manufacturing outrage for clicks by imposing a salacious interpretation of our campaign and intentionally ignoring its full context. This campaign was designed to explore the false realities created by AI and social media, including fake leaders, fake bodies, fake food, and fake robots." While they apologised for the "unintended impact", it was clear that the outrage was, in part, something they wanted. You don't use AI images in 2026, especially ones with dismembered body parts posed like sex dolls, unless you want to piss people off. It worked for Equinox, although at the expense of their claimed agenda, and they had to stick the knife in further by attacking the dozens of Asian women who said their provocations were cheap. We used to say that any publicity was good publicity, but nowadays, it feels like inciting rage and harm is the only way to go.
Recently, basketball player Sophie Cunningham, who isn't an especially gifted player or top scorer in the WNBA, came forward as a transphobe who thinks trans women shouldn't be allowed to compete in leagues like hers. It wasn't a surprise that a woman who was a ring girl for the UFC's Conor McGregor comeback fight would have such sh*tty politics, nor was it a shock when all of the TERFs and Trumpettes gathered around her like flies to a pile of dung. But it was more disappointing when sports outlets framed this story in decidedly pro-Cunningham ways, as though she was both brave and going against the grain for spouting the bog-standard anti-trans line about the world of sports. She's ragebaiting her way to stardom because the misogynists who don't even watch the WNBA will line her pockets more than her salary. It may not last long, but for now, it's effective.
The hall of smoke and mirrors that is the modern-day internet is a ceaseless hellscape of brainrot, algorithms, corporate monopolies and kayfabe. AI is everywhere, ad revenues are down, and we're all fighting to get six seconds of someone's attention on the giant dopamine slot machine of social media. The easiest way to get it? Piss someone off. You know what ragebait is: it's losers with a microphone saying contrarian nonsense; it's images of women of colour photoshopped to make them look more threatening and masculine; it's putting Clavicular and Bryan Johnson onto runways for fashion week; it's influencers throwing out hundreds of dollars of food for a bit or chasing someone down the street and yelling slurs; it's "pranking" people by pretending to steal their pets or mocking local customs. Ragebait is the act of manipulating your audience to make them angry or sad, and reaping the benefits of an increased audience. And it I hate it.
The internet is, alas, dominated by rage bait, and avoiding it is increasingly impossible. Even if you're aware that you've been ensnared by the most obvious of bear-baiting, it's tough to disentangle your emotions from a sense of reason. I myself have fallen into the rabbit hole of influencers deliberately creating waste in the name of shilling Amazon affiliate links because it feels designed to needle at my left-wing anti-consumerist tendencies. That's the point, and that's still a relatively innocent example. It's small fry compared to the tried-and-true right-wing "anti-woke" bigotry that pretends anyone who gets upset at your racial slurs is the real problem. That's just how the Trump administration works, complete with ugly AI-generated images and hostile rhetoric lifted straight from Peter Thiel's group chats.
The presence of ragebait is concerning but unsurprising. It was the natural response to overwhelm and disempower progressive causes like #metoo, Black Lives Matter, and LGBTQ+ activism. For a brief while, it was, shock horror, a bad thing to use slurs or exclude a marginalised group from your community, even if it didn't always lead to tangible change. Those who deemed such progress to be "woke" quickly utilized ragebait to strengthen their profit margins by using lies and paranoia to rile up their audience, then keep them hooked with a steady stream of content that was both addictive and nonsensical. And they had the perfect response to any form of dissent: Ha, you're acting exactly how I wanted you to. Triggered much?!
It's the line you hear from every bad comedian who confuses the N word with wit: if you're not with me, you just don't get it. You're not laughing because they're unfunny: you're clearly so angry that this brave truth teller has the nerve to say what we're all thinking, and you're the intolerant one for not being more open-minded. Unfortunately, this tedious cycle of ineptitude and insecurity has become a commercially successful enterprise. Bigots like to throw their money around to support dumb people, and they consider any sort of attention they get to be a net positive, from Sydney Sweeney's good jeans to Dave Portnoy's cigar-smoking smarm.
Provocation can be a good thing. Great art is designed to push you out of your comfort zone and elicit emotions you may not necessarily want. This is not the same thing as ragebait, which revels in the worst excesses of humanity in the name of exacerbating cruelty over progress. It's a mindset that thinks of empathy as a weakness and that wants everyone's world to be as small as theirs. How do we combat it? Increased media literacy is always helpful, and so are offline forms of news sourcing and entertainment that reward slowness and friction. Ignoring it doesn't always work, as anyone who grew up in the "don't feed the trolls" era can attest to. It's always important to call out bigotry, especially when there's such a push to normalize it. Well-placed anger might be what saves us. Well, that and waiting for the AI bubble to burst.
