There’s a scene in the documentary Predators in which Chris Hansen, the former Dateline NBC reporter who hosted the hit series To Catch a Predator, rubs his nose.

Once upon a time, Hansen was one of the most recognizable personalities on network television. To Catch a Predator, which set up pedophile stings and turned them into sensational reality television, was such a massive success back in the early 2000s that today, 19 years after the show ended, Hansen is running a successful YouTube show doing the exact same thing.

Hansen is a TV news star, a man accustomed to the camera. He knows when he needs to be on and when it’s ok to be off. He knows that if the shot is likely to make it to the screen, he shouldn’t be rubbing his nose. His TV instincts told him that split second was not going to be on air. But it was, because the film for which he sat for an interview was not network television or a YouTube channel he controlled, and the editors were not on his payroll. It was a documentary, and one that was profoundly critical of his life’s project. And off-script moments are to documentaries what perfect takes are to news shows.

I doubt he understood these things. He probably didn’t realize at the time he sat down for the interview that this was not a friendly environment for him. He’d done years of appearances on massive shows like Oprah and Jon Stewart; he could do a softball interview on Ambien if he wanted to. And at the time — which was in the last few years — he was 64 years old. At that point in life, you have absorbed who you are to the marrow of your bones. You’re not improvising your persona like you did when you were young; who you are is now in every facial tick, every reflex. If you’re a TV showman, then knowing when to be on and when to be off is muscle memory. Hansen thought he was off, so he rubbed his nose. But he was on.

Rubbing your nose isn’t some catastrophic faux pas, and I’m not pointing it out just to be catty to Chris Hansen. The point I’m making is that to a person like him, a man whose very soul is cast in perfect Rembrandt lighting, life is a performance. There’s a front stage and a back stage. There’s an On Air light that lights up red and triggers Newscaster Mode. His personality is constructed from this performance for his audience. It is who he is. And more and more, it’s the same for the rest of us.

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Shortly before I watched Predators, which is, by the way, one of the best documentaries I’ve ever seen, I watched another great doc, from 2009, called We Live In Public. We Live In Public is about a guy you’ve never heard of named Josh Harris, who at one point around the turn of this century was on track to become Jeff Bezos, or Elon Musk, or at least Marc Andreesen. He saw the future of the internet and he rawdogged it. He started by creating an internet streaming channel back when modems could transmit video at about one frame per second. He left that business behind to start a fun but twisted intentional community called Quiet in the basement levels of some commercial building in Manhattan, in which hundreds of people lived in pods and were filmed live to the internet 24/7, flossing their teeth, eating their breakfasts, falling in love, breaking up, fucking, taking shits, showering, and slowly becoming unwound. The project, which included an underground shooting range, was eventually closed down by the NYPD, at which point Harris took the cameras into his own apartment and streamed his round-the-clock life with his girlfriend. That experiment also collapsed, for quite predictable reasons.

There’s a point in the film in which Josh is in his apartment fighting with his girlfriend, Tanya Corrin. Tanya tells the camera that under normal circumstances, if you’re in a fight with your partner, the best thing to do is to really listen to them. But under the circumstances of her bizarre life, she admits, in which every moment is being observed by an anonymous digital viewership, you can’t do that because you have to perform for the audience. You have to win the fight. You have a crowd on your side, and so does he. Neither of you can let them down. So you become a version of yourself that you would not be without that audience present. And it’s not a better version.

It hardly needs to be said that the comment anticipated the life we all live today online. It’s not that Tanya was a soothsayer; she was just very early to the party.

Tanya was not like Chris Hansen. She was a young New York City transplant conscripted into the digital habitat of the 21st century before it had fully cohered, and before she was prepared for it. Her ambivalence about the alien world she found herself in is what makes her relatable as a human being.

