How digital culture is reshaping our faces and bodies | Elise Hu (re-release)

0:07You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. The talk I'm sharing today is very important to me because it's something I care about a lot. Beauty standards in our new technological age and the ways digital culture is reshaping our faces and bodies. What does it mean when we so often see ourselves through the lens of our phones or computers? What if the way we look in the real world somehow feels less real or doesn't live up to the image we have of ourselves online? It's not just the topic that means a lot. I also cherish this talk because I gave it.

0:48As you may know, the talks I share with you on this show don't happen just anywhere. They happen at our TED conferences. And I gave this TED talk you're about to hear last year at the inaugural TED Next, which is TED's newest annual flagship conference dedicated to exploring the future you, from the personal to the professional and everything in between. TED Next caters to an audience that's really hungry for innovation and fresh ideas. And I really loved being on the ground in Atlanta where it takes place. It pulses with a fizzy energy. And the conference has all the elements of the well-thought-out and executed programming that we expect from TED.

1:28I'm so, so excited to share with you that I will have the honor of hosting a session of talks at TED Next 2025, which is coming soon on November 9th through 11th in Atlanta, Georgia. I helped curate the talks for this session that I'm talking about, and we have really dynamic speakers and artists that y 'all are going to love and could really shift the way you think. It's not too late to join me there in Atlanta at TED Next to see these talks happen live. If you want to learn more about attending, which I hope you do, go to ted.com slash daily next. That's TED.com slash daily next. I hope to see you there.

2:09And now here's my talk.

2:15Earlier this year, I was in Taipei, Taiwan, where I decided I wanted to make a TikTok about cup noodle. Only this brilliant TikTok never happened because of the shock I got when I opened up the app and flipped it into selfie mode. The face looking back at me was a face, but not exactly my face. A whole array of beauty filters had automatically worked me over, and I could not turn them off. There was so much going on here, skin smoothing, skin lightening, teeth whitening, nose narrowing, bigger eyes, and it gave me a thinner, softer jawline. This was a whole lot of non-consensual filtering, or what someone joked was forced catfishing.

2:53And for me, it's the perfect example of something called the technological gaze at work. What is it? Well, women have had to play to the male gaze forever. You know what that is. But the technological gaze describes an algorithmically driven perspective that we learn to internalize, perform for, and optimize for. And then by taking in all our data, the machines learn to perform us in an endless feedback loop. We learn it so young. An estimated 80 percent of 13-year-old girls in America have already used filters or some kind of editing to alter their appearance online. And these days, the filters are hyper-realistic because they tend to be AI-generated.

3:32They come with a suite of characteristics teaching us how to look, things like arched eyebrows or higher cheekbones or plump lips. What then happens is we see the gap between the way we look in the mirror and the way we look in these filters, and the digital world begins to dictate real-world beauty standards. We've seen it in celebrity culture, and I know this because I saw it when I lived and work in Seoul, South Korea, as the NPR bureau chief there nearly 10 years ago. Seoul is all about optimizing your face and your body. If you want your vagina rejuvenated, your skull reshaped, any part of your body lifted or enhanced, have at it.

4:06It's the cosmetic surgery capital of the world. Nearly half of all Korean women have already undergone some kind of plastic surgery. By the time they're in their 20s, no other place comes close. These days, traptox is really popular. That's injecting Botox into the base of your neck, your trapezius muscles, to give the appearance of a longer neck. Calves are being injected with Botox for the same reason. Having a slimmer jawline is so desirable that a sole plastic surgery clinic once displayed the human bones of jaws it had shaved down in a glass vase in its lobby. This has since been removed.

4:43But this kind of body augmentation work isn't just accepted, it is expected. because in Seoul, looks matters so much for your professional and personal advancement. Headshots are required on resumes. Hiring bosses made character judgments based on your faith. You were often bullied if you were bald or big. Trying to look better is framed as a route to economic security and a matter of personal responsibility. But Korea just shows us a more concentrated and extreme example of the pretty privilege that exists everywhere. Look at fatphobia in the United States, helping drive off-the-charts, off-label use of Ozempic.

5:18not for diabetes, but for weight loss. It makes sense when we are so rewarded for thinness and stigmatized for fatness. And all I'm saying is we should reckon with this, because the more narrow our idea of beauty is, the wider the pool of ugly becomes. And digital culture is now reshaping our actual faces and bodies. Under the technological gaze, I worry that our bodies become projects to be worked on forever. And if we don't slow down this body augmentation arms race that I saw in Seoul, then the enhancements that were available there only get farther and farther out of reach, and not just for women.

5:56Because if we are chasing digital beauty, well then, the limit does not exist. AI's idea of attractiveness is only increasingly inhuman and cyborgian. I don't want this. I don't want my daughters coming up in a world in which their looks are the most important things about them. it is incredibly marginalizing to everybody who can't fit in and exhausting for everyone who can because you are constantly having to make or pay for interventions in order to keep up. So what do we do? Filters aren't going anywhere. But we can challenge what the system is optimized for by changing what it means to be beautiful.

6:35Just as the solution to homophobia isn't to make everyone straight and the solution to racism isn't to make everyone white, the solution to lookism and fatphobia isn't to make everyone interchangeably skinny and conventionally pretty. In fact, it's the opposite. It's to celebrate diversity and the differences that make us who we are that are inherent to the human condition. And ultimately, we have to disrupt a system that reduces our worthiness to our looks. Even though my face is rounder and probably darker than an algorithm would like, I have come here tonight wearing my actual face. And my hope for all of you is that you feel comfortable and will continue to feel comfortable doing the same.

7:17Because I see a wide variety of jawlines out here tonight. And let me just say, they are all worthy. Thank you.

7:33That was me, Elise Hu at TED Next 2024. And if you want to learn more about attending, please go to TED.com slash Daily Next. I really hope to see you there. If you're curious about TED's curation, find out more at TED.com slash curation guidelines. And that's it for today. TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective. This talk was fact-checked by the TED Research Team and produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Lucy Little, and Tonsika Sungmarnivong. This episode was mixed by Lucy Little. Additional support from Emma Taubner and Daniela Ballarezzo.

8:13I'm Elise Hugh. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed. Thanks for listening.