A Bot’s role as a participant throws off the structural assumption that technology’s role in the chatroom/IM space is that of a facilitator or mediator. The great irony is that, as I will demonstrate, the bot is simply another layer of mediation between two users. Thus it becomes clear that chatters often fetishize the bot, imbuing it with a level of agency that it never can exert within an interaction. What is hidden in all of this is the bot’s creator, with whom the chatter is actually in conversation with, albeit across a temporal divide. And that’s the next thing that I need to unpack.