How WhatsApp Took Over the Global Conversation

My sister created a family WhatsApp group, for loved ones on both sides of the Atlantic, on July 8, 2017. At that time, I was using the app for my work. British politics and, arguably, the British state are coordinated by WhatsApp. Ninety-two percent of British internet users are on the platform. The police joke about it. The National Health Service depends on it. On the afternoon of March 13, 2020, ten days before the UK entered its first COVID lockdown – Dominic Cummings, senior adviser to Prime Minister Boris Johnson, formed a WhatsApp group of five men who came to more or less run the country.

This fall, a journalist from Daily Mail asked a government spokesperson, via WhatsApp, if it was true that national policies were designed this way. The spokesperson sent a response to Simon Case, the country’s most senior civil servant, with a suggested response: “The Prime Minister does not make government decisions via WhatsApp.” Case responded on WhatsApp less than a minute later: “Um, is that true? I’m not sure that’s the case. I think we’ll have to ignore it.”

Koum grew up in a village outside Kyiv. He moved to California with his mother in the early 1990s when he was sixteen. His father, who worked in construction, stayed in Ukraine. “Sending an instant message to my dad would have been something then,” he told an interviewer. Her mother had cancer, and she and Koum lived on welfare for a while. In high school, Koum read W. Richard Stevens’ “TCP/IP Illustrated,” a six-hundred-page guide to Internet protocols. Then he read it again.

When WhatsApp was up and running, Koum was joined by Brian Acton, a former Yahoo colleague, who became his co-founder. They wrote the software in Erlang, a programming language developed in the 1980s by computer scientists at the Swedish telecommunications company Ericsson. The goal was to make WhatsApp work better than cellphone text messaging – short message service (SMS) – which was taking off in the United States, years after becoming popular in Europe and Japan. Texting was lucrative for telecommunications companies, worth around a hundred billion dollars a year. But it was a mediocre product. You were limited to one hundred and sixty characters. Longer messages were fragmented and sometimes delivered out of time. Sending photos, especially to different phone brands, was a gamble. Koum traveled to Europe often and learned how much people loved texting and how often the technology was insufficient. “You’d have to call the person the next day and say, ‘Hey, did you get my text?’ And half the time the answer would be no,” Koum said. “The message was just dropped on the floor.”

The idea with WhatsApp was for you to feel like you’ve used it before. The logo was a combination of the iPhone’s dial and messaging icons, set against a bright green that was just a shade or two darker than Apple’s. “We wanted it to look good next to the native phone,” explained Anton Borzov, the first designer of WhatsApp. Borzov ran a small studio, called Tokyo, in the Ukrainian city of Dnipro. From the beginning, Koum and Acton were interested in populations in emerging markets. They hired speakers of Portuguese, Bahasa Indonesia, and Spanish to create local language versions of the app for Brazil, Indonesia, and Mexico.

They built WhatsApp not only for iPhones, but also for BlackBerrys, Windows Phones and Nokias which were common in Africa and South Asia. Engineers and designers assigned to different versions of WhatsApp had to use these devices for personal communication, to be alert for bugs and issues on the network. Chris Peiffer, the company’s first full-time American employee, remembers receiving a bright pink Nokia that was popular with Indonesian teenagers. “We’re really proud of: No, we’re going to make this work,” he said. “The messages will get through.”

“Handcuffs? I don’t know who you are with handcuffs.”

Cartoon by Michael Maslin

Koum hated surveillance, which he grew up with in the USSR, and publicity, which he grew up largely without. He kept a pair of walkie-talkies on his desk, to remind him of the simplicity of what he was trying to create, alongside a note written by Acton: “No ads! No games! No gadgets!” When Koum thought about a person’s online connections, he imagined his grandfather in Ukraine flipping through his address book. “It’s the most intimate social network,” he said. “And it’s already there on your phone.” WhatsApp didn’t have an avatar or pins or passwords. Your online identity was you. In 2011, the number of users increased from ten million to one hundred million. New Year’s Eve was the busiest day of the year, as a midnight surge – passing through Jakarta, Delhi and Rio – hit the servers. In spring 2014, when the application had five hundred million users and around fifty employees, Koum and Acton agreed to sell WhatsApp to Facebook for nineteen billion dollars. Koum signed the documents against the wall of the Mountain View social services office.

In the fall of 1914, Bronisław Malinowski, a young Polish ethnographer, began studying island communities off the coast of Papua New Guinea. “Imagine yourself suddenly posed, surrounded by all your equipment, alone on a tropical beach near a native village, while the speedboat or canoe that took you away moves away,” he writes in the first pages of “Argonauts of the Western Pacific,” one of the first classics of social anthropology, published in 1922. Malinowski intended to explain “the imponderables of real life” on the islands. At the center of the “Argonauts” imponderables was kula, a form of circular trade – of necklaces and armlets made from shells – that took place between the Trobriand Islands.

Malinowski spent a lot of time thinking about language. In a 1923 essay, he observed that much of what people say – whether in the Trobriand Islands or in European drawing rooms – is devoid of obvious meaning. Say “Ah, there you are!” » in Krakow was the same as saying “When are you coming?” on Kiriwina, the greatest of the Trobriands. It was about transmitting sociability rather than thoughts or ideas. Malinowski called this “phatic communion” and he believed it was essential to human society. It expressed “the fundamental tendency which makes the simple presence of others a necessity for man”.