The story takes the form of an online explainer to an event referred to as “Botgate,” created by Internet user MH-Sleuth and the Botkins, his community of investigators. Editing access has been heavily restricted to preserve the document’s integrity since Botgate is a scandal of interlocking hoaxes on the Internet. The goal of the explainer is to present a true and verified summary of Botgate. It begins with “The Post,” written by Bee, who has multiple Internet user accounts on social media. 

Bee starts The Post by sharing that they don’t know how to describe themself because they do not feel ownership over their name or appearance. They are Thai American and work in tech. Their father died by suicide early on in their life. Their mother, a stylish woman obsessed with appearances, became disappointed when neither Bee nor Bee’s brother Kant inherited her good looks. Most of their upbringing focused on learning affected behaviors that would improve their appearances. Bee doesn’t think much of their Thai identity; the siblings never learned to speak Thai and were often bullied for being Asian. Bee’s mother showed favoritism to Kant, who became a model son and class valedictorian, though he remained a victim of bullying all the way up to graduation.

When Bee is in third grade, they are inspired by an episode of The Simpsons to sell their gender to a schoolmate. This gets Bee in trouble with their school as they are misinterpreted to have sold their soul.

Determined to avoid being a victim of bullying, Bee resolves to find a way to become invisible in high school. Faced with the choices of assimilating, finding another minority group to appropriate from, or performing their Asian identity, Bee goes down a different route and becomes a goth. Bee makes two goth friends, Ryan (who goes by Leaf) and Melanie (who goes by Nothing). They nickname Bee “Tran” and make them perform songs about Asian identity. Bee goes along to elicit Leaf and Nothing’s approval. Leaf and Nothing ask Bee to teach them swear words in Thai, which gets Bee into trouble when the swear words start spreading around school. Bee realizes that Leaf and Nothing take advantage of them and decides to stop being their friend. When Bee’s mother grounds Bee, Bee retaliates by shaving their head.

When grounded, Bee uses the family computer, living socially without a body. Bee learns to prank players of the online game Everquest, making substantial profit out of their pranks and other deals. Bee’s mother tries to address their errant behavior by making them present as more feminine. This continues until Bee lies their way into Stanford University.

Bee moves into a co-op. At one of the co-op’s consensus meetings, Bee is asked to introduce themselves to their housemates. The co-op’s white sexual health adviser, Craig, asks Bee how they identify in terms of gender. Bee answers nothing, an answer that Craig and the others repeatedly misinterpret to mean different categories, from “nonbinary” to “gender noncomforming.” Despite being overly deferential, Craig presses the question, which prompts Bee to double down on contrarian answers, resisting any attempt to define them with identity labels. When another Southeast Asian housemate, Binh, tries to rein in the discussion by making comparisons to race, Bee rejects their Asian identity and argues that racialization is reductive of individual identity, earning Binh’s ire. Privately, Bee believes that while identity politics could lead to solidarity, there are many more obstacles that promote disenfranchisement. 

Bee insists on getting a single room at the co-op, so the house managers give them a spare room intended for sexual privacy. This alienates Bee from their housemates. Bee becomes an isolationist at the co-op to hide their depression. They retreat to the Internet, where they immerse themselves in online shock and gore content. 

Bee is paired up with Craig on dishwashing duty. He constantly patronizes them. When Bee expresses their frustration, Craig cries and abruptly leaves. They start hanging out and become friends, but Bee soon realizes that Craig just wants license to share his own pain. Bee declares their major in Symbolic Systems; theories of cognitive thought resonate with their rejection of identity. Bee experiences dermatological issues that cause them to recognize their mother’s concern for them.

Bee finishes college and moves into a warehouse commune, their hopes of finding a community reignited. After attempts to find a new word for their gender, they eventually resign themself to identifying as genderfluid. This marks a period of performing conformity with representation and identity politics. Like their housemates, Bee takes to politicizing every slight to leverage possession over the common areas of the commune. This includes calling Craig out at a picnic for being an involuntarily celibate man. 

