Elaine Castillo’s second novel Moderation follows a woman nicknamed Girlie Delmundo (we never learn her real name), who works as a content moderator for the fictional social media company Reeden, based in Las Vegas. Girlie self-identifies as a responsible, driven eldest daughter, a young woman who lives with and helps support her extended Filipino-American family.
When she is promoted to work in her company’s virtual reality space called Playground, she develops a crush on her new boss, William Cheung. Girlie’s desire for William conflicts with her cool, by the rules, mode of moving through the world. As Girlie learns more about William, and about Playground itself, she also begins to confront her own trauma and her family’s dependence on her financially.
Moderation is a novel about tech and about love, but it is also a novel about what it means to be part of the Filipino-American community, and about how debt and labor shape American life.
I talked with Castillo over email about content moderation, about repressed, eldest sibling Earth sign fiction, and about what it means to take on the topics of labor and personal trauma in American life. This interview has been edited for clarity and concision.
The Rumpus: Let’s start at the very beginning with the title. The theme of “moderation” works on many levels throughout Girlie’s story. On a literal level, it’s her job to moderate online and virtual spaces, but there’s also a sense in which Girlie’s whole existence is an act of moderating herself and her surroundings. Can you talk about the character and why that mode of being is so important for her?
Elaine Castillo: I’ve joked in interviews before that Moderation is the third and final installment in my “hardass trilogy”—that a certain spiky, combative, martially-defensive narrative voice has been a throughline in my work, from the protagonist in my first novel, to the critical voice in my essay collection How to Read Now (Viking, 2022), now culminating in the voice of Girlie.
The novel points out that Girlie’s been a moderator for over ten years by the time the novel begins, which is unheard of, given the high turnover at this extremely punitive job. So what type of person would have the particular combination of extreme professional competence and deliberate emotional hardness, to be able to do that work for so long?
One of the earliest articles in my research was Adrien Chen’s 2014 Wired article about content moderation, which I credited in the acknowledgments, and which identifies how much of the labor of content moderation was done by Filipino laborers. That landscape has evolved since I first read that article; Karen Hao’s brilliant Empire of AI talks about how content moderation in AI is now done in places like Kenya, for example.
It became clear to me that there was a connection between the racialized labor of content moderation, and other forms of racialized labor in my family and within the Filipino diaspora generally: my mom’s work as a nurse, my father’s work as a security guard at a Silicon Valley computer chip company, my aunts’ work as cleaners and cooks.
Moderation, as a way of being in the world, is very familiar to me as an eldest daughter growing up in an Asian immigrant family: a certain way of modulating yourself in the world to conform to the many obligations placed upon you—who you have to be to your family, your community, your workplace.
I joked at an event recently that I was tired of messy girl fiction, adrift anxious millenial fiction, that it was all younger sibling water sign propaganda—that we needed more repressed, competent, parentified eldest sibling, Earth sign fiction. (In a surprise to no one: I’m a parentified Virgo eldest sibling.) This is just my contribution to the genre.
Rumpus: Girlie is a working person who is deeply familiar with debt and the way in which money can provide or limit possibilities. I’m interested in hearing more about why it was important to you to focus on work and workers for this book, and how you see the book in terms of the genre of the workplace novel.
Castillo: Early on, when I was describing what I was writing to someone, they asked me, kind of teasingly: “Oh, is this your tech novel?” I never actually considered myself as writing a tech novel—but I did think I was writing a novel about labor. About labor as a racialized force, like I mentioned earlier, about how working-class labor not only shapes and upholds an industry like tech, but also a community like Silicon Valley, where I grew up raised by people who were always working on the periphery of these industrial centers.
I’m also interested in how the material and emotional reality of that labor informs and deforms communities: how things like love, vulnerability, connection and care are affected—and warped—by the realities of affective, working-class labor. Some of the emotional toughness, repression, and frankly, abuse, that I experienced within my community and extended family networks was absolutely connected to how utterly depleted and precarious everyone was at their respective jobs, and how those jobs were connected to larger forces around capitalism, and its reliance on a supply of immigrant labor.
One of my favorite novels, which I’ve found myself talking about a lot on this tour, is Émile Zola’s Germinal, which is famously about a mining community in France, and their efforts to organize a strike, and it’s known for its harrowing portrayal of class exploitation in the post-Industrial Revolution world. It’s certainly thought of as a novel of labor. It also feels to me like one of the early tech novels: a novel about how a certain kind of tech industry, in this case the mining industry, is transforming the societal relations of the people affected by that industry.
And one of my favorite TV shows of all time was Star Trek: The Next Generation. And Star Trek, for all its world-building, its philosophy, its far-reaching vision—is ultimately a workplace narrative! It’s not just about “how do we live together,” but “how do we actually work together.”
I didn’t want to write about the big tech bosses any more than was necessary to inform the world I was writing about: the illuminated emotional lives of the tech world’s least powerful laborers, and the internal struggles of the people who reach middle management, like William, and like Girlie when she gets her promotion.
