“We don’t want to be the deviation that proves the rule, we want to be a new set of rules leading the way to a much more open and diverse technology ecosystem,” Whittaker said, “that doesn’t depend on five companies and 15 guys and a paradigm, which is very, very outdated and ultimately not healthy for the world and the future.
It costs about $50 million a year to run Signal, and Whittaker noted at the event that there are no easy answers to finding that kind of funding or more for projects that need consistent, independent and secure support without being subject to the forces of the monetization of data and surveillance capitalism.
“None of this is simple, my friend,” Whittaker said. “There is a type of capital that we need. How do we get it?’
The first Trump presidency in the United States was increasingly hostile to encryption and independent technologies, so with the new Trump administration looming and anti-encryption advocates entering governments around the world, what’s next for Signal?
“Signal knows who we are. Signal will continue to be Signal,” says Whittaker. “Signal has one thing that we do, and we do it really well, and we do it pretty obsessively, and that is: we provide a truly private communications infrastructure to anyone, anywhere, globally. Point. We don’t change.”
