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A few years ago, my father died suddenly of a heart attack. The days that followed were harrowing. My mother, brother, and I wailed endlessly in my childhood home; I felt an exquisite sorrow, one I’d never known before. But a strange thing happened three days after he died. I was scrolling Instagram, looking at other, happier people. Suddenly, the house was silent. No one was crying. I looked up and realized that all three of us were on our phones, blue screens lighting up our faces, all of our feelings set on pause.
I’ve worked in tech for most of my life, and I know all of the facts: Phones are addictive; they can have the same impact on the brain as gambling; the internet is rewiring our attention span and pleasure centers. But I never grasped exactly how powerful technology was until the phones swallowed up my family’s grief. And I can’t lie—it was nice, for a moment, to stop the feeling.
The tech industry can be easy to hate—the erratic CEOs, the biased algorithms, the environmental damage. But beneath all of that is a gigantic, diverse workforce of people who found themselves working in the field—instead of in journalism, education, art—because they needed salaries and health care.
You might similarly roll your eyes at the “tech novel,” which is frequently characterized by a sad main character working for a hot start-up or a mega-tech company, making decent money but largely alienated from society as they build a nefarious app. (See Josh Riedel’s Please Report Your Bug Here or Claire Stanford’s Happy for You. And yes, I even wrote one myself.)
But the tech novel matters because technology has changed people’s emotional and social lives. Scrolling is a seemingly infinite distraction: We might feel sad today, but we can just click through our phones until tomorrow. Scientists attribute the fact that Americans are spending more time alone partly to a rise in digital-technology usage. The tech novel could be the key to how we examine these shifts.
In Moderation, Elaine Castillo’s sardonic new novel, Girlie Delmundo, the daughter of Filipino immigrants, works as a content moderator at a major tech company. Girlie’s father is dead, and she needs the job because her mother is about to default on the mortgage for a house she bought just before the subprime-mortgage crisis. Castillo boils that moment in history down to a few paragraphs that are at once informative and blistering. At one point, she writes: “It was the age of rhinestones, the age of velour, the age of shock and awe, the age of that most rhinestone, most veloured, most shocking and awesome of all things: the adjustable rate mortgage.”
During her job interview, Girlie is shown a video of a girl pleasuring a man. She flags it as child-sexual-abuse material and is asked to validate her decision to an interview panel: “The socks feature an illustration of a main character from the animated Disney film Frozen,” Girlie says. “Judging from the scale of the TV remote control next to her leg, I would estimate a girl’s size three or four.” She gets the job.
Girlie joins a team of content moderators who are mostly women of color, swiping through terrifying scenes at the company’s offices in Las Vegas for enough money to keep their families afloat. Soon enough, she’s the company’s expert on child-sexual-abuse material, a grim honor. But for readers, the brutality of Girlie’s work chronicles is offset by her personality—she’s got machismo, smarts, swagger. She’s the kind of woman who goes to a flashy big-budget work event, eats the sustainable caviar, and steals the mother-of-pearl spoon because “nobody said she couldn’t.”
Castillo makes clear, though, that Girlie’s cool wit is a mask that helps her cope with the horrors she sees at work. Nothing appears to faze this woman; when she walks past a man on the street whom she’s sure she’s flagged as a child abuser, she has a moment of panic, then stoically brushes it off. As the narrator puts it: “No one was better than a content moderator at dissociation.” But even masters of dissociation eventually begin to crack.
Girlie is soon offered a promotion with a salary she can’t turn down. Her job is to find and eject anyone in a virtual-reality experience who is abusing the system—and users keep finding new, weird ways to do that. One of her targets is a child-trafficking ring; another is the “alarming number of people trying to have cybersex” on the platform. Moderation’s VR takes users back in time to places such as the St. Louis World’s Fair and the Villa Borghese, avoiding the clichés of future-focused Tron-like programs. Castillo’s language when describing these virtual realities is transportive. When Girlie stands next to a co-worker at the virtual Trevi Fountain, Castillo describes the pair looking at the “sky, pink as a lip; at the creamy marble body of Oceanus upon his chariot. At his two horses, one wild, one tame; at the calm green waters, glowing with wishes.” She made me feel like I was in Rome too.
Along with Girlie’s new job comes a new boss, a man who is smart and handsome enough to overwhelm Girlie with feelings she’d rather not have. It’s a classic will-they-won’t-they, but Girlie’s love interest is just as withdrawn and work-focused as she is, which makes a potentially predictable storyline into something fresh.
As the novel progresses, Girlie’s grief and pain—from the inhumane content she’s viewed and the personal losses she’s endured—rupture into the narrative in slight, devastating moments. Still, Girlie refuses to be weak. “I don’t bleed on other people,” she tells a doctor who runs therapy sessions for the company’s moderators, after she has a sudden moment of vulnerability. “I make a point of it.”
I’m not sure I’ve ever read such a perfect rendering of a woman suppressing everything inside of her to earn a paycheck, to keep going, to get the job done. But of course, Girlie is trying to pull off a tightrope act, and her story’s conclusion is inevitable. Her burgeoning love for her boss, in particular, can’t be denied forever. Eventually, slowly, a chain of tender moments between them builds to a cinematic resolution.
A novel is, at its best, a mirror for the mess of the human experience and all the feelings of love, despair, fear, longing, and grief that come with it. Moderation is that, and it is also a mirror for the modern world, a place where we hide from ourselves in numerous new ways: social media, situationships, video games, virtual reality. Girlie embodies that repression, and as the glossy surface of her character cracks, we catch glimpses of what lies beneath.
Most days, often with the help of one or more of those distractions, I try to forget that my father is dead. And I’m good at this, almost an expert. But sometimes, when I walk my dog on a sunny day, it hits me: my dad’s laugh, his smell, the way he called me Pookie for some stupid reason. And I’ll find myself on the sidewalk, in the sunshine, sobbing for him—all of the pain and beauty of it coming down on me at once, and feeling what an honor and a terror it is to be alive now, without my dad.
Moderation is, at its core, a book about the moment when everything we’ve been repressing comes back to the surface. You can hide from yourself for only so long: until the work day ends, until your favorite show is over, until the feed runs out of content, until the digital tide recedes and all that is left is your broken, beautiful life.
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