A new transmission from An Analog Brain In A Digital Age, by Marco Ciappelli Ghosts Across the Thames — A Tale of the Past, Present, and Future of the Human in the Machine Reflections from Infosecurity Europe 2026 — on sovereignty, agentic AI, burnout, and the stubborn human being still sitting at the center of all of it. By Marco Ciappelli | On Location at Infosecurity Europe 2026, with Sean Martin
By Marco Ciappelli | On Location at Infosecurity Europe 2026, with Sean Martin
July 2026
No time to read? No problem. Let my Artificial Intelligence companion, TAPE3, read it to you — it's got a voice, and a bit of attitude too. 🎙️🤖
Just like me… but with better pronunciation. 🤣 😅
There is a building across the Thames from the Infosecurity press room, a derelict flour mill called Millennium Mills that looks exactly as haunted as it sounds. For three days I kept glancing at it between conversations — broken windows, whole panes gone, a slow architectural decay staring back at a hall full of the anxieties of the digital age.
We made a joke, the way you do at the end of a long week, that the ghosts in there might be watching us. Alan Turing, who taught us to ask whether a machine could think at all. Ada Lovelace, who saw what the general-purpose machine could become a full century before it worked and, in almost the same breath, insisted it could originate nothing — the first person to draw the line we are still arguing over.
It was raining, the trains were on strike, and a few hundred meters away several thousand people had gathered to argue about the future of the machines those ghosts imagined. I have covered enough of these events to know when a room is telling me something. This one was telling me it had sped up.
That was the first thing about the floor, before any single topic: the clock. The story everyone told, in one form or another, was the collapse of time. An intrusion that once took hours to hand off from one criminal crew to the next now does it in seconds, faster than you can decide whether to answer a ringing phone. Attacks are being weaponized in the time it takes to make coffee.
Norbert Wiener, who gave us the very word under all the signage — cybernetics, the study of control and communication in the animal and the machine — warned three-quarters of a century ago about handing our decisions to systems faster than we could follow. His ghost would have recognized the floor instantly.
And so the defense has to move at that speed too, which forces a question the industry has spent years politely avoiding: if no human can keep pace, what exactly is left for the human to do?
The answers filled the booths. Agentic AI, autonomous agents patrolling the network and making decisions on their own. The same agents reframed, a beat later, as the newest insider threat — trusted credentials, no psychology to exploit, no hesitation to catch. Shadow AI, the quiet reality that people across every organization are already using tools nobody sanctioned. E.M. Forster wrote that story in 1909, in "The Machine Stops": a civilization so dependent on a system it no longer understands that when the system falters, no one remembers how to live.
Quantum computing described not as a distant weather system but as a theft already in progress, encrypted data harvested today to be opened later. If you only read the signage, you would think the entire human contribution to security had been reduced to signing the purchase order.
But I did not spend my week reading signage. And here the mood matters, because moods are data too.
My friend Madelein van der Hout (https://youtu.be/uEbnXj4ZWqc), the Forrester analyst who this year joined us as a kind of friendly ghost of her own, beaming in from the Netherlands rather than London, put it more precisely than I could. A few weeks earlier, at RSAC Conference in San Francisco, the drumbeat had been resilience, and the air was thick with everything technology can do, good and bad, sold at full volume. In London the word was sovereignty, and the register was pragmatic, tempered, European — a continent that will, as she said with affection, make a framework out of anything. RSAC is where her blood pumps with enthusiasm. Infosec is where she comes to get grounded in reality.
Same industry, two continents, two temperaments. And underneath the London sky, closer than anyone likes, the shadow of hybrid warfare.
The reality I went looking for was the human one, and I found it in a series of conversations that had almost nothing to do with the booths.
Sarah Armstrong-Smith (https://youtu.be/f5hOOhyZrrE), after nearly thirty years in cyber and crisis leadership, said the thing most people in her position will not say aloud: whatever we are doing is not working. More tools, more money, more people, more AI, and the problem keeps getting worse. She reminded me of a con called the Spanish Prisoner — a letter from a stranger, a fortune promised in exchange for a small advance — that is at least four hundred years old and is, give or take a detail, the email in your spam folder this morning.
The tools change. The mark does not. We are robbed through the same prehistoric wiring, a flash of fear, a flicker of greed, a decision made before the slow part of the brain wakes up.
Geoff White (https://youtu.be/KMAMfe197Jc), who has read three hundred thousand leaked messages written by a ransomware gang when they thought no one was watching, showed me the other side of that same wiring: criminals who do not see a gang at all. They see a company, with clients and negotiations and, sometimes, a tidy report handed to the victim afterward. The mind rewrites the job description until the extortionist can get out of bed believing he is a businessman.
Nothing personal — as an Italian, I did not have to reach far for the reference. We are all narrating ourselves into the people we would prefer to be. The gang simply does it with higher stakes and worse intentions.
Lee Clark (https://youtu.be/LyUHROaVawo), who runs threat intelligence for the retail and hospitality sharing group, the RH-ISAC, made the point that the two threats his members report most often need almost no code at all. One is a phone call to a help desk. The other is a fake résumé. People, lying to people, about who they are.
And the defense that keeps working is the oldest one we own: the flinch, the hesitation, the small animal instinct that something is off. We keep trying to automate away the part of us that pauses. Lee spends his days proving the pause is the point.
Then there was the cost of standing guard, which the event finally named out loud, on stage and on the risk register, not in a wellness pamphlet.
Bronwyn Boyle (https://youtu.be/bH2tRghfeBU), a CISO who came to security through classics and philosophy, gave me the sentence I keep turning over: we can talk about vulnerabilities for hours, she said, but we cannot talk about vulnerability when it hits us. She had run herself to the edge of burnout without a word for it, until Peter Coroneos (https://youtu.be/MJ5Za5LAjgs) — who founded the non-profit Cybermindz to treat the mental state of defenders as part of the network's resilience — described the symptoms and she recognized herself in the list.
