Carpe Momentum: Information Armageddon - Why Maria Ressa’s Warning Matters Now

How a Nobel laureate’s lived lessons from the Philippines map to America’s slide, and why JD Vance’s rhetoric turns that lesson into a plan.

Maria Ressa stepped up to the UN microphone in a moment that felt equal parts obituary and call to arms. She did not read a manifesto; she read the weather: the world sits “on the rubble of the world that was,” she said, institutions buckling under engineered untruths, democracies hollowing out at the seams. This is not drama; it is a diagnosis with a bone-deep pedigree. Ressa is a 2021 Nobel Peace Prize laureate who spent a decade building Rappler, documenting extrajudicial killings, surviving arrests and smear campaigns, and refusing to let a state erase the record.

“Without facts, you can’t have truth. Without truth, you can’t have trust.” - Maria Ressa, UNGA

That sentence is the spine of her case: when facts disappear, so does shared reality; when shared reality disappears, so does the practical possibility of democracy. She calls the era we live in “an information Armageddon”, not an inevitable apocalypse but a battle to be fought and won, or lost depending on what we do next.