Yasmin Suteja and The Art Of Being a Person Online.

Sophia Leon S.

4 hours ago

8 min read

Yasmin Suteja has spent the last decade being both the person in the image and the person making the image. Now she is questioning the machine that decides what we see, what we want, how we see ourselves, and even whether our choices are really ours.

There is something pretty surreal about interviewing someone you have been told is your double, literally... Yasmin's mother had already decided we were alike before we met. By the time we sat down together for the interview, I said meeting Yasmin for the first time felt like “having a brunch with myself.” During our first brunch we had barely started talking and were already jumping between beauty standards, the internet, work, taste, men, our mothers and the strange experience of being women who are constantly perceived.

That is probably the best way to understand Yasmin, she does not think in straight lines. Her intelligence comes partly from the fact that she talks like a person thinking in real time. She jumps from Tumblr to AI to beauty to anthropology to capitalism to dating to her mother to the internet. To me that is not a mess at all, that’s the texture of her brain, and I am in love...

Somewhere inside all those tangents is a very contemporary question: what does it mean to remain a person when so much of modern life is designed to turn you into an image?

The Influencer Is A Dirty Word

Yasmin studied film and wanted to direct, but when she graduated there was no obvious path from film school to filmmaking. She had a university degree in Communication and Media Arts and Production, a deep interest in cinema, and no straightforward way into the industry.

So she found another way in, turning herself into a talent agent for what would become the first wave of Australian influencers. She connected photographers, models, resorts and brands, selling content packages before “influencer” had even become a career. What began as a workaround became an industry.

Today she works across directing, producing and content creation, but she still finds herself having to explain that she has an education.

There is something really telling about that. We rarely ask men in creative industries to prove that their visibility does not make them less intelligent. For Yasmin, the discomfort around the word “influencer” is not just about people looking down on a new kind of career. She suspects there is something more deeply gendered underneath it.

SOPHIA: Why is “influencer” still treated like a dirty word?

YASMIN: “I think there’s been a huge kind of development in the industry of influencer and content creator, and maybe it’s considered a bit of a dirty word. I’ve always been interested in the potential sort of misogyny underneath that.”

And then she gets to the part that's absurdly obvious:

YASMIN: “Why is influencer such a dirty word, and why is it something that people roll their eyes at straight away? You can be front-facing, and you can be hot and cool and funny and all of those things, as well as smart and considered and a businesswoman and a storyteller. And you can also be a director.”

It sounds obvious. It is also apparently revolutionary.

When Yasmin began pushing more seriously into directing, she remembers people looking at her Instagram and seeing the selfies before they saw the filmmaker. There was an assumption that the two could not coexist. Why, directors don't take selfies?

The deeper issue is not whether Yasmin is allowed to be taken seriously. It is why women who are visibly attractive, socially fluent, comfortable being photographed or willing to make themselves visible are so often assumed to be less intellectually serious. The woman can be the image, or she can be the person behind the image. For Yasmin, that contradiction is exactly the point. She wants to exist on both sides of the lens without having to amputate one identity to legitimise the other. Why should she?!

Beauty Got Democratised. Then We Became The Panopticon

For Yasmin, the politics of the image are personal. She remembers growing up in Australia feeling that she did not fit the dominant beauty standard, and returning to Bali because it was one of the places where she felt beautiful. Then social media began to change who got to be seen.

SOPHIA: Did social media actually change beauty, or did it just create a new version of the same pressure?

YASMIN: “I think the social media space and the influencer industry has opened up a completely different consideration of beauty.”

That change has made a huge difference. The internet gave people who had been ignored by traditional gatekeepers a way to build audiences on their own terms. But visibility came with a catch: once everyone can see you, everyone can also watch you...

Yasmin describes this through the idea of the panopticon. Social media means we are not simply being observed by some distant authority. We are watching one another, all the time, and adjusting ourselves accordingly. We are not only asking, “Am I happy?” We are asking, “How does this look?”

SOPHIA: What changed when the camera stopped documenting our lives and started shaping them?

YASMIN: “Before you were living your life and then the camera was capturing the life you were already living. Whereas now we’re living a certain life. We’re performing.”

That difference feels almost too obvious once you hear it, and we’ve heard that more than once now... We travel, dress, eat, exercise, fall in love and decorate our homes with an invisible audience somewhere in the room.

Yasmin is not pretending she is outside the machine. She has booked the picturesque airbnb just for the pictures, and participated in the system. She has simply spent enough time inside it to understand what it does to the person operating it.

Synthetic Serendipity

Then Yasmin gives the problem a name: synthetic serendipity.

