Mark, My Words: will bots ruin the new age of the streaming superfan?
(WorldNews Music)

You smelt them before you saw them. The kind of excited dampness you only get from spending your sixth night in a row camped outside a variety of regional venues wearing the same pasty-encrusted merch and keeping that promise to never wash the hand your hero shook during their 2016 tour of Outer Mongolia. They were the superfans, a far different breed than the spoilt, dolled-up, VIP ticketed meet-and-greeters who merely allow their parents to slip further into the Wonga abyss to get their Ariana Grande selfie. The superfans considered fandom a form of military training, their own personal 1917. Only by putting themselves through the...