Moderation is both a slow-burn romance and a commentary on tech greed and overreach.

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Being a content moderator is one of the worst jobs in tech. These underpaid workers spend hours wading through the darkest and most depraved user-generated content to scrub it from social platforms. They burn out quickly, suffer high attrition, and carry long-term damage to their mental health. But Girlie Delmundo – content moderator at Reeden, a leading social media platform – isn’t one of them. In Elaine Castillo’s new novel Moderation, Girlie is an accidental lifer, somehow immune to the worst effects of the job.

Girlie (her chosen moderator name, not her given name) is gruff, tough, and doesn’t let people in easily. But when she’s promoted to active moderation in Playground, Reeden’s new immersive VR platform, her walls start to slip. She finds herself warming to her handsome new boss and, in mandatory moderator therapy sessions set in a virtual redwood forest, actually feeling things she’d rather keep buried. Cue the slow-burn forbidden romance and themes of tech overreach.

All the moderators in Moderation, including Girlie, are Filipina. She lives with her mother, aunt, and cousin in Las Vegas – a “seven income family, in a gated community” – after losing everything in the 2008 mortgage crisis and leaving the Bay Area behind. Castillo threads in many interesting Filipino cultural references alongside observations on race, class, income, wealth signifiers, queer relationships, and physical appearance. Layered over all of that are the novel’s questions about AI and new tech. It’s a lot to cover, and the mix is part of what makes the book interesting.

Moderation is positioned as tech satire, a category I really enjoy reading, especially having worked at some popular online platforms. But the world of Playground doesn’t feel like so much of a stretch. The first tech satire I read, Dave Eggers’ 2013 novel The Circle, took the technology so far it felt dystopian, but what seemed like shockingly intrusive technology at the time (always-on live streaming and recording wearables) is now commercially available via platforms like Bee AI’s Pioneer and Meta’s Ray-ban smart glasses. And while some of the AI-centered books I’ve read recently like Stop All the Clocks and The Garbage Man (coming in September) turn the innovators into evil billionaire techno villains, the Playground founders come across more like idealists (despite the inappropriate user behavior on the platform that’s impossible to control). In Moderation, the technology could have been pushed much further to land as true satire. 

Moderation is both a slow-burn romance and a commentary on tech greed and overreach. Eventually the story pivots to focus more on the romance and the tech side of the narrative sort of fizzles out. It’s an entertaining read with plenty of sharp observations about our current times. But because it straddles both romance and social commentary without committing to either, it doesn’t fully deliver on either front.