That’s not exaggeration to say that small features in chat apps encode different visions of how to organize society. If the first reaction in the table was a thumbs of disliking instead of a heart, perhaps we would all become more negative, more cautious people. What kind of social vision does Signal arise from?
“In retrospect, me and everyone I knew were looking for the hidden world of secrets in this world,” Marlinspike admitted in a 2016 article. interview. An important text in anarchy theory describes the idea of a “temporary autonomous region,” a short-term place of freedom where people can experiment with new ways to live together outside the confines of current social norms. Originally coined to describe “piracy utopias” that could be contrived, the term has since come to be since used to understand the life and afterlife of real-world DIY spaces like communes, raves, beaches, and rallies. And Signal is, unmistakably, a makeshift autonomous region that Marlinspike spent nearly a decade building.
Because the autonomous regions temporarily create space for radical impulses that society represses, they keep daytime life more stable. Sometimes they can make money the way nightclubs and festivals do. But the temporary autonomous regions are temporary for a reason. Time and time again, the area’s residents make the same mistake: They can’t figure out how to interact effectively with the wider society. This area often runs out of money because it exists in a world where everyone needs to pay rent. Success is elusive; when a temporary autonomous region becomes attractive enough to threaten daytime stability, it can be violently suppressed. Or the attractive liberties afforded by the region may be taken up in a softer form by the wider society, and the region eventually ceases to exist because its existence has pressured society at large to be a little more like it. How can Signal go?
There are many reasons to think that Signal may not be around for long. The nonprofit’s blog, which aims to convince us of the elite nature of the organization’s engineers, inadvertently conveys the incredible difficulty of building any new software feature with end-to-end coding. Its team consisted of about 40 people; New Marlinspike leave the organization. Achieving impossible feats can be fun for a stunt hacker with something to prove, but competing with engineering teams of major tech companies may not be sustainable for a small nonprofit led by Marlinspike no longer.
In keeping with an organization formerly led by an anarchist, Signal lacks a sustainable business model, to the point where you could almost call it anti-capitalism. It has endured so far in ways that seem impossible to replicate, and that may alienate some users. Signal was largely funded by a large loan from the founder of WhatsApp, and that loan grew to $100 million. It has also accepted funding from the US government through the Open Technology Foundation. Since Signal cannot sell users’ data, Signal recently started developing a business model based on providing services directly to users and encouraging them to donate to Signal within the app. But to get enough donations, the nonprofit had to grow from 40 million users to 100 million. The company’s aggressive pursuit of growth, coupled with the lack of censorship in the app, has led Signal employees to public question whether the growth can come from abusive users, such as far-right groups that use Signal to organize.
But there are also reasons for hope. By far the most effective change Signal has made is arguably not the existence of the app itself, but making it easier for WhatsApp to bring Signal-style end-to-end encryption to its billions of users. Since WhatsApp was adopted, Facebook Messenger, Google’s Android Messages, and Microsoft’s Skype have all adopted the open-source Signaling Protocol, albeit in lighter forms, as the history of the temporary autonomous regions will give us a guess. Perhaps the existence of the Signal Protocol, coupled with demand from increasingly privacy-conscious users, will encourage better-funded messaging apps to compete with each other for as much encryption as possible. After that, Signal will no longer need to exist. (In fact, this is similar to Signal’s original theory of change, before they decided to compete with mainstream tech companies.)
Now that the era of global water coolers is over, private small group chats are becoming the future of internet social life. Signal started out as a rebel, a piracy utopia surrounded by code, but the mainstream has become—alarmingly fast—much closer to the vision Signal sought. In one form or another, its utopia can last.
