The Bubble City Experience: a contemporary paranerd classic

When I first wrote about Aaron Swartz’s unfinished nervous nerd novel, Bubble City, I had just been through chapter 1 and 2. But at the Dallas International Airport, waiting for the London connection on December 22 I had no choice but quickly finish the other 9 chapters posted so far under the pressure of the compelling narrative. Bubble City turned out to be my biggest literature experience of this year and the emphasis is on “literature” here.

The plot in one sentence based on the 11 chapters so far: Jason Barsto (an alternative Swartz) coder of a San Francisco news aggregator startup, called Newsflip (an alternative Reddit) gets hunted down by Google (an alternative Google) because he explores a backdoor in the tricky S-boxes behind the Notated News Analysis (NNA) system of the aggregator code at Newsflip (developed formerly at an alternative Yahoo), by which alternative Google or alternative others can manipulate and dangerously homogenize news recommendations for users.

It is a paranoid parody, a contemporary classic hacker fiction: it is crime and anti-crime, it is love and anti-love, it is real and anti-real but most importantly it is about Google or rather it is the best artistic expression of the emerging Hassliebe to Google so far, that every well informed and networked, responsible alpha geek (like Swartz) feels today. I suspect that even Google employees can feel the same way toward their own company.

Everybody in the tech world has plans with Google and Google has plans with almost everybody.

How to get rid of the Google Eye according to Bubble City: Scroogle and Tor

What’s the best thing to do if Google wants track you down and you are “a geek, the kind of person who searched Google every time a thought passed through his head”. Well, Aaron Swartz’s nervous nerd novel, Bubble City (I summarize my thoughts on it in the next post) has a geeky algorithm to play with in Chapter 9:

Thus, to be sure Google can’t track you, you need to do at least three things: never long in, never accept tracking cookies, and use some kind of anonymization of your IP address (like Scroogle or Tor). And that’s just for the Web.

Matt Thurling on the concept of science.TV

Another comment turns to blog post to make it more visible: Following my post on science.TV, Matt Thurling, founder explained the concept of it in a lengthy comment, that sheds light on the ins and outs of science.TV (emphasis added by me):

Although science.tv has been some three years in the making, we’re still in the very early stages. The site is live, but it should probably be labelled ‘alpha version’ because, in terms of functionality, it’s only about 10% of what’s to come. And in terms of content, it’s even less developed.

The content that’s on the site at the moment is admittedly something of a mixed bag. It actually represents one small part of science.tv – fun resources for teachers to use in classes to demonstrate phenomena. The few films that have been uploaded or linked have come from the focus group of teachers involved in the project.

We did some interesting research a while back on what ’science’ means to different kinds of people. For scientists and academics, it’s about pursuit of the truth via the scientific method; for pretty much everyone else, it’s actually more about the products of science. What’s also interesting is the meaning of ‘experiment’, and what seems to be taught to school students is not experimentation at all, but the ‘correct’ performance of rituals with set outcomes.