Early one morning a new job came up. Not through the normal channels. They had a chatroom for everyone working online and by themselves. It was like a water-cooler. They were a small part of 4chan. They shared hacks and codes and keysets. The Tamagotchi phone had woken her up at 3am and she’d left the notebook by her desktop. She’d turned on the screen for some light just as the message about the job arrived in the chatroom. Someone had written that there was a video-sharing platform which needed moderators – lots of moderators. Someone else replied to say that they were working there, and people needed to know there was some terrible stuff. They wrote it in a way that said they wanted people to know they were working with the terrible stuff and were cool with it. They wanted people to know they were tough and progressive and dead enough inside that they could watch anything. Like most of the things people wrote in the chatrooms, it was an act of swagger. That, or the person was trying to protect the work they had with the video-sharing platform. While the company didn’t mind how many people they had moderating – more got done – sometimes the work got crowded and there was less for the individual moderators to do. Either way, he – and Margaret was sure it was a man – was an idiot. Any hint of explicit or disturbing content meant more money. Much more money. There was an email address for the video-sharing platform.

Margaret stopped for a second and thought about the most terrible thing she could imagine being videoed and shared, and then she imagined a more terrible thing. Over the last couple of weeks, she’d realised what she wanted was more money. Things came and went without any reason or meaning – she had no control over her world. No matter what she did, things would come, and things would go. But money meant something tangible and quantitative. Things had a value and so did her time. Money was a way to convert her time into things. More money meant more things. Then she could control what turned up and what disappeared. The only way to get more money was to increase her hourly rate, because the hours in the day were fixed. This job could be it. But, also, this was the sort of thing that ruined people’s lives.

She’d seen the other parts of 4chan – the places that held the worst. This was the sort of thing that desensitised you to a point you couldn’t operate in the world. They’d said the same thing about video games. And probably rock ’n’ roll.