Bee becomes friends with one of their housemates, a Chinese-Malaysian bone jeweler named Zamira, hoping that the friendship will help them to spend less time online. Zamira sees every aspect of Bee’s experience as traumatic, which makes Bee feel deeply supported at first. However, eventually Bee realizes that Zamira does this to coerce Bee into doing favors, either guilt-tripping them or accusing them of lacking solidarity. The other residents of the commune use Bee as an envoy to pass messages to Zamira during periods of conflict.

Zamira stops paying rent, which threatens her place at the commune. She turns to Bee for a loan and pressures them into conducting a rent strike. Bee finally refuses Zamira, which causes her to get angry. Zamira moves out. Years later, Bee learns that Zamira falsified her identity and is really a white girl named Bethany. Bee cannot believe how hard they had fallen for her manipulation. Bee gives up on ever fitting into a community. They continue to resent identity as a condition that reduces one’s life into the result of external forces.

Bee’s mother develops breast cancer, which causes Bee to return to Western Massachusetts to take care of her. They spend nine years together, strengthening their relationship. Bee spends a lot of their free time on Twitter, which they greatly enjoy for its noise, anonymity, and the inherent bad faith of its most active users. Bee’s loves shitposts, or aphoristic content combining inane humor with deeper truths. Bee often posts while their mom is undergoing chemotherapy. When Bee’s mother reads this content, Bee doesn’t really know how to explain it in a way that will make her appreciate it. Bee lies that the posters are just their friends.

One day, one of Bee’s shitposts goes viral. They are disgusted by the validation they feel from getting noticed online because it makes them crave attention. They abandon their main account and turn to a number of alternative accounts to continue making elaborate shitposts. They still feel, however, that there is an opportunity to shitpost on a massive scale.

Bee’s experiences with identity politics inspire them to engage in a large-scale online hoax. They hatch a plan to erode people’s trust in online interpersonal engagement. First, Bee acquires access to thousands of inactive accounts. They use artificial intelligence to enable each account to generate new posts on a regular schedule, adjusting each one so that they don’t go viral.

Bee’s plan results in a number of incidents, one of which they recount. Two Twitter users seemingly feud over the politics of sexualizing American actor Timothée Chalamet and Spongebob Squarepants character Patrick Star. This escalates into a long-term conflict between camps of other users who support the original proponents of the feud. The conflict escalates to the point that several of the users involved have their personal details exposed to the public, presumably with the intention of harming their reputations and lives. Bee then reveals that they are the owner of all the accounts involved in the incident. The conflict has thus been fictional.

Following the death of Bee’s mother, Bee moves to New York City, where they continue to generate new content. They only stop during the COVID-19 pandemic because of the physical and mental strain the project inflicts on them. At the same time, video content platforms far outpace text-based platforms in popularity, which renders Bee’s endeavors irrelevant. Their bot accounts remain active, however.

Bee is only revealing the truth about their plan now because volunteering the information would minimize people’s interest. Bee declares that the Internet is a false community, where no one forges real connections with others or has accountability for their actions. No one can truly be themselves on the Internet because others will always try to impose their own definitions of identity on everyone else. To make the point, Bee reveals that the post explaining their life’s story has been duplicated on other social media platforms, each iteration containing minute variations that contradict the others. Bee concedes that while they have succeeded in rendering their identity moot online, their existence was necessary to make this hoax happen in the first place.

MH-Sleuth continues the explainer by denying being connected to Bee in any way. MH-Sleuth then elaborates the theories behind Botgate. One theory suggests that the main points of Bee’s narrative are true. However, no one has found any records matching Bee, and existing artificial intelligence models are incapable of generating variations of The Post at the scale that Bee has indicated. Another theory suggests that The Post is a New Media literary experiment created by Thai American novelist Tony Tulathimutte. Attempts to link the two have however cast doubt on the existence of Tulathimutte as a real person.

None of the theories has resolved the mystery, prolonging intrigue around it instead. MH-Sleuth admires the creator(s) of The Post, suggests that any definite answer would frustrate the power of the mystery, and notes the irony of Bee fleeing to the Internet to escape identity, especially as The Post is likely to draw sympathy, whether intended or not. MH-Sleuth ponders whether it is useful to interpret online behavior. Maybe The Post was trying to seek an audience not of communities, but lonely individuals.