Signal Is More Than Encrypted Messaging. Under Meredith Whittaker, It’s Out to Prove Surveillance Capitalism Wrong

August 29, 2024:

So we have to look like a tech company in some ways to be able to do what we do.

If I could get into the actual story of your career, you said in your initial blog post when you took the president role that you’ve always been a champion of Signal. I think you said you used RedPhone and TextSecure?

I did.

I tried those at the time, enough to write about them. But they were pretty janky! I’m impressed or maybe a little weirded out that you used them back then.

But I was in tech. Right? All the cool people in tech were already using them.

And you were at Google at that time?

Yeah. I was with Google then.

What was somebody like you even doing at Google, honestly?

Have you ever heard of needing money to live and pay rent, Andy? [Laughs.] Have you heard of a society where access to resources is gated by your ability to do productive labor for one or another enterprise that pays you money?

I get that! But you are now such a vocal anti-Silicon-Valley, anti-surveillance-capitalism person that it’s hard to imagine—

I’m not anti-tech.

Yeah, I didn’t say that. But how did you end up at Google?

Well, I have a degree in rhetoric and English literature from Berkeley. I went to art school my whole life. I was not looking for a job in tech. I didn’t really care about tech at that time, but I was looking for a job because I graduated from Berkeley and I didn’t have any money. And I put my résumé on Monster.com—which, for Gen Z, it’s like old-school LinkedIn.

I was interviewing with some publishing houses, and then Google contacted me for a job as something called a … what was it, consumer operations associate?

Consumer operations associate?

Yeah. What is that? None of those words made sense. I was just like, that sounds like a business job.

So I set up a Gmail account to respond to the recruiter. And then I went through, I think, eight interviews and two weird sort of IQ tests and one writing test. It was a wild gauntlet.

What year was this?

I started in July of 2006. Ultimately what a “consumer operations associate” meant was a temp in customer support. But no one had told me that. And I was like, what is this place? Why is the juice free? The expensive juice is free. I’d never been in an environment like that. At that point, Google had hit an inflection point. They had a couple of thousand employees. And there was a conviction in the culture that they had finally found the recipe to be the ethical capitalists, ethical tech. There was a real … self-satisfaction is maybe an ungenerous way to put it, but it was a weird exuberance. I was just really interested in it.

And there were a lot of blank checks lying around Google at that time. They had this 20 percent time policy: “If you have a creative idea, bring it to us, we’ll support it”—all of this rhetoric that I didn’t know you shouldn’t take seriously. And so I did a lot of maneuvering. I figured out how to meet the people who seemed interesting. I got into the engineering group. I started working on standards, and I was just, in a sense, signing my name on these checks and trying to cash them. And more often than not, people were like, “Well, OK, she got in the room, so let’s just let her cook.” And I ended up learning.

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