She describes the strange feeling of thinking a coincidence is personal when an algorithm may just have connected the dots. A friend plays the song you were thinking about. Instagram suggests the people you have been talking about. Spotify seems to know what you will like before you do.

SOPHIA: Do you think our choices are still autonomous?

YASMIN: “I want to think that my decisions are totally autonomous, but I can’t guarantee that they are.”

That may be the most unsettling sentence in our whole conversation.

We like to imagine that desire is private. What we wear, read, buy, watch, who we follow, where we travel. But how much of what we want was discovered by us, and how much was delivered to us so seamlessly that we mistook recommendation for instinct?

Yasmin thinks the only real escape is to log off, which is also the most unrealistic solution imaginable when your work, friendships and business all live online. However, the point, perhaps, is not purity. What if It’s awareness?

Good Taste Is What The Algorithm Didnt Tell You

This is where Yasmin starts talking about Tumblr. She remembers a time when taste could exist without immediately becoming a shopping list. Tumblr-famous people were sometimes anonymous. You followed the image, not necessarily the person. You developed an aesthetic through books, music, photography, films and whatever strange corners of the internet you happened to find.

SOPHIA: What happened to taste?

YASMIN: “Good taste is like, I just randomly reached for this book and that’s informed this thing, not TikTok told me to do it.”

There is something super crazy about that idea now. Taste is one of the last places where we experience ourselves as individual. If an algorithm can anticipate what we will like, then our preferences start to feel less like discoveries and more like instructions.

Yasmin is fascinated by that tension. She talks about AI, mass reproduction, personal branding and Andy Warhol, whom she sees partly as an early curator of people and ideas. She talks about the Factory and the importance of bringing creative minds together.

That is very telling. Yasmin has always been interested in more than making images. She is interested in the ecosystems around them: who gets seen, who gets invited in, who gets to make something, and who decides what is worth looking at.

The Moral Compass

The more you understand the machinery of influence, the harder it becomes to pretend you have no responsibility for what you put into it.

Yasmin talks about having to create a moral compass for herself. She is proud of being visible as a woman of mixed heritage, particularly because other girls have told her that seeing someone who looked like them in spaces previously inaccessible to them made them believe they could enter those spaces too.

But she is also conscious of the beauty standards she participates in creating.

SOPHIA: Has being aware of your influence changed what you are willing to promote?

YASMIN: “I had to create a moral compass for myself. I’m proud of my heritage. I’m proud of what that represents to other girls who look at me… But also I think in terms of the beauty standard stuff, I will never be promoting things like injectables or peptides or anything like that because I don’t live my life like that.”

It is not a universal prescription, it is a boundary. That is the more interesting way to think about influence: not as the ability to tell everyone else what to do, but as the responsibility to know what you personally will and will not sell.

Don't Look For Someone To Complete You

By the end of our conversation we've already discussed anything you can imagine, and naturally we've also covered dating... Two women in their thirties discussing autonomy, identity and the economics of attention were apparently always going to arrive at men eventually...

Yasmin has stepped away from dating apps and, after a few frustrating experiences, is trying to stop chasing ambiguity.

SOPHIA: What do you think women are asking for now that they weren’t asking for before?

YASMIN: “If this man can’t text you back, how is he going to do all that?”

All that means the real stuff: grief, illness, loss, family, aging, children. The parts of life that do not fit neatly into a dating profile.

And again, the connection to everything else we have discussed is very clear. The same woman who refuses to let an algorithm tell her what she wants is also trying not to let being single convince her to accept less than she actually wants.

The goal is not to find someone who completes you. I shared my simple philosophy during our conversation: “When you meet your person, he or she is not there to complete you. They are just there to add more colour to your life than there already is.”

Maybe that is the argument underneath all of this. The algorithm does not get to decide who you are. Neither does an audience. Neither does a beauty standard, a career label, a relationship status or the version of yourself that performed well online.

You can be the woman in front of the camera and the person behind it. You can be beautiful and serious. You can be an influencer and a director. You can be visible without making yourself entirely available to be consumed.

At the very end, we talk about how women can sometimes feel there is only one spot, one opportunity, one woman allowed to win. But we’ve come to believe there is more to be gained through collaboration than competition, building our own dream world and trying to become our own dream girls.

That felt like the right place to leave the conversation.

Yasmin Suteja has spent the last decade inside the image machine, learning how it works from both sides of the lens. Now she seems less interested in becoming the perfect image than in remaining the author of her own life. And maybe that is the real flex: To be seen, without being watched.