Every day, vast amounts of online content gets filtered, labeled, downranked, removed, or left up.Those decisions shape what we see, what spreads, and who gets harmed. Let’s look at what it means to “keep the internet safe” at scale: the ethical tradeoffs behind moderation policies, the limits of automation, how bias and context slip into supposedly “neutral” rules, and what real accountability could look like when platforms move fast and consequences occur unevenly. Who makes these calls, what gets missed, and what would a better system require?

The Moderate asks what it takes to keep the internet “safe,” and what that work does to the people doing it. This talkback goes inside the making of a production that treats digital life as a stage language. Projections, Zoom, and FaceTime are built into the storytelling, shifting their scale, location, and presence in real time as performers move through space. How do live and mediated performance get choreographed together, how does sound and light help to create the feeling of always being clocked-in to our digital realm, and how does the production handle the unsettling reality of what moderators are asked to witness? This conversation will deconstruct these questions, and more.

What does it take to carry a heavy story seven shows a week, and still keep it truthful, safe, and alive? Our signature Artists and Audiences conversation brings the cast together with the audience for a look at the making of The Moderate from the inside out: the work of a short rehearsal schedule, the choices that shape the performances, and the realities of staging a show with not just difficult material, but a complex, multimedia, hybridized theater piece.

Mary L. Gray has spent years interviewing the people who keep the internet usable: content moderators, data labelers, and contract workers whose labor sits beneath the platforms we scroll every day. In her research, she pushes back on the assumption that the work is inherently traumatizing. The harder question, she argues, is not what workers see, but how they are supported, paid, and protected.

Now, in conversation with playwright Ken Urban, whose research for The Moderate included interviewing Gray herself, the two return to the tension at the heart of the play: What does it mean to represent this labor onstage? Where does storytelling clarify the stakes, and where does it risk reinforcing the very myths Gray challenges? As belief in algorithmic solutions grows, and as companies continue to treat moderation as a technical problem, what does it take to acknowledge the human systems that make digital life possible?