Latest news with #Reeden
Washington Post
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
‘Moderation' is full of provocative insights about modern life
Elaine Castillo's second novel, 'Moderation,' opens with a blistering portrait of social media's toxic underbelly. At the social media platform Reeden, moderators are charged with removing harmful content, and the graphic descriptions of this grisly material make it obvious why suicide, alcoholism and nervous breakdowns are occupational hazards. 'None of the white people survived,' Castillo notes matter-of-factly; the moderators who last at Reeden's Las Vegas site are almost all Filipina women, and the sharp depictions of linguistic and class distinctions among them will be familiar to readers of Castillo's striking debut, 'America Is Not the Heart.'
New York Times
02-08-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
A ‘Pride and Prejudice' for the Chronically Online
MODERATION, by Elaine Castillo There are entire Reddit threads devoted to dissecting the grim mechanics of online content moderation. The job is like 'pumping raw sewage into your brain for minimum wage,' one user says; another warns, 'Do not ever work as a moderator unless you fancy having PTSD.' Veterans of the profession report having been sealed inside a psychological bathysphere, pressurized and isolating, so they could descend into the internet's abyss. Elaine Castillo's new novel, 'Moderation,' 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's Las Vegas branch, she's developed a surgical skill for compartmentalizing and an accuracy rate of 'around 99.5 percent.' 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 — and company — protection) because 'it seemed like the most obvious confirmed-bachelor Pinay auntie name she could think of.' For her troubles, Girlie earns shockingly little pay, and no benefits; and when she's promoted to work at Playground, Reeden's newly acquired V.R. company, she calls her new salary 'pay off the mortgage in full better.' Castillo teasingly withholds the actual sum, while Girlie's initial take-home salary of $28,000 lodges in the mind like a bad pixel. 'Moderation' is sharply attuned to the costs of employment: financial, emotional, psychic. Girlie supports not just herself but her extended family of 'nurses and maids and cleaners': her mother, who was left 'a million dollars in debt' 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. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
The Guardian
11-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Moderation by Elaine Castillo review – a twisted look at the tech workplace
Elaine Castillo's second novel is set within the rotten heart of the US tech industry, where 'Girlie was, by every conceivable metric, one of the very best.' What makes her so effective in her underpaid contract role moderating content for social media giant Reeden is that most prized of workplace currencies: a stoical capacity for labour. Though the job's mental toll is clear – suicides are common, white staff never stick around and wellness support remains superficial – Girlie proves exceptionally hardy, near-perfect in her ability to identify and scrape feeds free of child sexual abuse content. Behind her productive impassivity, Castillo tells us with a sombre touch of irony, is a 'glowing' line of ancestors – Filipina nurses and maids who have long cleaned up after others. Things look up for Girlie once William Cheung enters the scene, inviting her to become a moderator at Playground, a virtual reality entertainment platform newly acquired by Reeden. Girlie is a perfect fit. As the American-born daughter of immigrants, she carries a cloying sense of filial indebtedness ('there was an unspoken understanding, an ironclad cultural code: if you made money, you had to pay your family back'). With the family home under mortgage, the generous benefits package is hard to resist. And, because we're partly also in romance territory, so is the man offering it. Castillo's celebrated debut, America is Not the Heart, was centred on the Filipino experience in 90s America. Peopled with nurses, doctors, faith healers, makeup artists, restaurateurs and DJs shifting languages between Ilocano, Tagalog and Pangasinan, the book opened a window on to a shadowed corner of American life, but refused to trade on trauma ('the gooey heart-porn of the ethnographic', Castillo calls it in her essay collection, How To Read Now). Instead, it honoured quiet, quotidian expressions of community and survival. But where that first novel could lean into self-seriousness, weighed down by the familiar solemnities of the immigrant story, Moderation has more fun within the genre – even if of a masochistic kind ('Parents worked all the time … Never been on vacation with my family,' Girlie says at one point. 'Never been to Disneyland either'). The book's twinned look at labour and immigration all but guarantees comparisons to Ling Ma's 2018 novel, Severance. But Girlie, unlike the Chinese-born protagonist of the latter work, is not haunted by memories of a distant homeland; her only longing is for her childhood home in Milpitas, lost in the 2008 market crash. The books' true kinship may lie in the fact that they both unfold against a backdrop of collapse: where Ma imagined a fungal pandemic, Castillo envisions a looming digital end time. Playground's journey, Girlie learns, began with a keen interest in the therapeutic space. The need for funding then led it to merge with L'Olifant, a French theme park company showcasing 'French history to the French'. Now, with Reeden as a shared parent, the two are poised to transform the worlds of entertainment and healthcare – at least in theory. Castillo cannily frames VR's healing power – from treating PTSD and phobias to providing pain relief and easing suicidal thoughts – within a darker tale of its co-option for profit, control and surveillance. Castillo is interested in the overlap between rightwing politics, tech culture and historiography. L'Olifant is modelled after historical French theme park company Puy du Fou, created by Philippe de Villiers, who is known for his Catholic, Eurosceptic and national sovereignty politics, and, in 2022, for backing the far-right candidate Éric Zemmour. Like Puy du Fou, L'Olifant is on a mission to make history 'fun' and 'exciting', even if it means ideologically rewriting it. As the story unfolds, and therapeutic ideals, revisionist ambitions and corporate greed converge, Castillo has potent themes to work with: censorship, digital feudalism, the exploitation of biometric data for propaganda purposes, and the disturbing trade-off between principle and progress. Disappointingly, she seems more content to skim surfaces than probe depths. Her narratorial tactic of choice is to tell and tell – through flat expositional dialogue, but also the lazy shorthand of news headlines ('PLAYGROUND'S NEW VIRTUAL REALITY INITIATIVE: FAR-OUT FANTASY OR FAR-RIGHT