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We have only briefly touched on the history of technology and the internet here. Any account of internet history is necessarily incomplete; it not only highlights or neglects the importance of individual activists, contributors, developers, policymakers, companies depending on when it is told, but it also changes so rapidly that it is difficult to capture accurately. Websites and platforms come and go. Services like Geocities, Alta Vista, and AskJeeves that were well known and widely used in the 1990s are virtually unknown today among most young internet users. Similarly, the social media platforms that have dominated internet usage since the mid 2000s may disappear. The internet’s future landscape may be defined by different services and companies, ones that are inconceivable today. As one technology historian puts it, “the history of computing […] can never be written” (Ceruzzi, 2012, p. ix). In a sense, the history of the internet is always in beta development: a product that is always taking shape, never in its final form.

Yet there are constants in the ever-changing landscape of the internet. One of these constants is the presence of bots. Bots have been a permanent character throughout the internet’s brief history, and they will continue to play essential roles – both infrastructural and social – in the future. This book aims to show the ever-increasing importance bots are playing in human life. Bots can be easy to miss or ignore because they often function in the background, or on the peripheries – or in social situations that are designed to pass themselves off as humans – but they are integral to life and the functioning of technical processes online. On the front end, bots play a role across political processes, business transactions, and social media sites. On the back end, bots are a means for machines to communicate with other machines and keep our favorite technologies running smoothly (or to attack them with malicious intent). In each of these domains, some bots incorporate AI techniques, while others are extremely simplistic in their design. We’ll explore each of these areas in depth in the chapters to come, and help readers understand the past, present, and future of online bots, and the undeniable influence they have on our lives.