Girlie Delmundo is the greatest content moderator in the world, and despite the setbacks of financial crises, climate catastrophe, and a global pandemic, she’s going places: she’s getting a promotion. Now thanks to her parent company Paragon’s purchase of Fairground, she’s on the way to becoming an elite VR moderator, playing in the big leagues and, if her enthusiastic bosses are to be believed, moderating the next stage of human interaction. When she meets William Cheung, Playground’s wry, reticent co-founder (now Chief Product Officer) and slowly unearths some of his secrets, and finds herself somehow falling in love, she’ll learn that history might be impossible to moderate and the future utterly impossible to control.
Sharply attuned to the costs of employment: financial, emotional, psychic ... Castillo’s 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 ... Castillo favors long sentences that twist and kink like a delirious garden hose, delighted by the unruly spillage of thought ... Succeeds in rendering visible the often invisible dirty work of the digital era.
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 ... 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.
This setup gives Castillo a long satirical runway, even some room for light sci-fi—all to the good. But Moderation is really a romantic comedy of the I-fell-for-my-boss variety. Though the love story left me cold...I applaud its trappings, which are daringly loveless, even churlish ... Castillo, despite some missteps, has the confidence to pull it off—but it’s a dangerous game.
