Short and bleak psychological horror. Probably could stand to have a content warning. ( )

gosh this was good! i finished it and was like "wait, was that?" but then i went back and reread the first few pages. the book is an exploration into how a job as a content moderator at company called Hexa has messed the main character's, Kayleigh's, sense of right and wrong, only being able to think within the "guidelines" of Hexa and how she's applying those rules to her own life. overall, i found this less of a commentary on the social media aspect itself and more on the ways how it's pretty inhumane to ask people to moderate messed up things day in and day out; it's shifting their morals and their own sense of being. i saw a lot of reviews talking about how it has a long list of trigger warnings and i think that sets up a lot of people for disappointment on what the book is really about. it's not chronicling what Kayleigh has seen, it's chronicling how what she's seen has f*cked her up. it is truly an interesting book and i think a lot of the negative reviews come from what people expect the book to be about and then being disappointed it's not just a list of made up, f*cked up things that could have possibly been posted online. it's psychological and i liked how it homed in on this one person's experience with content moderation. the author does state at the end that the book is fiction, but any similarities to real life are "not accidental," and lists articles and documentaries about this same topic that inspired this book and her research into it. much much to think about!! ( )

So, I used to watch gore. A lot of it. It was an addiction: part of the DNA of my PTSD. I needed a way to numb myself from the constant, white, electric pain within and around myself. It took a year or so, but I eventually found that release through other things. (Mainly just looking at pictures of scary bugs. Not joking.)

This book is a harrowing and uncomfortable look at what the internet has allowed us to become privy to. In another century, I would not have had that release. I would have probably drunk and hurt myself far worse—two terrible things for the body that I can't pretend would have necessarily been better than watching suicides on loop. But it makes you think, doesn't it?

Following a woman working at a content moderation center, this book charts the mental disintegration of being at the frontlines of this work, and how the internet poisons and hardens the worst of us. It's provocative and funny and driving in a way that lends itself to a one-sit read, and finishing that last page leaves you feeling so, so icky. It was bold. I liked that.

Bervoets has a contemporary and loose style to her writing that makes the book terribly easy to rip through in one sitting. The book's strength is in its short length and its weakness is in the relatively strict narrative reality it keeps. This latter aspect makes sense: the author wants to highlight the unreliable narrator and remind us that we can all be privy to massive blindspots in our world from the slick constant content of social media. But. Certain aspects of the main character (namely, her reticence at sharing emotions from the beginning until the end) are ultimately placed without greater meaning, and the lack of experimentation of prose left me feeling as if I'd read a good book but not a great book, you know? But I still really enjoyed this and found it questioning all the right parts of a strange, horrifying frontier of the internet age. ( )

Started out better than it ended. There was barely any talk about her job, which was what the description said the book would be about. Instead it was focused on her relationship, which wasn’t even that frightening. Still don’t know why there’s a lawsuit or what she said in the video, i have my guesses of course. ( )

3 stars
very short, the ending left me shocked not for actual content but because i wasn’t paying attention and expected at least 3 more chapters. interesting take on the ways that viewing graphic/disturbing content on a daily basis can alter our own perceptions and understanding of what is normal. i think it could have been more developed and gone further into how that affected the mc, but overall i liked it!

characters: 3
plot: 2.5
writing: 3 ( )