For readers of Leila Slimani’s The Perfect Nanny or Ling Ma’s Severance: a tight, propulsive, chilling novel by a rising international star about a group of young colleagues working as social media content monitors—reviewers of violent or illegal videos for an unnamed megacorporation—who convince themselves they’re in control . . . until the violence strikes closer to home.
Kayleigh needs money. That’s why she takes a job as a content moderator for a social media platform whose name she isn’t allowed to mention. Her job: reviewing offensive videos and pictures, rants and conspiracy theories, and deciding which need to be removed. It’s grueling work. Kayleigh and her colleagues spend all day watching horrors and hate on their screens, evaluating them with the platform’s ever-changing terms of service while a supervisor sits behind them, timing and scoring their assessments. Yet Kayleigh finds a group of friends, even a new love—and, somehow, the job starts to feel okay.
But when her colleagues begin to break down; when Sigrid, her new girlfriend, grows increasingly distant and fragile; when her friends start espousing the very conspiracy theories they’re meant to be evaluating; Kayleigh begins to wonder if the job may be too much for them. She’s still totally fine, though—or is she?
I waited a long while to read this one after finding a recommendation and then finding I had to wait… actual months before reading it. It’s like. 90 pages. Do you know how many people that is?!
In any case, it’s a fairly quick read. Like I said last novella, my attention span is shot so it took me 2 sittings to get it together and finish.
It doesn’t hide what it is supposed to depict: exposure, numbing to such things, and then finally engaging in acts that seem so much less… traumatic, from the character’s point of view. You watch people fall into the wormholes of things that they are exposed to over and over and over, you find that your perspective shifts with the character, and you find that the title references more than the window dressing.
Kayleigh’s story is written like a letter, explaining that she’s kind of really fucked up and not anywhere near ready to face the culmination of her own exposure to all of this shit. As you progress, you think, woah, well, you have a point.
You have a point…
You have… a point, but…
And the mirroring of a generous act with an act taken too far, the levels of sexual escapades that grow more and more brazen, the turning of perspectives when Kayleigh gets to the final moments with Sigrid.
I really liked this story, as it shows that humans, even well-meaning ones, are so very susceptible to things they see online if they are just blasted, over and over and over— combine that with a shitty work environment, controlling company, a struggle to make ends meet…