But I think the most important reason for this focus on a moderator was that I knew that while I was writing about the dystopian nature of tech and labor, I didn’t want to produce another tech dystopia. We’re living that; we’re familiar enough with it. Every story and article I read about moderators mostly casts them as invisible exploited laborers within a grimdark story about tech and capitalism. But one of the jobs of fiction is to write characters: to not reduce people to the worst story ever told about them.
Rumpus: The setting of Las Vegas acts as a foil to the desperation of Girlie’s family, but also as a vibrant focal point for her multicultural community. How did you arrive at Las Vegas as the setting for Reeden’s headquarters?
Castillo: Well, I knew that the main character’s family would have had to leave the Bay Area, post 2008. The members of my own family who had to leave the Bay Area around that time all moved to Las Vegas, where they’d “bought” houses before the market crash—so there was a sense of personal history there, in that I knew precisely which communities had left the Bay Area in financial ruin, and where they set up their new, precarious lives.
The other reason is, of course, as Girlie states in the novel: “Las Vegas is very virtual reality-coded.” For a novel that’s about being a laborer in virtual reality worlds, it’s funny that Girlie herself already lives as a laborer in a kind of virtual reality world.
But as for why I didn’t set the book in the Bay Area, the more expected location: as a person born and raised in Silicon Valley, who was also lucky enough to have lived in England for nearly a decade, I know that the dream logic of Silicon Valley is no longer limited to the Bay Area. And not just because companies are uprooting in search of more permissible tax havens!
But: because that industry, and its robber barons’ devouring vision of the world, has turned that appetite on everywhere else. To write about tech, we should write about Vegas, we should write about virtual reality, we should write about the Philippines (where Cambridge Analytica rehearsed dismantling our democracy), we should write about Kenya (where content moderation in AI has gone), we should write about Chile, where massive data centers are being built, and where an equally massive resistance by its mainly Indigenous communities are fighting the exploitation of their land and resources to serve the tech behemoths of the modern world.
Rumpus: William’s German Shepherd Mona helps Girlie interact with William in both the real and virtual worlds in the story. I know that you recently said goodbye to a beloved dog named Xena. Was Mona modeled off Xena, and in what ways was creating a non-human character challenging?
Castillo: Mona was definitely modeled off Xena, although she’s less a one-to-one representation of Xena herself, than a representation of my determination to never again write a book without dogs!
Adopting Xena transformed my entire way of being in the world. When I was procrastinating on writing this novel, I wrote a hundred-page essay for Everand and Roxane Gay on dog rescue, dog training, and the history of German shepherds. So it was natural to want to write about dogs in this book. I think the most challenging bit was not wanting to shoehorn her into every scene.
Rumpus: This may be the first novel that deals with therapy using virtual reality in a realistic way. How did that field become part of this story?
Castillo: Once I realized I was writing about tech, virtual reality, and the appropriation of technology by the far right, I knew I had to deepen my understanding of what those innovations are actually doing. And as someone who grew up with the progressive vision of Star Trek, I’m never going to entirely surrender to technophobia; it was important to me that Moderation not offer your regularly scheduled capitalist hellscape and tech dystopia.
Like anyone else, I’m painfully aware of the coalescing layers of harm that come with each evolution in the tech industry, but I also wanted to contend with technology’s nodes of seduction, connection, comfort and pleasure. I wanted to sit with the question of how we got here in the first place—how we ourselves become entangled, captured, complicit.
To that end, the subject of virtual reality therapy turned out to be the perfect site in which to explore these questions. That therapy is real, the science of it very much exists, and Brennan Spiegel’s book Vrx: How Virtual Therapeutics Will Revolutionize Medicine was a huge influence on those sections of the novel.
Rumpus: Girlie often notices and comments on luxury jewelry and accessories. She notices William’s expensive watch right away when she meets him, and she gifts her cousin Maribel a pricey watch for her birthday. There is also a scene where Girlie’s mother shows off a purse that Girlie bought her to a group of family members. Why was it important for Girlie as a character to be focused on expensive, material things?
Castillo: There’s a dimension of the book that is very concerned with luxury objects, with material objects. Because Moderation is a book about debt, I wanted to write about how people get themselves in debt, and why—what financial ruin actually looks like. How the culturally particular compulsions around spending, flaunting, providing and saving face in this particular Asian community, all the things that are supposed to prove that one has “made it” in America, are also what curse the community to never truly build generational safety, let alone wealth. A lot of people think financial ruin looks like Dickensian destitution. But for many Americans, what it looks like is a never-ending credit card debt. Financial illiteracy can look very luxurious.
But the way American fiction describes material possessions, and depicts materialistic desires generally, often contains an implied critique. There’s often a Puritanical streak in this approach to luxury and greed, a tendency to assume that material plenitude and spiritual vacuity go hand in hand. And while Moderation isn’t entirely void of those judgments, I also wanted to push against them.
