K-Pop Stans And Hackers Are Sabotaging Cops With Music Bombs
Given the number of protesters and journalists that have been shot in the face, the police aren't taking kindly to the current BlackLivesMatter protests, violently suppressing activists on trumped-up accounts of looting and rioting taking over the mostly peaceful protests. But if they're so keen on people only calmly resisting their totalitarianism, what's more chill than fighting the power by dropping your favorite tracks?
While not everyone can go to the streets to show their disgust with the wanton killing of George Floyd by officer Derek Chauvin, online allies have found ingenious ways of supporting the brave protesters on the ground in their fight against the police. And a surprising non-zero number of these tactics involve flooding the cops with music bombs to reduce the chance of them catching protesters. This is how the Chicago PD police scanners were taken over by hackers -- some claim none other than Anonymous themselves -- who decided to do some DJ'ing. So, instead of hearing each other, police officers on coms were treated to non-stop loops of NWA's "Fuck The Police" and Tay Zonday's "Chocolate Rain," an appropriate reminder that this internet artifact is, in fact, a polemic about racial relations in America that just happens to mention the words "chocolate" and "rain" roughly 6,000 times.
But using deep internet cuts as the soundtrack of the revolution is also the stratagem of the most fearsome army of zealots to ever roam social media: K-Pop stans. Over the weekend, Dallas PD launched its iWatch Dallas app where patriots/bootlicking snitches can rat on protesters not complying with whatever random rules the police feel like putting on them. In response, K-pop stan Twitter mobilized its idol-worshippers to overload the app by spamming fancams, those voyeuristic fan videos of their favorite idols in concert that stans tend to post absolutely everywhere for no good reason -- only this time used as a force of good.
This isn't even the first time that a police state has had to fear K-Pop stans as subversive elements eroding their iron rule. The Chilean government, which has been putting boots on protesters' necks before it was fascist fashionable, published a report in 2019 positing that K-Pop fans were, in part, responsible for inciting the Chilean protests. The Interior Ministry singled out K-Pop fans fanning the flames of revolution by using social media to manipulate young protesters, highlight human rights violations and point at the Chilean government for suppressing journalists and social media use. I didn't know all of that could be interpreted from someone posting 20 seconds of a BTS dance routine. Then again, those are very elaborate.
For more weird tangents and some very discreet Lee Tae-min stanning, do follow Cedric on Twitter.
Top Image: Wikimedia Commons/Min Kyung-bin, Tay Zonday
