Here’s a hot take: black South Africans shouldn’t pay taxes as a form of reparations. That’s right, I said it. We’ve done enough for this country. The descendants of Van Riebeeck and co should fund the country for a while. I hear one of them signed a trillion-dollar pay package at the end of last year.
Did your blood boil a little? If your fingers were already furiously typing a rebuttal or screenshotting that sentence so you could share it with a caption about “the state of journalism these days”, then congratulations, you’re a victim of the Oxford Dictionary’s Word of the Year for 2025, “rage bait”.
If you’ve been living in a world disconnected from the dopamine crackhouse that is the internet, “rage bait” is content specifically designed to provoke anger and outrage.
If engagement were a driver, “rage bait” would be Lewis Hamilton. Nothing works better. Oxford’s choice of “rage bait” as the word of the year is like an MRI documenting our collective cognitive decline. To understand how we got here, we need to look at the trail of words that brought us here.
In 2020, Oxford couldn’t even choose a word. The year was too unprecedented, too chaotic, too everything. Cambridge went with “quarantine”. Sweet, wasn’t it? We thought isolation was the problem.
By 2021, we’d moved to “vax” (Oxford) and “perseverance” (Cambridge). We were still in survival mode, still believing that if we could just get through this, things would return to normal. Adorable.
Then 2022 gave us “goblin mode” from Oxford — the year we collectively decided that pretending to have our lives together was too exhausting. Cambridge, meanwhile, was distracted by “homer” because of Wordle. Word games and giving up on pants.
2023 gave us “rizz” from Oxford, while Cambridge chose “hallucinate” — referring to AI’s tendency to confidently generate complete nonsense, like a third-year politics student trying to make a point. One word about humans trying to be James Bond circa Sean Connery, another about machines making things up. Sounds a bit like modern dating.
At home, we’re rage bait connoisseurs. Our political discourse has been rage bait since the first mention of Springbok quotas.
Last year, Oxford selected “brain rot”, finally acknowledging that we were all slowly being poisoned by low-quality digital content. Cambridge went with “manifest”, the delusion that imagining something hard enough makes it real. We knew we were deteriorating and thought we could wish our way out of it.
Which brings us to 2025: “rage bait” and “parasocial”. We’ve gone from isolated to angry and emotionally attached to strangers on the internet who are probably Russian bots.
At home, we’re rage bait connoisseurs. Our political discourse has been rage bait since the first mention of Springbok quotas. X in South Africa is a rage bait factory with occasional interruptions for load-shedding memes. So are the WhatsApp groups and any attempt to get callers to chime in on radio. Remember John Robbie and Redi Tlhabi? We used to inject rage bait into our veins for breakfast.
The algorithm doesn’t care about truth. It cares about engagement. Nothing drives engagement like anger. A thoughtful, nuanced take on tax policy gets 47 views, and three of them are your mom.
“Black South Africans shouldn’t pay taxes” gets shared 4,700 times, mostly by people explaining why it’s wrong, which ironically spreads it further. We’re all complicit in this.
Every quote tweet with “Can you believe someone actually said this?” is another deposit in the rage bait economy. The outrage is the point, and we know this.
We survived the pandemic only to create the kind of contagion that spreads through fibre optic cables and 5G towers. The conspiracy theorists were right about 5G after all, just not in the way they thought.
Most of us understand we’re being manipulated. We engage anyway because the anger feels good. It feels righteous. It makes us the hero.
Cambridge’s choice of “parasocial” pairs perfectly with this. We’re forming one-sided emotional relationships with influencers, politicians and AI chatbots who are literally programmed to push our buttons and suck up to us. We feel like we know them. We defend them like they’re family. We get angry on their behalf. They couldn’t pick us out of a lineup if their engagement rates depended on it.
The trajectory from “quarantine” to “rage bait” is a story of how isolation, desperation and capitalism’s infinite appetite for our attention created a perfect recipe for societal dysfunction. We survived the pandemic only to create the kind of contagion that spreads through fibre optic cables and 5G towers. The conspiracy theorists were right about 5G after all, just not in the way they thought.
Rage isn’t a bad thing. At least in some contexts. Something just tells me that we shouldn’t flick that particularly angry bean so often. It’s all fun and games to piss people off, but in a world where people’s mental health seems to be going severely left, rage baiting people seems like a great way to cause a lot of trouble.
Well, being angry all the time looks exhausting. I’ve never seen a tired monk. I’ve never seen an enraged one either. Maybe they’re onto something.
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