App or Opp: The Counterrevolutionary Culture of Chat Apps

• In Event: Technocapitalism, Anticommunism, and Technofascism in Late-Stage US Empire and Beyond

Abstract

The encrypted chat app Signal is widely used by activists on the Left with the assumption that it's a safe, private way to organize movement work. Originally created by a self-identified anarchist named Moxie Marlingspike, it was soon popularized by people like NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, who said he used it everyday. Others have critiqued the ability of the app's servers to keep user identities secret, and it was funded by a group that many of its users would consider an adversary: the Open Technology Fund, which is part of the US government's foreign propaganda agency that runs Radio Free Asia, Office of Cuba Broadcasting, Voice of America and other media outlets around the world with the goal of spreading anti-communist, pro-US imperialist messaging.

But beyond these material issues, members of the radical direct action group Gay Shame critique the insider-outsider culture that forms around Signal and other apps like it, and the distinction between security and safety it elicits. The app prescribes a fictive urgency and often paranoid and unnecessary secrecy to every group chat; it makes consensus difficult to gather; and it deepens our dependence on our phones. Tech is simply a tool, but at what point does the culture we create around it become counterrevolutionary?

Author

• Toshio Meronek, Journalist