Recoding the Bot: ARMY and Digital Transgression Available to Purchase

Andrea L. Acosta’s contribution, “Recoding the Bot: ARMY and Digital Transgression,” reflects on the equivalencies that are often made between the online “bot” and ARMY, usually to discredit BTS’s popularity as the result of mechanistic, horde behavior. Parsing the deeply racialized figure of the “bot” illuminates the very human investments behind digital strategies of resistance and anti-surveillance that have sparked solidarities with Black Lives Matter and anti-fascist movements. Rather than refuting or rejecting the bot label, she is interested in what the metaphor of the bot—and the idea of a human passing for one—can offer when understood as a deliberate strategy for online organization and behavior. Fans harness bot behavior to manipulate algorithms to their own ends: achieving higher YouTube views or better music chart positions, censoring detractors—even facilitating political protest.