“Sometimes people just click,” reads the strapline of Moderation by Elaine Castillo, published this summer. The Filipino American protagonist, Girlie, is indeed a professional clicker: she’s a content moderator for a tech company and subject matter specialist in child sexual abuse, tasked with vetting offensive videos, images and text all day long, with little pay or respite, and no end in sight.
But she also clicks with William, her new boss (who is taller than her in a “gendered” way that she finds “politically irritating”). Approaching the story, Castillo was keen to not just write “poverty porn about tech’s most exploited workers,” she says. “Why not imagine a content moderator as a romance heroine?”
She’s not the only novelist to have done so. In Green Dot by Madeleine Gray, we meet Hera, a comment moderator who falls in love with the married older journalist sitting across the wall of Dell computers at the newspaper they both work at. And before that, We Had to Remove This Post by Hanna Bervoets, translated by Emma Rault, also centred a content moderator.
Why is the moderator role rich fodder for novelists? “It’s a goalless, unending job that requires constant attention but produces nothing,” says Gray. In many ways it’s capitalism’s ugliest bits distilled into their purest form.
Writing her novel, Castillo drew on a seminal 2014 WIRED article by Adrian Chen, titled The Laborers Who Keep Dick Pics and Beheadings Out of Your Facebook Feed. The majority of the workers he wrote about were Filipino, she says, which “tracked with experiences” in her own family. “Even then I saw the links between that form of racialised labour in tech” and other industries. “The work of Filipino nurses, security guards, cleaners, for example, felt intimately connected.”
In this way, she always thought of Moderation as a “labour novel”, more than a tech novel. She was interested in the “people who do the dirty work who uphold the tech industry” and “the internet we all use”.
In Green Dot, Hera goes on from comment moderation to content production and then retail, which she finds more rewarding in its honesty – “we are selling our time to sell people objects,” she tells us – in contrast to the corporate jobs that disguise their “soul-sucking” in jargon and the “false promises of work-life balance”, says Gray. (Indeed, Moderation’s protagonist Girlie is offered wellness coaching sessions and yoga).
The work and romantic storylines are reliant on each other. Were Hera “being provided with some sort of intellectual and emotional sustenance from her labour, chances are she would be far less depressed and desperate for connection, and she wouldn’t have an affair with her married boss just to feel something,” says Gray.
The romantic power dynamic is less steep in Castillo’s Moderation, partly because the oppressive presence of tech corporations looms larger. For Castillo, “love, connection, vulnerability and the erotic” might have something to teach us about how to resist tech dystopia. And in any case, they make for a good story.
Moderation author Elaine Castillo. Photograph: Amaal Said
