Namex’s new podcast makes its debut with a special guest at NAM2026.
The internet does not enter everyone’s life in the same way.
For some it coincides with a first email, for others with a chat, a search, or the sudden sense that the whole world might pass through a screen at home. Even when we cannot remember our first time online, we often remember the moment we realized it would change something.
It is from this personal memory that “Internet and I” the new podcast produced by Namex, sets out.
In each episode we ask journalists, politicians, scientists, artists and entrepreneurs to go back to their first encounter with the internet. Not out of nostalgia, but to use that memory as the starting point for a larger story: that of a technology that has transformed politics, information, the economy and the way we are in the world.
The project began in 2024 with a conversation with Pietro Grasso, who told us, among other things, the password used by Giovanni Falcone. That interview became episode zero: the first experiment, from which we began to define the tone, the outlook and the structure of the series.
For the official launch we decided to leave the studio.
The first episode was recorded live at Rome’s Gazometro, in front of the NAM2026 audience. And for an edition of the event devoted to the geopolitics of the internet, the guest could only be someone used to observing the network’s consequences where they are most apparent.
Cecilia Sala has spent years reporting on international affairs from the field. In the countries at the center of her reporting, the internet is not simply a means of communicating or keeping informed. It can be an instrument of control, a weapon, a source of information or a lifeline.
It is what allows a piece of news to get out of a closed country. A voice to cross a border. A person to know whether someone on the other side is still alive.
But it is also the space in which power watches, restricts, locates and censors.
In the conversation, Sala describes her own relationship with connectivity, starting from personal experience and moving on to today’s conflicts: from the phones that in the field can save a life or endanger the person using them, to the shutdowns that cut entire populations off from the rest of the world.
Listening to her reminded us how concrete the consequences are of the infrastructure the Namex community knows in its technical detail. Behind every network that works, or that is switched off, are people who can communicate, work and describe what is happening. Or who can no longer do so.
The NAM2026 audience became part of the episode too. The pauses, the reactions and the silence during the most personal passages stayed in the recording, giving the sense of sitting beside the person speaking.
This is the dimension “Internet and I” wants to preserve: an intimate conversation that, starting from one person’s story, tries to read the collective story of the network.
The title contains the idea that holds the whole series together. The relationship between the internet and us does not run in one direction only: we changed the world by building the network, but the world, through the network, has changed us too.
“Internet and I” is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music and all the main listening platforms.
The first episode, with Cecilia Sala, is online. The feed also includes the episode with Pietro Grasso.
Happy listening.
— By Christian Cinetto, Head of Communication and Content at Namex
