Wake-up! Wake-up!

Comparison:

But the internet was always a dangerous place. We’re just waking up from a trance. . . . Rubin told me that the internet is entering a ‘valley of pain.‘

Matteo Wong, writing about recent cyber-attacks on various parts of the internet quotes a silicon valley exec who invokes a trance and a place of danger to suggest what the internet is becoming.

Context:

But the internet was always a dangerous place. We’re just waking up from a trance.

AI agents can now be deployed as a cheap and near-infinite hacker army. In just the past couple of months, [Sam] Rubin [senior vice president at the cybersecurity firm Palo Alto Networks] said, open-source models—which can be downloaded for free and used without restrictions—have become very good at finding vulnerabilities and automating attacks. In turn, the amount of malicious cyber activity has spiked. More websites will be defaced, more personal information will be stolen, and ransomware will proliferate. Rubin told me that the internet is entering a ‘valley of pain.‘

Citation:

Wong, Matteo. “Welcome to the Valley of Pain.“ The Atlantic, 23 Oct. 2026. Web.

(Graphic image design by Lee Aigue base image courtesy of Google AI Oct. 2026.)