Meredith Whittaker is not a follower of norms. It takes a few tries to get her to pick a restaurant to meet at — her suggestions include the lobby of her hotel in London and a coffee shop that doesn’t take reservations, which makes me nervous.
Eventually, she relents and chooses Your Mum’s Kitchen, a tiny family-run eatery in the basement of a Korean supermarket on a quiet road in north London. Korean cuisine is her comfort food, she says, having grown up in Los Angeles’s Koreatown neighbourhood. Even now, Korean hotpots and jjigae, a spicy kimchi stew, are her go-to recipes when she’s cooking at home in Brooklyn.
Whittaker, who is petite, with a signature sweep of dark curls streaked with grey, is arguably Silicon Valley’s most famous gadfly. Over the past few years, she has come to represent the antithesis of Big Tech, an industry that has built its wildly successful economic model mostly through “surveillance capitalism” — profiting from people’s personal data.