“I Am My Own Bot”: Everyday Resistance in Online Fashion Resale

This paper examines how online fashion resellers, platform workers who buy and resell secondhand goods, negotiate the constraints of algorithmically governed marketplaces through everyday resistance in platform labor. Drawing on four years of digital ethnography of reseller communities including interviews, participant observation, and first person methods, we show how resellers reconfigure this platform labor through worker-led automation and collective patchwork tactics, even when these contravene official platform policies. We argue that such practices constitute forms of worker led everyday resistance that are creative yet compromised, emerging within U.S. consumerism, capitalist value extraction, and imperial entanglements of the secondhand trade. Our findings highlight both the possibilities and the limits of worker led automation and resistance, contributing to HCI debates on platform governance, labor agency, and the contested politics of automation.