There is an election going on to choose our community moderators, replacing the current moderators who were appointed by Stack Exchange by moderators chosen by the community. (The current moderators can run in the election, just like any other user, if they wish to continue.)
It's now 5½ days in the 7-day nomination period, and… nobody is putting themselves forward. Most sites get multiple nominations in the first few hours after they open; in a few hours we'll break the record for slowest nomination). This is a bit worrying — as a participant here, I am sure that Emacs Stack Exchange is a healthy community, but lack of interest in moderatorship is generally considered a sign a community that lacks motivated participants.
Moderators are accorded the highest level of privileges. They handle those situations that cannot be handled by the broad community. For more information, see A Theory of Moderation.
On a site like this, I expect a moderator's job to take a few minutes per day, mostly handling flags (about 1 per day on average), responding to support requests on meta, settling the occasional dispute. Moderatorship is a responsibility, because moderators have access to some extra tools and have a moral status as behavior models and leaders of sorts, but on this site, it isn't a very time-intensive job.
So why aren't you volunteering?
An extra message from Grace Note, a Community Manager:
I was originally going to post an announcement this morning when I logged in, but with Gilles's post here, that seems unnecessary. I do want to stress the importance of running, though! We need leadership to come from within this community, the election can't move forward unless people want to take on the responsibility.
The nomination phase is scheduled to end in a bit under 6 hours - however, if there are not at least 4 candidates available by then, which is one more than the number of seats to be filled, the nomination phase will be extended by another 7 days to allow for more candidates.