Welcome back. I took some risks last week by injecting more of my voice and personality into the newsletter. Subsequent engagement numbers confirmed some of my fears. Paid subscribers can read the last story to learn more.

For everyone, this edition unpacks:

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It’s bad.

If you read no further, know this: the internet is more exposed than ever; many experts are “freaking out”; and yes — AI is why.

But that was only part of the story.

“Several dozen” cyber incidents hit global corporations and governments in a span of two days, John Milinovich, a senior product manager at design software maker Figma, wrote in a widely cited X post.

“[I]n isolation, each [incident] would have been the worst to happen in an entire calendar year,” he said. “Every sector from government to education to big tech and banks is being massively affected, and people are starting to freak out.”

For those in cybersecurity who’ve been warning about AI hacking risks for years, the underlying problem came as no surprise.

AI is making it easier to find and exploit bugs that have always existed in software; it’s just that now, we’re all about to learn exactly how insecure the internet really is, 404 Media cofounder Jason Koebler observed.

But shocks like this one will push everyone to do better, including banding together to tackle the problem, experts told Business Insider.

Things are going to get “a lot worse before they get better,” Jason Clinton, Anthropic’s deputy chief information security officer, wrote on X.

“I think we’re going to have a couple years where every single week it’s going to feel like the sky is falling,” Prince told Reuters in a separate interview.

Everyone — from senior leaders and boards, to ambitious side questers and workers — should decide what really needs to be online.

For the C-suite and their advisers specifically:

Most people won’t really care or notice how the internet is run in the future. But builders should understand this: the promise of the old internet of openness — millions of nodes and the ability to connect to anyone — will never return, according to Stratechery’s Ben Thompson.

On a podcast Friday, he referenced Neal Stephenson’s “Snow Crash” to help make the analogy. The sci-fi novel (one of my favorites, actually) depicts a world of fully distributed, nation-like enclaves that are locked down, while everything in between is a hellscape, Thompson said.

“The internet is going to be little fortresses everywhere, patrolled in a very cyberpunk way, by these agents that are always on, always alert, doing battle, and hopefully it never breaks through and you don’t know about it.”

The Atlantic’s Matteo Wong agrees the internet will need new walls. But unlike Thompson, he leaves room for a better outcome: if we eventually find and fix the vulnerabilities, “the result could be a more open web, where anybody can use widely available AI tools to run security checks at any time and you’ll feel safer sharing your personal information again.”

For businesses and workers, the question is which side of the walls you’ll want to be on.

As Zillow CEO Jeremy Wacksman told me last December, the counterintuitive part is that lower rates matter less for buyers than for sellers.