Hanna Bervoet’s novel “This post has been removed” tells of the moral abysses of the digital community.
Attempted suicide, abuse, rape, beheading. The internet is full of pictures and videos that, apart from a few sick freaks, no one wants to see. Content moderators rate and sweep them off the platform if they fall through the cracks, a kind of digital garbage disposal. There are thousands of these people around the world reviewing reported posts. Kayleigh is one of them. She is the protagonist in the novel This Post Has Been Removed by Dutch writer, screenwriter and columnist Hanna Bervoets.
Kayleigh is young and broke, so she takes the job at Hexa. She watches and evaluates clips in unison: 500 a day, time is stopped when she goes to the toilet. Nothing may be taken into the workroom, nothing carried out, everything that is seen there stays there. That’s how it’s meant to be.
For Kayleigh, the new job seems far less dramatic than her previous one at the call center – she had to deal with dissatisfied customers. With Hexa, on the other hand: “Incredibly relaxing that nobody is yelling at me here”. Well, Kayleigh is in a separation phase at the time and not quite herself, as she says in retrospect.
As if in her sleep, she can recite the guidelines she applies to the “tickets,” the reported posts. When is a video left standing? “Not when blood is visible. On the other hand, if the situation is clearly comical. Not when sadism is involved. However, even if what is shown has an educational value”. Or: “A naked child may only be shown if the photo has news value, except for pictures from a concentration camp: photos of unclothed underage Holocaust victims are prohibited.” The calmness with which Kayleigh approaches the matter is disturbing. And slowly it dawns: your cool way can only be a farce, a protective shield, a suppression mechanism. Because obviously Kayleigh is in therapy after her hexa episode.
The book:
Hanna Bervoets: This post has been removed. Novel. Ad Dutch v. Rainer Kersten. Hanser 2022. 112 pages, 20 euros
The first-person narrator asserts that she is not a victim. She knew what she was doing when she started the job. She tells a lawyer in retrospect what happened at Hexa: With the blinded perspective of the protagonist, the reader looks into a more than toxic world of work, in which employees slowly go crazy, endure everyday life only in ecstasy and creeping into the world of conspiracy narratives slip. Long-term consequences: Colleagues are depressed, they only go to bed with electric shockers out of paranoia, they wince in the supermarket if someone stands behind them. And Kayleigh? Floating on cloud nine.
She has a crush on a colleague: Sigrid, five years older, slim and beautiful. The relationship seems promising, but then the dreadful pictures on the Internet rain down on private and love life: Removed from the Internet does not mean deleted from real life – the human hard drive doesn’t work that easily.
Therapy with Gojibeeren
Sigrid, probably severely traumatized, tries to treat himself with a mixture of goji berries, chia seeds and alcohol. Kayleigh doesn’t ask any more questions. Then bad news at work: Pornography and spam are now being routed directly to a new center in India. Only Violence, Abuse and Threats are still rated on the hexa screens – the hard tickets. The score goes down, the pressure goes up.
Soon Sigrid collapses – it is the turning point of the story. Now Kayleigh has to realize that the matter is getting too much for her too? That something can’t be right with their psyche, their judgment? But no, only a shock situation can shake her awake and make her realize the extent of the abyss she has long since fallen into. The end comes abruptly – perhaps a little too abruptly. However, the fast cut at least makes the misery visible in cross-section.
On the previous 105 pages, Hanna Bervoets has compressed a psychologically complex story to its essence at a sporty narrative pace, while dragging an ethically questionable aspect of the digital community in front of the screen. Who decides what is the “norm” on the internet? What gets stuck in the filter? Images that dull, that shift moral concepts, turn users into emotional zombies – this is certainly not just Kayleigh’s problem, but possibly the trauma of an entire generation of digital natives.
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