Elaine Castillo’s Moderation: caught in the dark web

In October 2014, Wired published an article about the invisible army of labourers employed to scrub beheadings and dick pics from Facebook and YouTube, detailing the psychological toll on these poorly paid protectors. It is hard to read a young woman explaining that watching videos of bestiality with children affects her to the extent she has to take a break with a coffee from Starbucks and not feel a depth of despair that hollows you out.

The article is credited by Elaine Castillo as a world-building resource for her new novel, which follows Girlie Delmundo, a content moderator who works for the fictional social media company Redeen. A “Subject Matter Specialist” in child sex abuse content, Girlie is emotionally closed-off and efficient – the ideal moderating machine. The biggest complaint her employers have about her is that she doesn’t take up the encouraged perks, such as yoga by the rooftop pool.

Girlie is hand-picked for a role handling live moderation in Redeen’s new acquisition, a VR platform called Playground. In the real world she is unsettled by her stylish and mysterious boss, William; in the virtual one she finds that, despite herself, she is falling for him in a vertiginous rush. Together, they walk through a perfectly rendered recreation of the Villa Borghese and witness battles in ancient Roman amphitheatres. At one point Girlie feels the haptics that simulate motion on her black gloves “singed, stinging, alive” as they both reach into the same popcorn box beneath a sky of fireworks and stars.

Moderation has none of the chilliness that has afflicted so many internet novels, nor the perfunctory bleakness of the modern office novel: instead, it feels fantastically, and terrifyingly, human. Castillo writes with a sense of immediacy and danger: the reader advances as if through a video game that keeps drawing its players onwards. As in her debut novel, America Is Not the Heart, she layers the story with multiple languages and slang terms, and returns to ideas about the deceptions of the American dream and the immigrant experience of being torn between two worlds.

Moderation considers what effect it has on people to encounter the worst of humanity on the faceless internet, and Castillo slowly allows Girlie’s own grief and trauma to rise to the surface as she sinks deeper into fantasy lands. Yet she wisely avoids the trap of making this too didactic a tech tale: she shows how existing in the virtual world brings its own private pleasures, such as watching William in the game where he can’t see her looking, “hidden like a sniper in the alcoves of her own body”. There are even birthmarks on his face, lovingly painted on to his digital avatar, that Girlie never noticed on the “real” William.

Later, in the real world, she finds herself trapped in tortuous social situations and wishing she could bring them to an end as she would a game, by simply pulling off her VR mask. As perhaps we each sense on a small scale when we escape into a screen, the darker our reality becomes, the more we are tempted by the smooth artifice and illusion of control found in a virtual one.

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