My TED Talk is Here! [#154]
It's about what digital culture is doing to our appearance standards and our physical selves, and how we can collectively reframe what it means to be worthy.
Hi friends,
We are interrupting regular programming to share my TED Talk, which is now live! I can't wait for you to watch “How Digital Culture is Reshaping Our Faces and Bodies.”
The talk is about the way the artificial world is now dictating real world appearance standards, the body augmentation arms race it sets off, and how we can respond to all this in an affirmative way, to make room for difference and resist internet-driven sameness.1
It is a distillation of the reporting, research, and writing that went into my book Flawless, and centers around one of its most enduring ideas: the artificial, or technological gaze.
I’m so excited for you to watch it. And after you do, let me know what you think, and please share it with the people in your life who you think should hear it.
Watch the talk: How digital culture is reshaping our faces and bodies
To mark the launch, Bookshop.org is offering a 10% discount on Flawless for the next week, just use the code HU10 at checkout. If you haven’t gotten your copy, now’s the time to pick it up and support a better way to buy books online. Every book you purchase on Bookshop.org supports local, independent bookstores.
Thank you to all the incredible people who made this talk happen: the curators at TED — Chee Pearlman and Corey Hajim, who have championed me at HQ, the Ignite founder Brady Forrest, who first gave this idea its first hearing on stage in a draft form, and the countless friends who vetted the talk. Reeve Hamilton, who came up with the last line, and all the people who let me practice on them, like my partner Rob, bestie Justin and my friend and fellow TEDster
, who let me frantically give the talk to him over Zoom on the day of the event.Odds and Ends
I wrote up my annual Year in Review on my blog, which I’ve now done for 20 years(!). And hosted Deck The Balls 2024, in which the vibes were very good, until the vibes turned catastrophically bad a week later. But I commit to keep convening people IRL in 2025, because we need more parties and vibe popes among us.
Okay okay, thanks for bearing with this unusual fare for Hu’s letter. Back to regular programming next time.
Onward!
E