Searching for SmarterChild

In the early 2000s, there was a chatbot on AIM called SmarterChild. Thirty million people talked to it. That's a genuine cultural moment I apparently missed entirely.

Now two filmmakers, Lindsey Sitz and Zan Gillies, are making a documentary about it, and from the footage on their Kickstarter page, it looks like they've already got some pretty fantastic footage. It's a dig into what SmarterChild meant to the people who grew up talking to it, and what happened to the humans who built it.

They have just a few days left on their campaign and are THIS close to their goal. If you're the kind of person who thinks about early internet culture the way I do, it's worth a look.