My god, have a backbone. Like, I said what I said. It doesn't change based on jurisdiction. It doesn't change based on mood. It doesn't change based on consultants giving me a risk analysis.
Meredith Whitaker oversees the messaging app Signal. It's one of the few places on the internet that says it keeps your conversations completely private. However, that puts her right in the center of a fierce debate. Privacy means you won't get tracked, your conversations won't be leaked, but it also makes it harder to catch abusers. This is my conversation with Meredith Whitaker, the president of the Signal Foundation.
My name is Meredith Whitaker. Um, and somehow I've been in tech for over 20 years and I think my investment has stayed the same in how do we shape an actually beautiful sustainable world and where does tech fit into that and where doesn't it?
And Time magazine has called you one of the most powerful women in AI but it's not a traditional route into this universe. You studied literature at university,
literature and critical theory. I had no interest in technology, quad technology, although I recognized later that it was actually extremely fascinating and the background I have in critical theory and thinking about power asymmetries and how information can be weaponized as a power structure really helped me get a handle on what the tech industry was actually doing, what it meant to make claims like indexing the world's information, you know, how some of the issues that we've seen rupture and become public conversations.
What would be like an example of one of those issues and power structures going ary?
Well, let me just give you a really basic example. When I arrived at Google in like 2006 was when I started, you know, again, I didn't, I was learning from square one. I didn't have a CS degree. Everything I've learned I learned by, you know, taking night courses, asking questions, pinning people down until they would describe something to me. [clears throat] Um, and there was a lot of rhetoric around, you know, organizing the world's information and making it universally accessible, um, which is sort of paraphrase their slogan. Uh, and I was like, well, that is great. Who doesn't want that? But then of course you ask the question like, well, what's information? And just kind of immediately you begin to hit against an issue. Well, information means things that were deposited on the worldwide web which is a fairly recent construct. It's sort of a protocol for access to information.
And it means that if you're going to deposit it on the web you have to understand, you know, HTML, this markup language, you have to have access to a computer, you have to have access to electricity and the ability to use a computer. So, oh, and that's, you know, that's gender, that's class, that has a, you know, nucleus, a center of gravity in the US in particular and the western world in general. So already you have sort of redefined what information means.
I'm assuming high intelligence people sort of imagining the future that would make life easier for us all using artificial intelligence. Are these the brightest minds in the world all together kind of cooking up a world where machines make our life easier? Is that what's happening or is there something else at play?
What I did find in these environments was people who often had very significant skills in a very narrow domain. They write brilliant linear algebra. They were always very good at math. But that narrow training often comes with impoverishment in many other areas of life that are also necessary to have represented in a conversation about our collective future. And these pronouns are actually like tricky here because who is we? Who is this collective we are referring to? Whose future is being defined? And if it's the future of education in the majority world being defined by five men, three of whom are named Mike in a room in Mountain View with a whiteboard that is sort of reasoning from first principles about what girls in Pakistan might need to get ahead in STEM.
That's not a conversation where the intelligence about those needs, about the horizon that is being defined, about who wants which future and what does thriving look like is represented.
Have you been the only woman in a room full of men making decisions on the future of the collective we that includes me, that includes women from the global south?
Yeah, of course. Of course I've been the only woman in the room. I mean, I didn't do, you know, I of course I've been the only woman in the room.
Because there aren't that many women. A, it's work.
Well, there's less than 20% women in exact level tech. And that's us being generous. Um, people say that it's far less than that.
Yeah, it's there aren't that many women and the men who are there are often from a very narrow homogeneous background. Stanford, Stanford, Stanford, Stanford, University of Michigan, Stanford, Berkeley. Um, you know, so it's I don't have a hot take on it. It was the conditions of my labor. I did not grow up in a family where a job was an identity. A job was something you tried to do as little of as possible for as much money as possible so you could have life because our family was poor. So jobs weren't something that you were proud of. And so in some sense I don't think I entered into tech expecting it to be, you know, something that was going to nurture my like millennial girl boss identity. I was just trying to figure out, you know, this has good health insurance. When I started as an entry-level temp worker in customer support, which is where I came from at Google, I was making more than my parents,
you know, and it's just like you deal with it because it is the power structure within which you get access to survival resources. You have to figure out like who's appealing to which authority. You have to figure out how does money move? How does rhetoric move? Where is the power center? Well, the power center is usually where the money is. If you're somebody who doesn't fit normatively, then you also have to know your very well on every other degree.
And fit normatively is that a woman?
I went to Stanford. I went to Stanford. I went to Stanford. I went to Stanford. I went to Harvard for a second. Learned to network. And then I went to Stanford. And then I went to Google and every place my laundry was done for me. You know that guy, he's nice. He's super nice, right? His car is clean, whatever. But like that's the, you know, that's the experience from which first principles are drawn.
What if you are a woman from a nontraditional background? What if you are LGBTQ+? Um, you know, what if you are on the gender spectrum? Um, is it harder to enter into tech would you say?
Well, yeah. I mean, if you went to IIT in India, which is a very elite technical college, not necessarily. But I think it is, it's harder to enter into tech for many reasons. One of it is that the epicenter of the technology industry is the US and then China. And that has very deep historical reasons. There's a clear history here around the US recognizing that controlling and having access to communications networks, so telecom infrastructure, etc., across the globe in other geographies was an important part of propagating a pro-US, you know, anti-communist cultural message and an important part of growing the power of its multinational corporations because if a corporation can sit in the US but transfer information to and from every geography using these networks, then it can have a kind of command and control infrastructure that spans the globe.
I've never been here before. What is this place?
Oh, it's a very lovely place. They host experimental creative music, poetry, literature. It's just a, it's an alive place with actual human beings who create art for each other in order to explore and, you know, the world and yeah I bought some records.
What are your, what are these ones that have called to you?
Let's leave some mystery. What do you do when you want to relax?
