About
Hi, I'm Carissa Estreller. I study the internet for a living so I made Digital Culturist for strategists who do too.
I'm the founder, but most importantly, I'm a practicing digital culturist. After 16 years in this world, I've learned to notice shifts before they break: a vibe on TikTok, a tension in a podcast, a meme surfacing across unrelated communities.
I realized my saves were those signals. Every screenshot, podcast, and link was something I noticed because it mattered. But scattered across platforms, those signals were lost. I was collecting research without a way to actually study it.
When it was time to find the pattern, I'd end up duct-taping my brain together, copying and reorganizing fragments across a dozen places just to find the pattern. I knew the insight was there. I just didn't have a way to see it.
“We need a space to deliberately study the internet, to let your signal library build itself as you go, and to surface the patterns already forming inside everything you're paying attention to. And this is why I built it. For you all.”
— Carissa Estreller, Founder
Short-term
In 2027, we're focused on how Digital Culturist becomes a place to think together. The bet is straightforward: once an individual strategist has this inside their workflow, the team version becomes obvious. That's where shared signal libraries come in — multiple people feeding signals into a folder and a project, seeing what the team is noticing, building from each other's research instead of siloing it.
Long-term
The real bet is that a shared signal library becomes a genuine knowledge ecosystem for strategists. Curators build, own, and monetize their expertise by sharing what they've been tracking. You can zoom out and see all the signals moving across every strategist in the network, then zoom back in and explore each person's signal library like discovering corners of the internet you didn't know existed. Over time, we move from everyone researching in isolation to strategists across companies and borders learning from each other's signals, going deeper on what matters, and maybe changing how people behave instead of just documenting it.