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?