The fall of videophony
It was a three-button affair, after all, to use the TP’s cartridge-card’s Video-Record option to record both pulses in a two-way visual call and play the call back and see how your face had actually looked to the other person during the call. This sort of appearance-check was no more resistible than a mirror. But the experience proved almost universally horrifying. People were horrified at how their own faces appeared on a TP screen.
Context
Carlisle's Mirrors entry for the videophony essay, and the essay's hinge: the "real coffin-nail" for the technology is not being seen but seeing yourself — three buttons turn every call into a playback, and the playback is "no more resistible than a mirror." What the irresistible mirror shows (a face "blurred and moist-looking," "evasive, furtive, untrustworthy, unlikable") drives the entire mask-and-composite economy the rest of the scene chronicles: the mirror creates the demand for a better face than the mirror shows. The catalogued phrase makes the mirror the essay's explicit model for what a screen does to vanity.