I won’t deny it: I discovered the brilliant Carmen Vicente thanks to the Instagram algorithm. Her video on Dead Internet Theory stopped me in my tracks. I didn’t swipe away, and weirdly, it left me feeling almost optimistic?!
I immediately became a Carmen fangirl and subscribed to her newsletter, Scroll Sick, where she curates the stuff worth reading, watching, and listening to every two weeks, so I thought I’d invite her on The Wayfinder. The ethos of our newsletters is shared: we want to help you navigate the overwhelming internet with a little more calm.
I hope you’ll tune in—and thank you Steve Knauf, The Gray Area, Tranquil Rain, and many others for watching live.
I highly recommend subscribing to Carmen’s newsletter below, and following her on Instagram, TikTok, and LinkedIn (yes, she’s so good she even makes that dreary site more exciting.)
Drumroll please🥁 🥁 🥁
I’m happy to announce that coming soon, right here on The Wayfinder, I’ll be launching a brand new podcast that unpacks the conspiracy I’ve covered here for years. DISARMED: How the U.S. Gave Up the Fight Against Falsehoods will examine how the second Trump administration dismantled the infrastructure built to identify, explain, and counter organized disinformation campaigns ahead of the consequential 2026 midterm elections.
For the past ten years, public servants, researchers, and civil-society partners worked to help institutions and the public understand and respond to information threats both foreign and domestic. Thanks to a sustained political campaign from the Trump universe, that work was recast as “censorship.” Civil servants lost their jobs. Researchers were investigated. Government teams that had taken years to build were dismantled.
DISARMED will tell this human and institutional story through in-depth interviews with people who did this work as well as experts in national security, technology policy, disinformation, and internet freedom.
You won’t want to miss it. More soon. 👀
