Maybe Rage-Bait Is Art

BYSofia Guellaty

September 24, 2026

On robots, Mounjaro, Vogue World, and the profitable business of making everyone angry.

On Tuesday night, Vogue World staged an ode to the human hand. It began with the Renaissance: brocades, lace, embroidery, craftsmanship, the mythology of the Italian artisan. It moved through Made in Italy, heritage and human ingenuity before arriving, naturally, at four humanoid robots dancing through the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II.

Fine. The robots were also made by human hands and human minds. You got me there, Vogue World.

OpenAI helped fund the evening. Meta Glasses was a sponsor, as was Eli Lilly, maker of Mounjaro. So there we were, watching a celebration of human touch, creativity, and art sponsored by artificial intelligence, wearable technology, and the pharmaceutical company behind one of the drugs radically changing our relationship with our bodies. I don’t know who wrote the scenario, but they deserve a raise.

None of this shocks me in itself. I use AI. I am using it to edit this very article. I take Mounjaro. What fascinates me is that an institution like Vogue could put all of these contradictions under one roof and apparently fail to anticipate what would happen next in the comment section.

Or perhaps they anticipated it perfectly. Rage-bait, after all, is also an income stream.

This is hardly a first. In May, Jeff Bezos and his wife Lauren Sanchez sponsored the Met Gala and the protests ran for weeks. In August, the Met cancelled the John Galliano exhibition it had announced only a month earlier. Then there was the whole Ed Sheeran and Macklemore situation.

Each time, I found myself wondering how nobody saw any of this coming.

Yes, we live in a world of chaos and contradiction, but Vogue could surely imagine that Eli Lilly and OpenAI sponsoring an event about the human body and human creativity might produce a reaction, particularly at a moment when there is already a growing sense that fashion’s biggest institutions have lost their appetite for risk. These are sophisticated people running sophisticated businesses.

Global corporations spend fortunes understanding audiences. They employ consultants and strategists, commission consumer research, monitor social media, and collect enough behavioural data to know what you had for breakfast. They cannot possibly be this tone deaf. If anything, they hear us perfectly well.

The more interesting question is whether listening to us requires them to change anything. Increasingly, I suspect it doesn’t.

Every corporation believes passionately in diversity, creativity, freedom, humanity, community, authenticity, sustainability and, naturally, world peace, right up until one of those things puts a dent in the KPIs or an event needs a sponsor. Then it’s every man for himself.

I am inside the machine too. I run a company and work with global brands, so I know the song and dance. It usually begins with, “We absolutely love this idea, but…” Three meetings and seventeen people later, the idea has been so thoroughly disinfected that nobody can remember why they loved it in the first place.

The irony is that the briefs have never sounded braver. Be bold, disruptive, provocative, authentic. These are actual words big corporations type into PowerPoint presentations before somebody produces something genuinely provocative and half the room develops arrhythmia.

Magazines used to provide a little more room for somebody to dare. When the market was more stable and publications were less beholden to corporate interests, they could occasionally be on the reader’s side, at least between two advertising pages.

Some crazy shoot, difficult opinion, or genuinely strange idea could still make it through and remind you why magazines belonged to the fourth estate in the first place.

I don’t mean that art was once pure until money came along and corrupted it. Please. Fashion has always needed big clients and magazines have always needed advertisers. Michelangelo had a Pope breathing down his neck and patrons paying for art designed, quite literally, to glorify them. Money has always funded culture. What feels different now is the extent to which money has managed to author it.

Once that happens, culture begins absorbing the instincts of capital. Everything must be manageable, predictable, scalable, optimised, and safe enough to survive several rounds of approval.

More troubling is how completely the people making culture have absorbed those instincts themselves. In making creativity safer, more predictable, and easier to sell, we have also stripped away much of what made it interesting, including a healthy contempt for the rules.

Fashion used to be ridiculous, snobbish, offensive, brilliant, and frequently spectacularly wrong. Music was supposed to make somebody’s parents nervous. Artists were exhausting. Magazines had visual identities, took positions, and built communities around them.

Corporate culture today isn’t strange simply because it contains contradictions. We all contain contradictions. I certainly do. What makes it strange is the solemn sincerity with which those contradictions are presented to us. Celebrate the body! Look at our inclusive casting of female bodies! Now please welcome the pharmaceutical company behind the drug making everybody skinny, and everybody keep a straight face.

Come to think of it, maybe the Mounjaro and robot scheme is genius after all.

So many rules of common sense have been broken that perhaps we should stop thinking about rage-bait as an unfortunate consequence and start considering it as the ultimate form of social experimentation.

Which brings me back to the comment section. God bless the comment section.

It frequently makes me despair for civilisation, but every now and then it is the only person at the party willing to look around and ask whether everybody else is seriously pretending this isn’t weird. The public tends to spot the contradiction immediately.

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What I find less convincing is the comforting idea that spotting it necessarily changes anything. We comment, repost, make the meme, and announce that a company has lost touch, celebrities live in bubbles, and capitalism has become shameless. Then we watch the next show, buy the product, stream the song, and click on the article, generating another few million impressions while explaining how outrageous the entire system has become. Instagram engagement goes through the roof.

Outrage, it turns out, is one of the machine’s most efficient distribution channels, which interests me far more than whether any particular corporation is tone deaf.

The people running these institutions live inside self-validating systems. So do I. So, probably, do you.

Stay in any position of power long enough and eventually so many people around you depend on the machine continuing to work that very few have an incentive to tell you when it is behaving absurdly.

The outside world can scream that we are not stupid and demand that these institutions stop infantilising us, but if all that screaming continues to produce relevance, engagement, and revenue, how corrective can it really be?

We keep telling powerful institutions that they have lost touch with their market while continuing to behave exactly like their market, exactly as the data analysts predicted we would. Their power is real, but so is ours, and we have become remarkably comfortable exercising most of it through comments.

A market, unfortunately, is not a comment section. A market is behaviour.

If we believe corporations have become too comfortable, then our purchasing, viewing, clicking, and subscribing eventually have to say the same thing our comments do. Otherwise, the machine learns something perfectly rational from all this outrage. We may hate what it does, but apparently not enough to make doing it unprofitable.

Someone once told me that a true conviction is what survives inconvenience. Everything else is positioning. Theirs, and ours.

Maybe it is time the rest of us put our money where our comment section is and spend more of it on independent companies. Yes, I realise an independent founder telling you to support independents is the least surprising sentence in this piece.

Welcome to the machine.

Maybe Rage-Bait Is Art

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