Sloan Foundation, now in its twenty-fourth year. The festival is made possible through the alliance between The Ensemble Studio Theatre and The Alfred P. You can learn more about our current Covid policies and protocols here. Most of the readings are open to the public for free but reservations are required. The 2022 EST/Sloan First Light Festival runs from April 7 through May 24 and features in-person readings of five new plays. I always feel like I’m not doing enough, but answering this question made me realize I guess I am working. I finished a new screenplay and the band just finished a new double album. There are discussions about doing workshops of The Moderate and this new neurotechnology play The Conquered coming up next season potentially. I have a commission that I need to finish this summer from Kane Rep that play is set in the 1990s and follows two college students and how the decision by one of them to have an abortion impacts their friendship. Big news is coming about a narrative podcast that I wrote called Vapor Trail, but I can’t share that yet sadly. I don’t use Facebook anymore, but I use Instagram, so it’s not exactly like I’m taking any big stand against the Metaverse.Īt the end of the month, I’m going to Flint Rep to work on a new play about a throuple called Danger and Opportunity. How active are you on social media? Which platforms? They should have job stability and resources for when this work takes a toll, like access to free therapy, and never be penalized for taking mental health breaks when they are needed. They should have a union like EMS workers. What they do is hard work, and they should be compensated fairly. But many of these workers see things that would traumatize any of us. And as one of my interviewees told me, looking at naked pics or consensual porn isn’t necessarily a terrible way to earn a living. There will never be an AI intelligent enough to take the place of moderators. What do you think the responsibilities of a company should be for the people who do content moderation for them? Is there a way to do it differently? I don’t think that would be ethical for an audience given some of the material in the play. You might read or hear a description of the content, or see a blurred out version of it, but never ever see the actual thing. How that will work in production is something director Steve Cosson and I will explore in our next stage of development. The audience will hear what Frank hears, but never see what he sees. Will the audience hear what he sees? Did you ever consider actually showing what he sees? Your stage directions have the audience seeing descriptions of what he sees without actually showing what he sees. Your play concerns the impact moderating content on an unnamed social media platform has on your main character, Frank. Ultimately, the play is fictional, but draws from those interviews. But there were things that were so upsetting that I really grappled with what to include. All of that influenced the writing of my play. All these interviews took place on Zoom or the phone, but I was able to get moderators to open up to me in surprising ways. Gray, and from there I was able to get into touch with people working as moderators. I spent 2020 interviewing scholars of internet culture like Sarah, Andrew Marantz and Mary L. What kind of research did you do in order to write THE MODERATE? Did you interview any content moderators? As the story of Frank started to come into focus, I applied for the EST/Sloan Project commission in 2020 and then in the midst of all the devastation, I got the good news that I got the commission, so I could immerse myself in writing something new and stop doomscrolling. Roberts and seeing the documentary The Cleaners. I had been thinking about internet content moderators as an interesting story for a new play after reading Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media by Sarah T. But let’s have the playwright tell us more. But what does what they see do to the watchers? On Monday, April EST/Sloan First Light Festival hosts the first public reading of THE MODERATE, the extensively researched and chilling new play by Ken Urban about the daily life of a social media content moderator and how what he sees and the decisions he makes affects his mental health, his family life, and his friendships. To keep violent and disturbing content off their platforms, social media companies need humans to decide what stays and what goes.
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