the smartphone, and a host of software technologies built on it,3 have birthed what is essentially a parallel, non-union, motion-picture industry consisting of YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Twitch, Twitter, and their many other social-video rivals, all of which rely on the free or barely compensated labor product of people acting as de facto writers, directors, producers, actors, and crew. Even if they’d never see it this way, YouTubers and TikTokers are effectively competing with Hollywood over the idle hours of consumers everywhere; more to the point, they’re doing what any non-union workforce does in an insufficiently organized industry: driving down labor compensation.

Almost no one I know has work; most people’s agents and managers have more or less told them there won’t be jobs until 2025. An executive recently told a friend that the only things getting made this year are “ultra premium limiteds,” which sounds like a kind of tampon but actually just means “six-episode miniseries that an A-List star wants to do.”

YouTubers’ lack of collective bargaining power isn’t just bad for me and other guild members; it’s bad for the YouTubers themselves. Ask any professional or semi-professional streamer what they think of the platform and you’ll hear a litany of complaints about its opacity and inconsistency

Social media is the lens for a lot of the show’s biggest bits and even plotlines. It is, just as in life, omnipresent, and so, even as the show spotlights the inherent ridiculousness of the extremely online, it also understands the way social media is a deranging accelerant of everyday problems, and thus a medium of everyday life.

These are all just a bunch of funny jokes about people who are too online, celebrities whose shallow fame exists only by way of the apps, and a contemporary American culture hypnotized by the blue light of screens.

In her book The Drama of Celebrity, the scholar Sharon Marcus argues that celebrity, as we know it, is a cultural phenomenon with three distinct authors. There’s the celebrity, who expresses themself through whatever art or product they make; there are the journalists who write about and photograph and criticize and otherwise construct the celebrity’s public image; and then there’s the public, who contribute devotion and imagination, and money, and love and hate.

There was a time when Marilyn Monroe emerged as an illusion, a trick of the light produced between herself, her studio’s massive press apparatus, and an adoring and vampiric public. Today, anyone can be an illusion like this, if at smaller scale.

The show by no means wants to redeem the industry, but, this season especially, it’s become invested in exposing the lazy nihilism that can come along with seeing the worst in people. If you run into a craven, soulless industry hack in the morning, you ran into a craven, soulless industry hack; if you run into them all day, you are the craven, soulless industry hack.

The Other Two is about identity. It’s a flimsy, fungible thing, and it’s a trap. It’s a point of pride and a point of embarrassment. There’s the real you that we all struggle to find and to express truthfully; there’s the version of yourself that you perform for the public; there’s the version of you that others create in and against their own image.