I’ve been watching this industry like a drunk in the bleachers at a county fair, and cybersecurity is nothing more than a sideshow. The tent is empty, the barkers are screaming, and the lion in the cage is a stuffed nightmare borrowed from a high school science lab. The whole setup is a relic of a past show, papered over with the smell of popcorn and desperation. We pretend there is a war against advanced extraterrestrial invaders, but the truth is uglier. The invaders are basement mutants with fingers twitching like electrified spiders, hacking your system while chain-smoking in a room that smells of ramen and mildew. They aren’t clever. They don’t need to be. You left the keys in the ignition and taped the password to the windshield.
You bought into the myth of “business enablement,” which is like bragging you can juggle knives blindfolded in a hurricane. It looks impressive until the crowd realizes you’ve lopped off three fingers and sprayed blood across the cotton candy stand. Your entire operation runs like a midway ride held together with rusted bolts and chewing gum. The safety harness is broken, the floorboards are slick with grease, and the only emergency exit is nailed shut. The operator grins through missing teeth and says, “Don’t worry folks, we’re profitable.” Profitable. That word has become a kind of invocation in business, a magic charm we whisper to ourselves while the whole thing burns.
The carnival itself is worse than the ride. It is a sprawling mess of booths selling snake oil disguised as innovation, fortune-tellers promising “zero trust,” and games rigged to make you lose before you even start. Security has become a con game wrapped in a festival of illusions. Every vendor has a story, every boardroom has a mantra, and everyone pretends the show is under control. But no one admits the tent is on fire.
The tribes that dominate this carnival are even more sinister.
The first are the corporate zealots, dressed in khakis like choir robes, chanting productivity hymns while shoving bodies back into the office pews. They don’t care what cybersecurity does. They care how shiny it looks and how they can turn it into a market advantage. They wear ties to the company softball game, measure loyalty by hours chained to a desk, and speak of their future heart attack like it is a company retreat. Martyrs in service of the brand, they preach sacrifice without ever admitting the god they worship is quarterly earnings. For them, cybersecurity is a prop, a glittering talisman to wave in the shareholder meeting while the house burns behind them.
The second tribe is the spreadsheet sorcerers. They wave MBAs like sacred relics to keep auditors circling overhead at bay. Their PowerPoints are gospel scrolls, their charts holy scriptures. They mumble about cybersecurity return on investment like a morning prayer and sing hymns to the great god of market cap. Their balance sheets are rigged tarot cards, and their rituals involve converting risk into numbers so vague and convoluted no one can challenge them. They sacrifice logic on the altar of “synergy” and demand faith from shareholders while the coffers bleed dry. They are not leaders, they are witch doctors chanting over a corpse, selling comfort in place of truth.
The third tribe and the rarest of all are the maniacs who see the inferno. They see the brakeless bus engulfed in flames, screaming downhill toward an orphanage. They’ve been burned before, learned the trajectory, and found themselves converted to the religion of cybersecurity. They don’t care if the bus is painted blue, green, or blessed by a six-figure consultant. They know it needs water and brakes, not slogans. They are the bucket-carriers, ankle-deep in ash, clawing to keep the whole thing from exploding while everyone else debates whether “remote work reduces culture.” They know that if the bus crashes, it will take the whole carnival down with it.
These maniacs work in shadows. They don’t parade their work at shareholder meetings. They don’t wave PowerPoints like scrolls. They do the dirty work, patching systems, hunting threats, rewriting broken policies, building defenses under impossible conditions. They are rarely recognized. They are the quiet heroes of a sideshow that refuses to admit it is burning.
But there are more tribes, sure. People invent categories like gamblers invent systems to beat a crooked slot machine. We love to put ourselves into neat little buckets so we can feel safer, like children naming monsters in the dark. But the truth is uglier than the buckets we build. We fill those buckets with quick-set cement, shove the security team inside, and toss them into the black water. Then we hold a press conference announcing “record growth.”
It is a kind of madness. The business world is a zombie horde, fighting over whether it prefers slow-moving corpses or fast ones. It doesn’t matter because they are all feeding on the same rotting carcass. Cybersecurity has been stuck in the graveyard for forty years, armed with nothing but a rusty shovel, digging trenches in the dark. Meanwhile the carnival burns.
And the fire is getting louder. It’s in the whine of servers as they collapse under attack, in the endless cascade of alerts nobody reads, in the faint smell of singed code. Cybersecurity today is less a discipline and more a funeral pyre, and every new “solution” is another log tossed on the blaze. Vendors sell air and call it defense. Boards nod politely while asking, “What is the ROI on staying alive?” Executives lean over spreadsheets and decide whether to patch vulnerabilities or patch their PR. The whole thing is an endless loop of ignoring danger until it roars in your face.
This is why the circus grows louder. It doesn’t matter how many vulnerabilities get patched, how many firewalls get erected, or how many pentests you run. Because in this carnival, threats are the carnival’s own product. They are the freak show. They are the lure that sells the tickets. Without the chaos, there is no show, and without the show, there is no profit. So the game continues, rigged and rehearsed, and cybersecurity is the carny who sweeps up after the act.
It is an absurd tragedy. We build walls in the sand, invent metrics that vanish on inspection, and call it defense. We rearrange the deck chairs while the Titanic burns, and somehow we applaud ourselves for efficiency. And the tribes cheer each other on, each in their own language of excuses, spreadsheets, and slogans.
The barkers get louder. The tents wobble. The fire grows. And no one walks away.
The carnival will not stop. It will not slow. It will not wait. The tent has collapsed into itself, the barkers are gone, and the lion is nothing but dust on the sawdust floor. Somewhere in the wreckage, the bus has completed its arc, flattened the orphanage, and scattered the tribes into the mud. The survivors stand in silence, staring at the ashes, clutching buckets filled with nothing but concrete and lies. Cybersecurity crawls out of the graveyard with its rusty shovel, and the barkers return, dragging a new tent behind them. The music starts again. The carnival begins anew, and we buy tickets without asking why.
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