videophony: chic integrity
a return to good old telephoning not only dictated by common consumer sense but actually after a while culturally approved as a kind of chic integrity, not Ludditism but a kind of retrograde transcendence of sci-fi-ish high-tech for its own sake
Context
The essay's closing twist is the theme's engine in miniature: even renunciation gets commodified into a pose. Giving up the flattering mask and going back to voice-only starts as a genuinely anti-vain gesture and instantly congeals into "a kind of status-symbol of anti-vanity," while the holdouts who still use masks and Tableaux "became ironic cultural symbols of tacky vain slavery to corporate PR and high-tech novelty." There is no escape hatch from the position-game — the sincere move (dropping the vanity-tech) is immediately re-read as the newest, hippest position, chic integrity worn like a leisure-suit-avoider's badge. The system can metabolize sincerity itself into fashion, which is precisely the disease the anthology diagnoses.