Moderation by Elaine Castillo Extract
- Allen & Unwin
- Oct 17
- 4 min read
Read an extract of Moderation by Elaine Castillo.
Girlie was, by every conceivable metric, one of the very best. All the chaff, long ago burned up by unquenchable fire: the ones who had hourly panic attacks, the ones who took up drinking; the ones who fucked in the stairwells during break time, the ones who started bringing handguns to the office, the ones who started believing the Holocaust had never happened, or that 9/ 11 was an inside job, or that no one had ever been to the moon at all, or that every presidential candidate was picked by a cosmic society of devils who communicated across interplanetary channels; the ones who took the work home, the ones who never came back the same, or never came back at all. The floor was now averaging only three or four suicide attempts a year, down from one or two a month. The ones who remained, like her, were the wheat: the exemplars, tested paladins, the ones who didn’t throw up in the hallway and leave the vomit there. They’d been, to continue speaking of it biblically, separated.
None of the white people survived. Not that there were that many of them to begin with. Young middle-class hopefuls bulging with student debt, they’d shown up around the time the position was still being called process executive, back when the site was still in the Bay Area. Back when she still lived in the Bay Area; back when any of them still could. Most of the white candidates didn’t make it past the initial three-week training course; the ones who did left within a year. The majority of the workers had been Filipinas, with a smaller minority of Cambodian, Indonesian, Laotian, Vietnamese workers: people who knew about the job through that reliable network still unmatched by LinkedIn, otherwise known as family— people who’d grown up knowing their mothers and aunts had been moderators, and so too would they follow. Sometimes a particular year— she’d started to think of her surviving cohort as a kind of graduating class, although what they were graduating from or toward, she did not know— would have one or two working-class Korean Americans, one or two Black Americans, usually people who were married to Filipina or Viet employees and had heard about the job through them. Of the two hundred or so who worked at the Vegas site, nearly all were women. Nearly all the women were Pinay.
To pass her final assessment, Girlie’d had to stand in a conference room of no great nor small size, indistinguishable from the nine other conference rooms in the building, and, in front of her peers and potential future colleagues, moderate a video of a tied‑up and blindfolded young girl of about six or seven who was being made to fellate an unseen man. The girl had bruises along her shoulders. The man, who was recording and audibly enjoying the act, had gray in his pubic hair. The trainees had already been reminded that they wouldn’t be allowed to pause the video or remove the audio during their presentation.
Earlier that morning, a young Cambodian American trainee who wore three soft friendship bracelets around his left wrist— two fraying, one new— had moderated a video of a young man, about the same age as himself, being stabbed multiple times, gurgling bright blood into a Champion sweatshirt as he abortively begged for something; not quite yet his life. In the middle of his presentation, the young trainee, without pausing the video, discreetly crouched behind his podium to throw up into a wastepaper bin he’d presumably positioned there for this very reason. By the time it was Girlie’s turn, the room still smelled of pepperoni and bile.
Girlie stood in front of her prospective coworkers and managers, presenting a carefully supported case for why the video of the tied‑up girl should be banned from the social media site in question, on the grounds of child pornography. On the one‑to‑five scale they’d all been taught, the video was a solid five.
One of her potential supervisors challenged her, face stony: How did she know the girl was a child, and not a consenting adult?
It was true, they could barely make out the girl’s face, behind the blindfold, on the blurry blown‑up image beamed on the matte-white projector screen, in front of the forty faces waiting, as in a court of law, for a verdict. It was true, there were plenty of small-breasted, small-boned women in the world, Girlie among them; it was true, there were plenty of people who cried during sex, or liked rough play of all descriptions. This was the real test of the moderator, in the end: being able to sift through, again and again, each workday’s thousand and one true things. This was the real work, beyond the stabbings, the rapes, the paranoia, the conspiracy theories, the hate speech, the carved-out crater in the living world where belief had collapsed in on itself like an exploding star. Reaching into the wound with two clean fingers, pulling out the still-steaming metal slug.
“The socks,” she said.
Extracted from Moderation by Elaine Castillo
available now.
Moderation
by Elaine Castillo
A world-weary content moderator takes a job policing virtual-reality worlds, only to uncover dark secrets in the code and unexpected feelings for her enigmatic boss.
Comments