Our Plastic-Surgery Nightmare

To borrow a phrase from Simone de Beauvoir, the face is not a thing but a situation—one that is, increasingly, more technically beautiful but more spiritually unattractive, replete with new information but devoid of human meaning. Today, the young inject their faces and look old; the old inject their faces and look uncanny; a twenty-year-old got famous for hitting himself in the jaw with a hammer to become hotter; teen-agers ask strangers on the internet if a facelift is their only hope. The internet casually scrambles basic ideas of personhood, reframing people as commodities and stripping us for parts.