That origin story is, perhaps, a startup cliché. But Signal is, in many ways, the exact opposite of the Silicon Valley model. It’s a nonprofit funded by donations. It has never taken investment, makes its product available for free, has no advertisements, and collects virtually no information on its users—while competing with tech giants and winning. In a world where Elon Musk seems to have proven that practically no privately owned communication forum is immune from a single rich person’s whims, Signal stands as a counterfactual: evidence that venture capitalism and surveillance capitalism—hell, capitalism, period—are not the only paths forward for the future of technology.
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