I didn’t want to simply reproduce the dichotomy between material beauty and moral good. I had to show that Girlie has also inherited the same compulsions around material objects—even if she claims to be self-aware about it. She’s not so unlike the mother she judges and enables in equal measure.
That’s also why it was important for me to write about Girlie’s own physical beauty, and her sharply-honed discernment about it. Physical beauty is a tricky thing to write about, and women blithely owning their own beauty isn’t always looked upon kindly by society. There’s usually a performative humility around the appearance of female protagonists in literature, an “aw shucks she doesn’t know she’s beautiful” kind of attitude.
Someone like Girlie doesn’t have time or patience for that kind of performance or false modesty. She’s aware of her beauty as she’s aware of the value of every commodity in her life.
Rumpus: How long did it take you to write the novel? What was your process like?
Castillo: I’d started writing the kernel of this novel in 2018, but it wasn’t a novel about content moderation yet, just a vaguely sci-fi story about futuristic therapies, formative harm, vaguely drawing from my love of X-Men, thinking about mutation and pandemics. Then a real pandemic happened, and I didn’t want to write a book about one! I ended up writing the collection of essays that became my second book, so there was a long pause.
When I came back to this book after publishing How to Read Now, I knew I wanted to write about content moderation within my diaspora. For a time, I really stalled on the book; I thought Moderation was going to be a direct sequel to America Is Not the Heart because I thought I had to explicitly show the trajectory between the 90s diasporic community I wrote about in AINTH, and where they end up, post-2008: fragmented, disconnected from each other, just muscling through.
And there was another challenge: I was going to write a love story. I knew that I didn’t want the exploitative nature of Girlie’s work to be the only story I told about her. But I had a problem––I’m not someone who reads or watches a lot of romance!
It was a challenge to bring to bear some of my natural genre attractions, my political and critical inclinations, and to have them be challenged by engaging with something like romance. To have my own preferences and prejudices about genres—and frankly, internalized misogyny around certain genres—challenged.
I also knew I was writing something thornier about community than I had in my first novel. Something I’d hinted at it in my first book, talked about it in an essay in my third book, and finally centered in my third book: a character who’d experienced formative harm, namely childhood sexual abuse at the hands of her community.
It meant writing community in a different way from AINTH, where the community really becomes a refuge for Hero, that novel’s protagonist. Moderation tells a different story; about people, namely daughters, who aren’t always safe within their communities, who are expected to remain loyal and in service to their people without always being protected, who are expected to uphold the silences of their community (because to speak out about an already marginalized community would be turning against your own). People who are often scapegoated as selfish class traitors if they do leave, or speak up, or try to hold people accountable.
Rumpus: Are there any authors you see as influences for this book?
Castillo: Well, my dad bought me my first William Gibson when I was about thirteen years old, in a Long’s Drugstore (back when they existed; back when you could buy fiction like William Gibson’s at the drugstore!). That was Idoru. And something I always connected to with Gibson’s fiction is that his protagonists were usually scrappy, lower-level laborers, hackers, people of negligible “world-historical” importance but who then get caught up in the web of larger forces, thrust into world historical events.
I studiously avoided re-reading any Gibson while I was writing Moderation, given that I knew that influence had probably lived in my subconscious for so long; same thing with Austen, another author I knew I was riffing on.
Consciously, I think I drew more on film and video games than literature, because virtual reality is such a visual, immersive landscape. The world-building it required from me drew from a different well. Particularly Asian film, like the repressed, thwarted romances of Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love, or Park Chan-wook’s Decision to Leave.
There’s a conversation where Girlie and William talk about Kurosawa films at a bar, and Girlie names Red Beard as her favorite Kurosawa—and it’s mine, too. The film is probably another influence on the book
There’s Yasujiro Ozu’s Late Spring, particularly lethal to responsible eldest daughters like Girlie. There’s the 1999 version of The Thomas Crown Affair, which is a great mixed-genre film about two properly adult people, with adult baggage, falling in love. The watch Pierce Brosnan wears in the film, the Jaeger LeCoultre Reverso, is the same watch William wears in Moderation.
All in all, I was thinking about deeply personal stories of repair and redemption, along with intensely erotic and repressed cinematic couples: wary damaged people finding each other, porcupines mating, intellectual equals in a cat and mouse, class conflict, couples on some type of social divide.
Rumpus: What are you working on now?
Castillo: Well, I thought I was alternating between two projects, a sci-fi project about cyborg labor and long marriage—or a big epic historical romp. But as often happens with me when I think I’m working on multiple projects, they might end up being the same project! So I think right now I’m mapping out a sci-fi series. It’s been too fun to play with genre; my Terminator 2, Star Trek-formed brain gets giddy when I’m doing this kind of envisioning, this type of world-building. I feel very happy to finally have been able to let my genre freak flag fly.