Chris Hansen is the opposite. He’s a Boomer who came up in the age of television, not the internet. His personality was methodically shaped by well-paid producers and directors whose job it was to make him a star. He didn’t need to worry about rubbing his nose in between takes because he had editors to cut those seconds of footage if the camera was still rolling. He had a crew of professionals and a massive media corporation behind him. He was used to being taken care of, and those instincts show grotesquely when he’s interviewing for Predators. When he’s on, he’s on. The questions feel rote to him, and his answers are scripted and rehearsed. He keeps saying, “I’m OK with that” when answering serious questions about the complicated moral implications of his work. He’s trying to look like a man who has had time to reflect upon and resolve his quandaries, but it’s obvious to anyone watching that he’s “OK with that” because all the collateral damage he inflicted on others is incidental to his professional interests. He’s had decades to ruminate on it, but that moment in front of the camera shows that he probably never really has. He just doesn’t give a shit about the harm he does to other people — it’s not much more complicated than that.

I’m not saying that Chris Hansen is a fake person, though I would certainly bet that he’s a shallow, narcissistic, self-centered person. What I’m saying is that Chris Hansen is a real person, and precisely the kind of person a successful front-of-the-camera media career fabricates. He’s sort of a corporate humanoid. In his Golden Years, he’s still hawking YouTube videos to sell advertisements for skin care products, using the same exact formula of his glory days two decades ago, only sadder. And some of us are being made into clones of Chris Hansen by fame-seeking and social media addiction. Predators shows that dimension, too.

This is the world we see in its gestation in We Live In Public, one in which we’re both viewers and extras in the livestream of American life. We’ve become as used to the ubiquity of the cameras as the pod dwellers in Quiet had. But it would be unfair to stop there, putting the blame uniformly on that collective “we.” The responsibility is not uniformly distributed. Most of us are not an active part of the problem. We’re living normal lives, not radically different from those of a decade or two ago. We’re not clipping DJI microphones to our collars and being followed around by cameramen. We’re the audience, not the stars. The cameras are pointed not at us, but at Hansen and a hundred younger and more famous versions of him, from James O’Keefe to Nick Shirley to Tyler Oliveira. Our job is just to consume their content on our newsfeeds.

The new generation of viral “independent content creators” that has inherited the earth is the cultural offspring of Reality TV. As children, their brains simmered in the stew of shows like To Catch a Predator, Cops, The Bachelor, The Apprentice, and American Idol. Now they’re shaping our politics. Our government, led by a game show host, takes its cues from them, vilifying Haitian immigrants one week and Somali-Americans the next, according to whatever’s blowing up on their YouTube channels. Their conferences are attended by presidents and vice presidents. They’re getting themselves banned by foreign governments.

Granted, you’re much more likely to see them rubbing their noses on camera. The coiffed and manicured newsman of Hansen’s era, sporting a blazer and quipping in perfect sound bites, is now an anachronism. Today’s political influencers have more of Josh and Tanya in them; they grew up assuming the On Air sign was always lit up red. They got drunk and embarrassed themselves with the camera on. They shot their antics with phones and didn’t worry about lighting or acoustics or makeup. This is the new aesthetic. It’s edgier than network TV, less scripted than 2000s-era Reality TV, but beneath the surface it’s the exact same thing: tabloid entertainment dressed up as advocacy journalism, or worse — as democracy.

Many of us have celebrated the slow demise of network news, the monstrosity that brought us Chris Hansen in the first place. We had good reason to. But we should be cautious about embracing what has come to replace it. It’s not just in politics; it’s in everything. The respectable, airbrushed, lowest-common-denominator reality that was once curated for us by professional gatekeepers between blocks of advertisements for multinational corporations is now dirtier, less polished, more grassroots. It has all the trappings of being “real.” But it’s an industry, too. It’s populated by the same needy personalities endlessly seeking public attention and affirmation to fill the gaping cavities in their self-esteem. Its gatekeepers are every bit as jealous as the ones they replaced, only instead of searching for the bland middle on behalf of mass advertisers, they seek out the hysterically polarized edges on behalf of targeted advertisers. Their irreverent rawness is every bit as mediated as Chris Hansen’s dignified poise was. They’re products of the same machine, only the machine’s firmware has been updated.