MODERATION, by Elaine Castillo<\/p>\n
There are entire Reddit threads devoted to dissecting the grim mechanics of online content moderation. The job is like \u201cpumping raw sewage into your brain for minimum wage,\u201d one user says; another warns, \u201cDo not ever work as a moderator unless you fancy having PTSD.\u201d Veterans of the profession report having been sealed inside a psychological bathysphere, pressurized and isolating, so they could descend into the internet\u2019s abyss.<\/p>\n
Elaine Castillo\u2019s new novel, \u201cModeration<\/a>,\u201d plunges us into this unsettling terrain through the perspective of Girlie Delmundo, a quick-witted, 30-something Filipina American contractor for a social media conglomerate called Reeden. After 10 years of screening gore and child sexual abuse in the company\u2019s Las Vegas branch, she\u2019s developed a surgical skill for compartmentalizing and an accuracy rate of \u201caround 99.5 percent.\u201d<\/p>\n In an industry that expects emotional burnout after a year or two, Girlie is an accidental lifer, a tenured ghost in the machine. She chose Girlie as her corporate pseudonym (Reeden encourages fake names for employee \u2014 and company \u2014 protection) because \u201cit seemed like the most obvious confirmed-bachelor Pinay auntie name she could think of.\u201d<\/p>\n For her troubles, Girlie earns shockingly little pay, and no benefits; and when she\u2019s promoted to work at Playground, Reeden\u2019s newly acquired V.R. company, she calls her new salary \u201cpay off the mortgage in full better.\u201d Castillo teasingly withholds the actual sum, while Girlie\u2019s initial take-home salary of $28,000 lodges in the mind like a bad pixel.<\/p>\n \u201cModeration\u201d is sharply attuned to the costs of employment: financial, emotional, psychic. Girlie supports not just herself but her extended family of \u201cnurses and maids and cleaners\u201d: her mother, who was left \u201ca million dollars in debt\u201d after the 2008 housing crash, as well as aunts and cousins who sustain a shared mortgage in a gated Vegas subdivision featuring manicured lawns, a golf course and a water park.<\/p>\n Castillo\u2019s debut novel, \u201cAmerica Is Not the Heart<\/a>,\u201d was a family saga set partly in 1990s California and haunted by the Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines and its brutal suppression of leftist resistance. \u201cModeration\u201d is no less ambitious, training an unsparing eye on Girlie\u2019s life in a seven-income household that operates like a tightknit timeshare. Especially evocative is Girlie\u2019s bond with Maribel, her exuberant, relentlessly chatty younger cousin \u2014 equal parts confidante, ward and comic foil \u2014 whose upcoming wedding becomes a focal point for the family\u2019s bickering and lavish displays of loyalty.<\/p>\n Castillo\u2019s close third-person narration, and her unerring ear for social performance, make for a novel that is often baroquely funny, full of barbed observations that detonate like precision-guided bombs. A manager is skewered for \u201cshamelessly deploying the material fact of his brownness to obscure the equally material fact of his bossness.\u201d Girlie explains her reluctance to procreate with memorable bite: \u201cShe had absolutely zero plans to subject a new human soul to the vinegar-dipped calamity of this family: financial illiteracy, parentification, brushing systemic abuse under the rug, short calves.\u201d At a party, a Londoner is miffed \u201cthat another English person was there, as if it diminished the commodity value of her accent.\u201d<\/p>\n Castillo favors long sentences that twist and kink like a delirious garden hose, delighted by the unruly spillage of thought. Some metaphors snarl into confusion (\u201cshe refused to be a tenant of her face, rather than its owner\u201d; \u201cnew housing was being thrown up against the scrubland like a rash\u201d), but this is the risk of a style that prizes a hummingbird metabolism over polish.<\/p>\n A logline for the book might have read: \u201cPride and Prejudice\u201d for the age of platform capitalism. Girlie\u2019s boss, William, offhandedly asks if she\u2019s ever imagined herself as the heroine of a film \u2014 Elizabeth Bennet, perhaps. Their mutual attraction is apparent from the start, and while she remains skeptical of Playground\u2019s vaunted promises of \u201ctherapeutic benefits,\u201d Girlie finds it hard to resist William\u2019s \u201cangel of history smile\u201d and the \u201ctractor beam pull\u201d of his gaze. She in turn impresses the British entrepreneur with her impudence and seeming desire to talk herself out of a job (on their first date she dismisses V.R. as \u201cold news\u201d and \u201cclunky tech\u201d). Thesis meeting antithesis remains as potent a formula as ever for creating chemistry.<\/p>\n Structurally, the combining of incisive tech critique with a fairly predictable romance plot presents a more challenging proposition: how to reconcile the content moderator\u2019s necessarily paranoid reading of the world (Girlie\u2019s \u201crule of thumb\u201d: \u201cIf anyone remotely femme was in the room, someone was going to find a creative way to assault her\u201d) with the optimism required to fall in love? By the end that tension is not so much resolved as it is conveniently disappeared.<\/p>\n \u201cModeration\u201d succeeds in rendering visible the often invisible dirty work of the digital era. As disturbing as that work may be, it\u2019s even more so to imagine our own future now that Meta has ended its third-party fact-checking program<\/a> and YouTube relaxed<\/a> its moderation rules. That we are not yet buried beneath a Big Tech rubble owes everything to the Girlies of the world.<\/p>\n MODERATION | By Elaine Castillo | Viking | 310 pp. | $29<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"MODERATION, by Elaine Castillo There are entire Reddit threads devoted to dissecting the grim mechanics of online content…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":55024,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[223,3807,41718,41719,88,41720],"class_list":["post-55023","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-books","tag-books","tag-books-and-literature","tag-castillo","tag-elaine-author","tag-entertainment","tag-moderation-book"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55023","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=55023"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55023\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/55024"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=55023"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=55023"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=55023"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}