transmitting a stranger rather than be seen
the video-transmitted image of what was essentially a heavily doctored still-photograph, one of an incredibly fit and attractive and well-turned-out human being, someone who actually resembled you the caller only in such limited respects as like race and limb-number
Context
The endpoint of the vanity spiral is total self-erasure at the point of contact: rather than let the other end see the moist, evasive, untrustworthy-looking real face, callers clip over the camera a doctored photo of a better-looking stranger who shares with them nothing but race and limb-number. To be on the line at all becomes conditional on not being present on it; the self is replaced, at the exact site of the connection, by an attractive fiction of itself.