LNP504 The politics of intellectual shame
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Good morning, Linus. Good morning, Tim. Linus, what watch? Ten watch. Such much? You'll get along beautifully in America.
Logbuch Netzpolitik number 503 from October 16, 2024. And you will have noticed it. Wir sprechen eine andere Sprache. Wir sprechen eine andere Sprache heute, weil wir haben heute einen Gast und das ist dann ein Gespräch, was wir heute auf Englisch führen wollen. 503.
Oh. Anyway, we say hello to Meredith. Meredith Whittaker. Hello, welcome to our podcast. I'm so happy to be here. Thank you for having me. Meredith, you are, in case somebody doesn't know you, the president of the Signal Foundation.
I am. I am.
And Signal is a messenger application?
It is the world's most widely used truly private messaging application. I always have to put the full sentence in there. A very special messaging application.
What makes it special?
We build against the grain, to put it in kind of flowery language. We go out of our way to build for privacy and to get as close to collecting no data at all as possible, which, as you and I assume many in your audience know, is a lot more work.
Then simply encrypting.
Well, encrypting is part of that, but then you need to make sure the encryption works. And then encryption of message content isn't going to solve all of your problems because you also have metadata. You also have libraries you're pulling in. You have core services you're working with. So there's a lot of ingenuity required to actually create a system that is rejecting the normative assumptions of the tech industry today, which is that we all want to collect a ton of data. And we all want to monetize that data. We want to sell you ads with that data. We want to sell that to different customers as a data broker. We want to train AI models with that data. Most of the infrastructure in the tech ecosystem now assumes that as a given. And then we have to rewrite things too.
And you negate all these assumptions and try to build a truly private messaging platform in a world that has a completely different business model.
Yeah. Well, I'm going to just flip that to be a little bit rhetorical and say those assumptions negate the human right to private, intimate communication. And we are trying to rebuild a tech ecosystem that actually honors those.
That's an even higher goal.
Yeah.
Before we dig more into the Signal project, which in itself I think is quite interesting, we'd like to understand how did you get there, where you are right now? So what was your introduction into this digital world? When did it start?
Um, I don't have one of those stories where I'm like an Atari. I was four. I'm a hacker. I didn't care about tech, Quatech. I wasn't. You remember back in school, there were two kinds of nerds. There were the math nerds and the book nerds.
You were the book nerd?
I was a book nerd. But in the story we tell now, because nerddom has been overlapped with monetary success and sort of a career in math and science, I think we forget about the book nerds. But hello, I'm here to remind you.
We exist, we're here.
And that's who I was. And so I studied literature and rhetoric at Berkeley, which I just thought were, I mean, they're still beguiling. Like being able to read and write is pretty fundamental for anything. And then I was poor. So I took a job at Google because they were the first ones to offer me a job. And then I got very fascinated with what on earth was going on.
When was that? Like when were you hired by Google as somebody that studied literature and rhetoric?
July 10th, 2006. So I graduated Berkeley and I needed rent money and I put my resume on monster.com, which is a precursor to LinkedIn. And they reached out and then I talked to my friend Michelangelo because at the time... You still needed an invite to join Gmail, as I recall. And I was like, hey, Michelangelo, can you get me an invite so I can make a Gmail address so I can appeal to this recruiter? And now my spam-filled Gmail address dates from that moment. So I was hired as something called a customer operations associate. And I didn't know what that was. No one knows what that is. It's just a bunch of words. But it sounded I was like, that's a business job.
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