Moderation by Elaine Castillo is the real romance in the virtual workplace, a story about the possible future of live.

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 after getting a promotion. Now thanks to the parent company Paragon’s purchase of Fairground- the world’s preeminent virtual reality content provider- 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.

In another world, girlie Delmundo would be a detective or a cyber analyst for a three-letter agency. At least, the protagonist of Elaine Castillo’s Moderation might be able to help the people in the appalling videos she is employed to watch. Instead she is a content moderator for a tech giant, playing virtual whack-a-mole to protect corporate interests above those of their users.

In her final interview for the job, she must watch and justify the removal of a video in which a young girl with bruises on her shoulders is made to fellate an older man. Asked by a manager how she knows the girl is underage, ,Girlie points to the socks in the corner of the screen, featuring a protagonist form the film Frozen and are “a girl’s size three or four”.

Moderation is a tale of corporate intrigue, with Girlie’s content moderator uncovering big tech’s dark secrets. Love is eternal and tech fads are doomed to the duration of a high-school relationship. Girlie’ story is real swamped by the virtual.

Reeden, the social media company, being ruinously wealthy, has recently acquired Playground, a virtual reality gaming platform whose partnership with a French theme-park conglomerate has allowed it to create vast immersive spectacles at the cutting edge of technology -Roman gladiatorial contests, and Viking raids. 

Offered a new job moderating these spaces in real time, Girlie soon discovers that in the world of VR, the abuse committed via avatars are ten times worse what it is in internet. “The rule of thumb in VR content moderation was, if anyone remotely femme was in the room, someone was going to find a creative way to assault her. If there was a hole, a face, a girl, all three, what was the difference; someone was going to try to fuck it”.

Despite the isolation that virtual reality requires from colleagues, friends, and family, the unbelievable perks of her new job mean she can solve a lot of her family problems with money and mobility. She doesn’t have to think about the childhood home they lost back in the Bay Area, or history at all- she can just pay any debts that come due. But 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 loved, she’ll learn that history might be impossible to moderate and the future utterly impossible to control or predict.

Girlie lives and works in Las Vegas, a young woman to cleanse the virtual world of its sins than in the real-world epitome of tasteless excess.

Very quickly the real world and the virtual begin to merge for Girlie. As part of her therapeutic offset sessions, designed to lessen the psychological effects of content moderation, she takes swimming lessons. Her playground avatar knows how to swim, but she does not, so what result is a bizarre exercise in “remembering that she could do something she knew she couldn’t do”.

Moderation by Elaine Castillo, Atlantic Books £17.99, Viking £29, 320 pages.