When reality needs a hashtag

A pair of scissors gets flagged

I often forget that what feels completely ordinary to me can look ‘dangerous’ to an algorithm. A pair of scissors. A kitchen knife. Even a butter knife. None of them depict violence, yet the algorithm sees only the blade, not the context. The image is reduced to a trigger, followed by warnings, limited reach, or sanctions.

At the same time, our news feeds confront us daily with wars, destruction, and human suffering. We tend to call those images reality, while ignoring the fact that reality, too, is mediated, edited, and framed.

None of this is new to me. I recognised the mechanism long before. It was about bodies, perfection, and the beauty ideals we learned to mistake for reality.

As a child, I loved playing with Barbie. She and Betty Boop were impossible role models; exaggerated bodies, impossible proportions, carefully manufactured ideals. But why did so many of us want to look like them? Was it beauty? Male attention? Or simply because we were taught that this was what beauty looked like?

Today, posts tagged #NoFilter and #BodyPositivity are celebrated, as if reality itself has become something remarkable. Isn’t that a strange idea? That authenticity now needs a label?

We’re surrounded by manufactured realities. AI generates people who never existed, green screens create places we’ve never been, and filters reshape faces and bodies until reality itself becomes editable. At some point, the edited self stops being the fantasy and quietly becomes the identity.

Beauty standards are only one example. The deeper question is how easily we accept manufactured realities without noticing them.

The algorithm didn’t create these ideals. It learned them from us.

Behind the paywall, I’m sharing Barbie, a stop-motion film I made years ago. It was shown in museums long before vertical videos became the norm. The image quality belongs to another era. The questions don’t.

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