There's the rise of rage-bait-proud influencers such as Comfy With Kerry, aka Kerry Rose Schwartz, who speaks only in hot-take headlines like "LA fine dining is a scam," and who theatrically gags and sneers while criticizing the food of well-liked California restaurants. Or Kai Trump, eldest daughter of Donald Trump Jr., who made a vlog titled "I Brought My Secret Service to Erewhon" in which she casually tosses food items from the luxury grocery store into her cart. ("It's so unfortunate that they removed visible dislikes," reads one top YouTube comment.)
But many cases are less clear, and the issue is further complicated by the comments-section ecosystem, which can be unpredictably brutal or sycophantic. One recent example: a TikTok about an incident at a coffee shop called Olive's in New York City. In the video, a user (@justvalthings), claims to have been "kicked out" of a Tribeca coffee shop for ordering a salted honey latte, or, as she calls it, [influencer] "Brooke Mason's iconic latte," as if that's a universally understood concept. Although the drink was not on the menu of Olive's, she says the staff "let [her] order it" but omitted the salt, allegedly because the owner would have considered adding salt to the shop's coffee a "slap in the face." A dispute followed in which she apparently attempted to go behind the counter herself and grab the salt, and was told to leave and not come back. Now, she's hoping to tell her story and ostensibly turn her followers against the coffee shop.
Watching the video, I thought, surely, this must be rage bait… right? But the TikTok comments were divided, with many viewers agreeing to boycott the coffee shop or pummel it with negative reviews. One user wrote, rather dramatically, "I hate coffee shops," and others declared that they would return to Olive's and place the same order to make a statement (about what, exactly, is unclear). Other comments were more pragmatic, with one barista writing that people need to stop going into smaller coffee shops expecting "what influencers make at home or whatever Starbucks puts out," and another user writing, "[it] sounds like a very small inconvenience that isn't worth damaging a business's reputation after a single interaction with an underpaid barista." Another simply said, "influencers are exhausting." The video currently has nearly 900,000 views.
I'd like to think that I've watched enough reality TV to know when someone is being mean or rude for sport, as opposed to simply holding an unpopular opinion. There's a difference between ill intentions, a state of full-blown delusion, and crashing out with all the pre-programmed chaos of a rodeo clown. (Consider the timeless moment in 2014 when New York City Real Housewife Aviva Drescher threw her prosthetic leg across a table at Le Cirque — all staged, she recently admitted. Not rage bait, just showbiz.) Engaging in rage bait is also detrimental to our mental health, as it activates fight-or-flight responses, increases stress hormones, and can worsen anxiety.
The role of influencers in restaurant culture is continuously changing, and like it or not, they're seemingly here to stay. As Eater reported in 2022, we've experienced three food influencer evolutions: the candid food influencers of the late aughts; the YouTubers that followed; and, finally, the rise of the three-second-hook TikTok influencer, ever in search of growing follower counts and sponsored content opportunities. We're also currently in a new wave of aestheticized e-commerce-optimized conservatism, as seen in Hannah Neeleman of Ballerina Farm and cooking influencer Nara Smith, both of whom are frequently accused of being cleverly packaged trad-wife rage bait. Maybe so, but they've now both locked down brand deals and signature retail products (protein powder and garlic oil, respectively).
We seem to be approaching a tipping point about how much online drama we can truly take. As writer Gideon Jacobs recently explained in the Los Angeles Review of Books, "when the United States crossed 'the 50-yard-line' in 2000 — over half its population online — the internet quickly grew serious and real," first for personal expression, and then for brands. Now, decades later, we both consume and produce more content than ever before; every Reel or Short consumed/watched sends data to brands, influencers, and companies trying to understand how to corral the attention of viewers in an oversaturated, post-authentic social-media world.
If the medium is still the message à la Marshall McLuhan, the popularity of short-form rage bait reveals the economizing of our attention spans, and, consequentially, our appetite for more truthful realities.
