Rage baiting in the banal hyperreal: Real housewives of Antwerp and the attention economy

Nothing sums up Real Housewives of Antwerp (RHOANT, Play4 Belgium) better than bringing a cheap salami snack to a chef’s dinner party, a small act of bad taste designed to provoke and induce cringe. The show thrives on such moments. Rather than merely representing social reality, in this piece we argue that RHOANT illustrates how reality television operates as a system for producing and circulating affect. By embedding rage bait within scenes that spill over into platformed engagement beyond the show, the show normalizes styles of emotional display that audiences learn to read as affectively meaningful. The products its participants appear to sell and endorse dissolve into a more fundamental commodity, namely visibility optimized for an attention economy in which the hyperreal has become banal.