"At the time, it felt like we were in a car careening out of control and it wasn't just that everyone was saying, 'we'll be fine' -- it's that they didn't even see the car," he said. Ovadya saw early what many -- including lawmakers, journalists, and Big Tech CEOs -- wouldn't grasp until months later: Our platformed and algorithmically optimized world is vulnerable -- to propaganda, to misinformation, to dark targeted advertising from foreign governments -- so much so that it threatens to undermine a cornerstone of human discourse: the credibility of fact. But it's what he sees coming next that will really scare the shit out of you. "Alarmism can be good -- you should be alarmist about this stuff," Ovadya said one January afternoon before calmly outlining a deeply unsettling projection about the next two decades of fake news, artificial intelligence–assisted misinformation campaigns, and propaganda. "We are so screwed it's beyond what most of us can imagine," he said.