NIGHTMARE?') – never showing, never dramatising. The characters, as a result, can feel like bystanders, idling on the tale's margins rather than actively inhabiting its centre. Girlie and William are interesting in their own right, but together, not exactly a match you'd ship. This is because for pages on end, the supposed romance between the pair lies dormant, only for it to comically whip into life in sudden bursts of passion. The novel tries to straddle too many worlds at once – thriller, dystopia, second-generation immigrant account, love story – but commits wholeheartedly to none. The result is a narrative that feels more scattered than layered. But Moderation is not without merits. Castillo is a writer of razor-sharp acuity who takes seriously the sinister instrumentalisation of storytelling, in a world increasingly veering right. As a novel of ideas, Moderation contains terror enough to keep you reading, and looking for signs of the nightmare its author has taken the time to document. Sign up to Bookmarks Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you after newsletter promotion Moderation by Elaine Castillo is published by Atlantic (£17.99). To support the Guardian order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
The Guardian
10-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Moderation by Elaine Castillo review – a twisted look at the tech workplace
Elaine Castillo's second novel is set within the rotten heart of the US tech industry, where 'Girlie was, by every conceivable metric, one of the very best.' What makes her so effective in her underpaid contract role moderating content for social media giant Reeden is that most prized of workplace currencies: a stoical capacity for labour. Though the job's mental toll is clear – suicides are common, white staff never stick around and wellness support remains superficial – Girlie proves exceptionally hardy, near-perfect in her ability to identify and scrape feeds free of child sexual abuse content. Behind her productive impassivity, Castillo tells us with a sombre touch of irony, is a 'glowing' line of ancestors – Filipina nurses and maids who have long cleaned up after others. Things look up for Girlie once William Cheung enters the scene, inviting her to become a moderator at Playground, a virtual reality entertainment platform newly acquired by Reeden. Girlie is a perfect fit. As the American-born daughter of immigrants, she carries a cloying sense of filial indebtedness ('there was an unspoken understanding, an ironclad cultural code: if you made money, you had to pay your family back'). With the family home under mortgage, the generous benefits package is hard to resist. And, because we're partly also in romance territory, so is the man offering it. Castillo's celebrated debut, America is Not the Heart, was centred on the Filipino experience in 90s America. Peopled with nurses, doctors, faith healers, makeup artists, restaurateurs and DJs shifting languages between Ilocano, Tagalog and Pangasinan, the book opened a window on to a shadowed corner of American life, but refused to trade on trauma ('the gooey heart-porn of the ethnographic', Castillo calls it in her essay collection, How To Read Now). Instead, it honoured quiet, quotidian expressions of community and survival. But where that first novel could lean into self-seriousness, weighed down by the familiar solemnities of the immigrant story, Moderation has more fun within the genre – even if of a masochistic kind ('Parents worked all the time … Never been on vacation with my family,' Girlie says at one point. 'Never been to Disneyland either'). The book's twinned look at labour and immigration all but guarantees comparisons to Ling Ma's 2018 novel, Severance. But Girlie, unlike the Chinese-born protagonist of the latter work, is not haunted by memories of a distant homeland; her only longing is for her childhood home in Milpitas, lost in the 2008 market crash. The books' true kinship may lie in the fact that they both unfold against a backdrop of collapse: where Ma imagined a fungal pandemic, Castillo envisions a looming digital end time. Playground's journey, Girlie learns, began with a keen interest in the therapeutic space. The need for funding then led it to merge with L'Olifant, a French theme park company showcasing 'French history to the French'. Now, with Reeden as a shared parent, the two are poised to transform the worlds of entertainment and healthcare – at least in theory. Castillo cannily frames VR's healing power – from treating PTSD and phobias to providing pain relief and easing suicidal thoughts – within a darker tale of its co-option for profit, control and surveillance. Castillo is interested in the overlap between rightwing politics, tech culture and historiography. L'Olifant is modelled after historical French theme park company Puy du Fou, created by Philippe de Villiers, who is known for his Catholic, Eurosceptic and national sovereignty politics, and, in 2022, for backing the far-right candidate Éric Zemmour. Like Puy du Fou, L'Olifant is on a mission to make history 'fun' and 'exciting', even if it means ideologically rewriting it. As the story unfolds, and therapeutic ideals, revisionist ambitions and corporate greed converge, Castillo has potent themes to work with: censorship, digital feudalism, the exploitation of biometric data for propaganda purposes, and the disturbing trade-off between principle and progress. Disappointingly, she seems more content to skim surfaces than probe depths. Her narratorial tactic of choice is to tell and tell – through flat expositional dialogue, but also the lazy shorthand of news headlines ('PLAYGROUND'S NEW VIRTUAL REALITY INITIATIVE: FAR-OUT FANTASY OR FAR-RIGHT NIGHTMARE?') – never showing, never dramatising. The characters, as a result, can feel like bystanders, idling on the tale's margins rather than actively inhabiting its centre. Girlie and William are interesting in their own right, but together, not exactly a match you'd ship. This is because for pages on end, the supposed romance between the pair lies dormant, only for it to comically whip into life in sudden bursts of passion. The novel tries to straddle too many worlds at once – thriller, dystopia, second-generation immigrant account, love story – but commits wholeheartedly to none. The result is a narrative that feels more scattered than layered. But Moderation is not without merits. Castillo is a writer of razor-sharp acuity who takes seriously the sinister instrumentalisation of storytelling, in a world increasingly veering right. As a novel of ideas, Moderation contains terror enough to keep you reading, and looking for signs of the nightmare its author has taken the time to document. Sign up to Bookmarks Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you after newsletter promotion Moderation by Elaine Castillo is published by Atlantic (£17.99). To support the Guardian order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
