Content moderation is unending warfare: so says the woman’s boss, Shady Dave. As soon as you’ve torn through one set of troops, another is ready to take their place, and thus the battle advances onward, wave after wave, ad infinitum. If it were possible to add up the number of streaming hours in existence, the sum would probably exceed the age of the universe. That’s what Shady Dave tells the newbies at orientation. Basically, the woman had better stop procrastinating over the rapist’s digital persona and return to the trenches. She minimizes her browser and signs into the screening panel—eerily close, she often thinks, to screaming panel. While it loads, the opening progress bar reminds her what she should be demolishing: hate speech, gore, torture, pornography both adult and child, horrific traffic accidents, executions carried out by terrorists. The woman has been at this job long enough that she not only remembers time in the usual way, by seasons and holidays, but also by what she was most traumatized to delete.

In the employee handbook, the woman’s position is officially listed as “digital media curator,” as if she were an assistant at an art gallery or the graphic designer for a winery. Indeed, she has become a veritable sommelier of beheadings. Unofficially, the woman and her cohorts have been dubbed “ninjas” because they kill content without being heard or seen. She moves into the violation column of her screaming panel a homeless panhandling veteran, which the woman knows he is because his sign says HOMELESS VETERAN, PLEASE HELP, as he’s crushed by a drunk driver speeding down the highway, and an extreme close-up of masturbation with a Batman figurine. Another coworker proclaims, catching a glimpse, “To the Batcave!” Shady Dave makes his signature big-brain-on-tech-campus entrance.

“Hello, my pretty little firewalls,” he says, turning on a dusty wall-mounted screen upon which someone has traced a dick. “I bring you another chapter in our cherished national pastime, fun with guns.” He ponders that statement for a second and adds, “Trigger warning.” While the clip of the shooting buffers, the outline of the dust dick glows like a phallic halo. An attractive blond local news reporter with an attractive reporter haircut is interviewing a stately older lady in a blazer, some sort of authority figure, about a local folk music festival when a hand holding a gun is raised—it becomes obvious that it’s the shooter filming this, which is why it’s so shaky—takes aim at the attractive reporter, and fires, then fires at the stately older lady, then at the cameraman. The older lady collapses. The reporter runs. The cameraman drops the camera. There’s blood. It’s revealed that the shooter is a disgruntled colleague who was let go from the station and uploaded this to social media.

“This is an American tragedy,” Shady Dave says. “I don’t want people to remember it tomorrow. Are there any questions?”

“Yeah,” someone replies. “I want to know when you’re going to get us eligible for full employee benefits and not contractor benefits.”