Currents 086: Monica Anderson on Bubble City



Jim talks with Monica Anderson about her paper “Bubble City Design Proposal: A Twitter Alternative Which Is Not a Social Medium.” They discuss the origins of the Bubble City idea, its architecture, quenching the flood of social media information, only seeing the messages you want, research bots, the difference between a bubble and a Slack channel, fine-tuning bubbles, law enforcement, filtering, the place of curators, federating feeds into the system, how the system supports itself financially, how identity is handled, viscosity, the Pacer speed control, the clickbait problem, trusted streams, Google Wave, how LLMs are changing programming, version changes to Bubble City, Understanding Machine One, a call for fundraising, and much more.

Monica Anderson is an independent AI researcher and ex-Googler operating from Silicon Valley. Her company Syntience, Inc. has researched computer-based Natural Language Understanding since Jan 1, 2001.