Welcome to the first edition of “rand0hm Observations” for CYBR.SEC.Media. What I write here will be less technical deep dive or current events-oriented and more of what the title says: observations.
Perspective is everything in this industry. No two people experience the world in the same way. Wisdom isn’t magically knowing about a thing, it’s the process of experiencing a thing an ungodly number of times. Enough to appear like you know what you’re talking about to an almost precognitive level. Fifteen years of cyber security buys a lot of experience, and I hope my perspective of the same things you’ve seen in that time influences how you handle your next fifteen.
One of my favorite pastimes is being a living Meat Shield. I stand at the outer edges of a mosh pit and let the crazies bounce off of me because my old-man knees, shoulders, eyes, etc. are too far out of warranty to get in the middle anymore. But, I take up my fair amount of space and I've never met a barbell I didn't like. So I play one of those barriers you see in constructions zones while I give my hearing another good shellacking because someday soon, I won't need it anymore anyway.
One night, while I should be thinking about how to protect my most important bits from humans flying at me at Mach-Jesus, I found myself thinking about how strikingly similar the energy of a circle pit is to how people approach AI lately. I promptly pondered WTF is wrong with me and went back to picking up the fallen.
Many consider the metal band Lamb of God to be the godfathers of what metal fans everywhere lovingly call the Wall of Death (WoD). It's like a mosh pit but imagine that mosh pit were the trash compactor in A New Hope except there's no plot armor and WoD walls crash together like a monkey on cocaine banging cymbals.
If you were to observe the WoD from a distance, you can see the shape of what’s to come and predict its general movement. Once the walls crash together, you can still drill down into its slightly coordinated chaos but it’s foolish and pointless to predict any specific motion inside the whole. Wonderful and horrifying in (mostly) equal measure.
The Wall of Death is the most apt metaphor I can come up with for what it means to live through this current evolution of what we colloquially call “Artificial Intelligence”. I say current evolution because we can go all the way back to 1943 when McCulloch & Pitts started talking simplified neurons and compute, to 1956 when McCarthy coined the term Artificial Intelligence, to the present where subreddit warriors attack like rabid badgers whenever AI slop is suspected. What a long, strange trip it’s been and we haven’t even left the driveway yet.
What’s the WoD got to do with any of this? The WoD consists of three main components:
Variable X is one side of a large field/giant concrete parking lot quivering with a mass of humanity waiting for the breakdown to hit.
Variable Z, another mass of ravenous humanity waiting to smash into Variable X with the force of a pantheon of angry gods.
Variable Y are a few curious weirdos in the green field between X & Z, running around waiting for the smash to come.
In the cyber security industry, “Doomers” are Variable X. The “If you build it, it will kill us all” contingent, sprinkled with social media vitriol and the aforementioned slop police. Variable Z are the “Boomers”. Unlike all those post-war babies, these are the hype beasts in every product marketing department and tech C-suite screaming BIGGER, FASTER, MORE. Scale at any expense because the ends will justify the means. Variable Y are the rest of the tinkerers just trying to figure out how to live in this new world. You and me. Hackers, vibe coders, explorers who want to learn and maybe make the world a better place in the process.
Doomers don’t want to hear about the potential good. Boomers are deaf to the verified bad to the point where they obfuscate and hide data. So what do us tinkerers do while we're living in the in-between? All I can give you is my perspective informed by 15 years of experience. I’ve Seen Things.
This piece of writing was adapted from an abstract for a talk I’ve been giving at various conferences over the last 12 months. What I wrote in April of 2026 for my submissions seemed almost childish and naïve by September. The pace of AI development is just so frenetic that four months was enough to question whether anything I could tell an audience about my cute little projects was just going to be a waste of their time.
I started asking questions. I talked with members of our venerated Cult of The Dead Cow (greetz to Medusa, TweetyFish, & John Threat), I read amazing books like More, Everything, Forever by Adam Becker and Empire of AI by Karen Hao, both copies that are at least a few grams heavier now from all the colored tabs I left within its pages for follow-up later. My shelves are laden with texts covering everything from "AI intimacy”, ghost-work, and how nations like China are approaching the growth and development of AI. My Downloads folder runneth over with blogs and research papers (Julie, you’re an angel) so that I’m not just opining my own bias. I got some perspective, I’m gonna get a lot more, all of which I now hope to pass on to you.
Make no mistake, there are terrible, cartoon-villain-level decisions happening right now. There are also wonderful acts of genius happening. Hackers and activists with enablement and inclusion in their hearts, using this technology to make lives better. It’s intoxicating to the creative brain and a constant lesson in "trust but verify." Don’t just look for the helpers, become one of us.
For those of us lucky enough to still have tickets to the show, it’s imperative that we figure out how to move between the chaos lest we get crushed.
Even if it means burrowing deeper down the AI rabbit hole while staying within shouting distance of our better angels.
We're living in the green field between our own Walls of Death. It's scary, it's exciting, and we need to learn how to swing when those walls finally crash together.
