Somewhere between a face filter and a scalpel, a new version of the human body is taking shape. It’s snatched, smoothed, symmetrical—and suspiciously hard to tell where the flesh ends and the screen begins. Whether it’s the surgically sculpted “Instagram face” or the BBL baddie, more and more people are reshaping their bodies to match the idealized versions of themselves they see online. It’s the earliest stage of something beyond just cosmetic surgery: a transhuman future where the body is no longer seen as something we are, but something we design.
Transhumanism, at its core, is a philosophical and technological movement that advocates for enhancing the human body and mind through science and innovation—think implants, gene editing, neural interfaces, even immortality. But in its aesthetic form, transhumanism doesn’t always announce itself with glowing cyborg eyes or chrome limbs. Sometimes, it starts with a subtle jaw tweak, a nose “refinement,” a biologically-impossible hip-to-waist ratio, a decision to make your actual face match the one your front-facing camera approves of. What begins as digital play becomes a kind of biological submission to the algorithm. When we talk about transhumanism in this context, we’re not speculating about a distant future but observing how the body is already being remade to match a digital standard that feels more real than reality itself.
Because reality, as we once understood it, no longer exists in isolation. We now live between two planes: the physical and the digital, constantly moving between our offline bodies and our online avatars. The line dividing them—once obvious, even laughable—is now nearly imperceptible. Your filtered selfie becomes a suggestion, a prototype, a plan with our digital self bleeding into the real one. People don’t just touch up a photo anymore—they touch up their actual faces to match the edited version. They don’t just like how they look in a filter—they go to a surgeon and become it. That in-between space, where the flesh competes with the pixel, is the transhuman aesthetic. We’re now hovering in that uncanny space where the digital body becomes the aspiration, and the real one is constantly being retooled to catch up.
What was once a glitchy mask to wear on Snapchat is now a set of instructions for the flesh. This shift isn’t limited to women or Instagram influencers either. Across genders and subcultures—from bodybuilders perfecting algorithm-approved silhouettes to teenagers getting lip flips because a TikTok filter made it look “natural”—people are editing themselves to mirror the machines that once mirrored them. And in that quiet reversal lies the most telling sign of the transhumanist turn: humans are starting to look like the technologies they use.
We’ve been warned. In her groundbreaking 2009 book Bodies, Susie Orbach described the growing detachment people were feeling from their own flesh. “The body is turning from being the means of our sensing and perceiving to being the totality of our identity,” she wrote. In other words, when you look in the mirror and see a body that doesn’t match the digital persona you’ve curated online, it doesn’t just cause dissatisfaction—it triggers an identity crisis. The real-world face, with its pores and asymmetries, becomes a problem to solve. And in a consumer culture that treats selfhood like a project, the solution is often surgical.
We call this a beauty standard, but it’s closer to a user interface that updates constantly. Once, people brought celebrity photos to their surgeons, now, they bring pictures of themselves. Not as they are, but as they should be: filtered, airbrushed, re-rendered through the lens of Snapchat’s smoothening algorithms or Instagram’s augmentations. Surgeons have a name for this: “Snapchat dysmorphia.” It’s when the digitally perfected version of yourself becomes more real than the actual one.
Legacy Russell, in Glitch Feminism, argues that our digital selves are not just versions of us—they’re opportunities to escape the limitations of embodiment entirely. “The glitch is the error that allows new possibilities to emerge,” she writes. Online, the body can be shapeshifted, glitched, or even erased. For many queer, trans, and non-binary users, digital space provides the room to be who they really are—because the screen doesn’t ask for proof; birth certificates or biology. The glitch, in Russell’s hands, becomes a tool of resistance and a refusal to play by the old rules of flesh.
And yet, this liberation is not immune to capitalism. What begins as play becomes product. Once filters taught us how to look, the market moved in to make those looks permanent. Lips became supersized, cheekbones lifted to high-contrast geometry, waistlines nipped and fat redistributed in Kardashian-esque proportions—it’s not coincidence, it’s conditioning. TikTok alone has racked up billions of views under tags like #BBL, where surgeries are aestheticized into short, glamorous edits. Meanwhile, the risks, the pain, and the aftermath are filtered out.
Ellen Atlanta’s Pixel Flesh captures this contradiction perfectly. She describes the experience of puberty as a kind of betrayal: the real body arrives, and it’s nothing like the one promised by Instagram. “To become a woman naturally is to become ugly,” she writes, not because bodies are ugly, but because they can never match the fantasy. Her book unpacks how digital beauty standards leave girls feeling like they’re always falling short of their own avatars. “We live in a culture where our digital selves are fed, filtered, and flattered—while our real selves are starved,” she notes.
