IN WHICH DFW & I EXPLORE CHINESE BEAUTY APP MEITU

I am not the first to gape at the remarkable prescience of David Foster Wallace's largely standalone conceit on the rise and fall of videophony buried inside Infinite Jest. But with the IPO of Chinese "Aspirational Beauty App" Meitu all over the New York Times and F ortune etc. it was such an irresistible conflux of innovation, glamour, and recursion I couldn't forgo the opportunity to explore it a little bit.

If you cobble together some extracts from the Meitu IPO coverage vs. Infinite Jest, it's almost impossible to discern fact from fiction, which is, of course, the purpose of the app itself. Try identifying the sources of these four quotations: Meitu, a (1)"High-def mask-entrepreneur," (2)"allows users to aggressively retouch their faces in photos," for (3)"aesthetic enhancement--stronger chins, smaller eye-bags, air-brushed scars and wrinkles." (4)"A touch can taper your jaw. It can slim your cheeks. Widen your eyes. Of course, it can make you thinner." It runs together seamlessly, but only (2) and (4) are from the news (Fortune and the NYT respectively). (1) and (3) are from Infinite Jest, published in 1996.

Obviously I had to download Meitu and try it. (Is the app's name intentionally an English homonym for "me too"?)

"Get ready for a new you!" the first screen instructs, followed by, in what seems to me a more foreboding admonition than intended, "Get ready for hundreds of emotions!" I found the original color version of my LinkedIn photo, which I consider to be, you know, a pretty good photo of myself, uploaded it to the app, and started tinkering.

Original photo (left) and Meitu-ized version (right)

There was something almost apotheotic about the ability to make pores evaporate, slim down my face, and up the ratio of eyes-to-nose. The whole process took about 30 seconds. It was terrifying, but mesmerizingly so, even if I found the results strange and alien-like--the aesthetics, by default, lean small-woodland-creature. I couldn't help but wonder, if the tweaks were geared toward American beauty standards rather than Chinese, if I would have felt differently. Per the NYT article, this is very much in the works--and will be more or less automated via geolocation usage algorithms. I shudder with "videophonic stress" and vanity--not hundreds of emotions, only two--just thinking about it, about expectations moving from Kim Kardashian to Bambi.

Meitu can "reject[] the idea that its business model relies on people’s insecurities or cultural pressures" and insist "It’s about making you happy," but I don't buy it. In the most flattering light I can muster, it's about getting caught up in DFW's "storm of entrepreneurial sci-fi-tech enthusiasm." Without a filter, of course, it's about Meitu making $$$. Precisely, $629M in the Hong Kong IPO this week and a $4.6B valuation. If DFW's clairvoyance holds, it will be a short-lived boom. Meitu already fell short its target $5B valuation, per the Wall Street Journal. "The question is whether the world wants Meitu’s idea of beauty," the NYT notes. But when innovations are rejected and their markets collapse, there can still be sticky effects:

"Even then, of course, the bulk of U.S. consumers remained verifiably reluctant to leave home and teleputer and to interface personally, though this phenomenon’s endurance can’t be attributed to the videophony-fad per se, and anyway the new panagoraphobia served to open huge new entrepreneurial teleputerized markets for home-shopping and -delivery, and didn’t cause much industry concern."

As a business and innovation strategy consultant, I'm no luddite and have few objections to companies making money. Personally, I also love a good Instagram filter. But Meitu just feels different; using it, I'd crossed one of those invisible lines that you know when you see. I deleted the app immediately.