But to frame all of this as dystopia would be missing something. There’s power in transformation, even when it’s mediated by algorithms. The BBL body, for instance, didn’t come from nowhere—it draws from Black and Latinx aesthetics long marginalized by Western beauty culture. Its rise, while undeniably commodified, also signals a shift in what kinds of bodies are celebrated and emulated. Likewise, bodybuilders hacking their physiques with peptides and tech-assisted training regimes may be chasing unrealistic ideals, but they’re also pushing the boundaries of what a body can be. The line between enhancement and expression is thin, and getting thinner.
What we’re seeing is a redefinition of what counts as “real.” A person may feel more like themselves after surgery, not because they hate their body, but because they want their outside to reflect what’s always been inside. In this sense, the quest to become your filter-self isn’t always a symptom of pathology. Sometimes, it’s self-actualization. Sometimes, it’s survival.
Still, there’s an undeniable pressure embedded in this system. You can choose not to participate, but you can’t opt out of the gaze. Social media collapses the distance between viewer and viewed—you are the model, the photographer, the editor, the audience, and the billboard, all in one. You are watched, and watching, and watching yourself being watched.
Where the male gaze once dominated beauty standards, we now live under something more diffuse and harder to fight: the technological gaze. This isn’t just about what other people think looks good but what the algorithm rewards. The angles that go viral, the faces that get engagement, the bodies that perform well on TikTok. As Elise Hu writes in Flawless, beauty is increasingly governed by “surveillance capitalism”—a system where cameras and metrics dictate how you should look, and then punish you with invisibility if you don’t comply.
The terrifying part? This gaze doesn’t sleep. It’s embedded in filters, front-facing cameras, likes, and facial recognition software. It decides which faces get pushed to the top of the feed, which bodies become trend cycles, and which identities are flattened into hashtags. It doesn’t desire you—it calculates you. And slowly, without noticing, we begin to anticipate what it wants. Our own gaze becomes algorithmic. We learn to look at ourselves the way the machine would. We chase symmetry because the camera likes it, we retouch under-eye circles because the filter erases them anyway, we contour for the front-facing lens, not the mirror. In short, the body becomes a site of optimization.
This is the most insidious part of it all—not the surgeries, not the filters, but the quiet internalization of machine logic. We’re not just being seen by technology; we’re learning to see ourselves like technology. To scan, assess, and correct. To flatten ourselves into something clickable. What we call self-love might really be self-management.
And unlike the male gaze, which at least had a face—however oppressive—this one doesn’t. You can’t call it out at a party or write a manifesto against it. The technological gaze is built into the code and it doesn’t care about you, though it shapes you anyway. It runs silently underneath your behavior, rewarding some faces with visibility and burying others in the scroll. It’s not just watching you; it’s telling you who gets to be seen at all.
Under this gaze, beauty becomes a form of data compliance. You edit your face to match the most-liked look not because you hate yourself, but because you want to exist—algorithmically, socially, economically. The logic of the platform is the logic of survival and when your value is measured in impressions and reach, it’s hard not to let that logic dictate your worth.
Legacy Russell would call this the opposite of the glitch. The glitch resists smoothness and interrupts the feed. It says no to polish, no to conformity, no to being legible on someone else’s terms. In Glitch Feminism, Russell urges us to embrace what doesn’t fit the frame—to become unreadable, uncategorizable, unoptimized. She writes, “to glitch is to embrace error, to refuse correction.” That refusal, in a world of constant editing and algorithmic sorting, is revolutionary.
But refusal isn’t easy when the pressure to conform is so seamless. As Susie Orbach warns, we’ve arrived at a point where the body isn’t just looked at—it’s constantly in need of management. Her analysis in Bodies makes it clear: we no longer simply live in our bodies, we curate them. We tweak them, track them, enhance them—not always because we want to, but because we’ve absorbed the belief that we must. The technological gaze doesn’t demand perfection out loud—it simply makes imperfection invisible.
Still, there is room to resist. Atlanta’s Pixel Flesh reminds us that awareness can be a first step toward freedom. When you start noticing the way these ideals are constructed—how they’re sold to you, filtered into your feed, coded into your insecurities—you can start to question them. You can choose when to participate and when to opt out. You can decide whether a procedure is for empowerment or performance. You can reclaim your body as something that belongs to you, not to the algorithm.
And maybe that’s what this moment demands: not purity, but consciousness. Not a rejection of all beauty tech, but an understanding of where the pressure is coming from. Because while transhumanism may sound like science fiction, it’s already here—in the swipe of a filter, the edge of a cheek filler, the decision to turn off the front-facing camera because you don’t feel “ready.” It’s here every time the machine’s version of you starts to feel more real than the one in the mirror.
The Instagram face, the BBL, the bodybuilder’s sculpted torso—they’re not just trends. They’re previews of what happens when technology stops being a tool and becomes a mirror and then a blueprint.
So the question isn’t whether we’re becoming post-human. We already are. The better question is: who’s writing the code?