Peter, whose background is in neuroscience before it was in cyber, framed it in a way that could be the mission statement of this entire newsletter. Our brains evolved for threats that arrive and then leave. A predator, a rival, a branch cracking in the dark. The system escalates, you deal with it, and your body gets the all-clear and stands down.
A cyberattack sends no all-clear. It is invisible, and it never ends. So the ancient machinery stays switched on, week after week, year after year — an analog brain locked inside a digital siege that never lifts, paying a price nobody designed it to pay.
What Cybermindz teaches, a protocol born in trauma therapy for soldiers, is essentially a manual override: a way to tell the body by hand the one thing the old world used to tell it for free, that the danger has passed. Brilliant, and also an admission. We built a place with no all-clear, so now we manufacture the all-clear ourselves.
Which left me with Peter's question, and mine: if the system you built needs the people inside it to constantly talk their own nervous systems down from a threat that never ends, is the problem really in them?
By Marco Ciappelli | On Location at Infosecurity Europe 2026, with Sean Martin
July 2026
No time to read? No problem. Let my Artificial Intelligence companion, TAPE3, read it to you — it's got a voice, and a bit of attitude too. 🎙️🤖
Just like me… but with better pronunciation. 🤣 😅
There is a building across the Thames from the Infosecurity press room, a derelict flour mill called Millennium Mills that looks exactly as haunted as it sounds. For three days I kept glancing at it between conversations — broken windows, whole panes gone, a slow architectural decay staring back at a hall full of the anxieties of the digital age.
We made a joke, the way you do at the end of a long week, that the ghosts in there might be watching us. Alan Turing, who taught us to ask whether a machine could think at all. Ada Lovelace, who saw what the general-purpose machine could become a full century before it worked and, in almost the same breath, insisted it could originate nothing — the first person to draw the line we are still arguing over.
It was raining, the trains were on strike, and a few hundred meters away several thousand people had gathered to argue about the future of the machines those ghosts imagined. I have covered enough of these events to know when a room is telling me something. This one was telling me it had sped up.
That was the first thing about the floor, before any single topic: the clock. The story everyone told, in one form or another, was the collapse of time. An intrusion that once took hours to hand off from one criminal crew to the next now does it in seconds, faster than you can decide whether to answer a ringing phone. Attacks are being weaponized in the time it takes to make coffee.
Norbert Wiener, who gave us the very word under all the signage — cybernetics, the study of control and communication in the animal and the machine — warned three-quarters of a century ago about handing our decisions to systems faster than we could follow. His ghost would have recognized the floor instantly.
And so the defense has to move at that speed too, which forces a question the industry has spent years politely avoiding: if no human can keep pace, what exactly is left for the human to do?
The answers filled the booths. Agentic AI, autonomous agents patrolling the network and making decisions on their own. The same agents reframed, a beat later, as the newest insider threat — trusted credentials, no psychology to exploit, no hesitation to catch. Shadow AI, the quiet reality that people across every organization are already using tools nobody sanctioned. E.M. Forster wrote that story in 1909, in "The Machine Stops": a civilization so dependent on a system it no longer understands that when the system falters, no one remembers how to live.
Quantum computing described not as a distant weather system but as a theft already in progress, encrypted data harvested today to be opened later. If you only read the signage, you would think the entire human contribution to security had been reduced to signing the purchase order.
But I did not spend my week reading signage. And here the mood matters, because moods are data too.
My friend Madelein van der Hout (https://youtu.be/uEbnXj4ZWqc), the Forrester analyst who this year joined us as a kind of friendly ghost of her own, beaming in from the Netherlands rather than London, put it more precisely than I could. A few weeks earlier, at RSAC Conference in San Francisco, the drumbeat had been resilience, and the air was thick with everything technology can do, good and bad, sold at full volume. In London the word was sovereignty, and the register was pragmatic, tempered, European — a continent that will, as she said with affection, make a framework out of anything. RSAC is where her blood pumps with enthusiasm. Infosec is where she comes to get grounded in reality.
Same industry, two continents, two temperaments. And underneath the London sky, closer than anyone likes, the shadow of hybrid warfare.
The reality I went looking for was the human one, and I found it in a series of conversations that had almost nothing to do with the booths.
Sarah Armstrong-Smith (https://youtu.be/f5hOOhyZrrE), after nearly thirty years in cyber and crisis leadership, said the thing most people in her position will not say aloud: whatever we are doing is not working. More tools, more money, more people, more AI, and the problem keeps getting worse. She reminded me of a con called the Spanish Prisoner — a letter from a stranger, a fortune promised in exchange for a small advance — that is at least four hundred years old and is, give or take a detail, the email in your spam folder this morning.
The tools change. The mark does not. We are robbed through the same prehistoric wiring, a flash of fear, a flicker of greed, a decision made before the slow part of the brain wakes up.
Geoff White (https://youtu.be/KMAMfe197Jc), who has read three hundred thousand leaked messages written by a ransomware gang when they thought no one was watching, showed me the other side of that same wiring: criminals who do not see a gang at all. They see a company, with clients and negotiations and, sometimes, a tidy report handed to the victim afterward. The mind rewrites the job description until the extortionist can get out of bed believing he is a businessman.
Nothing personal — as an Italian, I did not have to reach far for the reference. We are all narrating ourselves into the people we would prefer to be. The gang simply does it with higher stakes and worse intentions.
Lee Clark (https://youtu.be/LyUHROaVawo), who runs threat intelligence for the retail and hospitality sharing group, the RH-ISAC, made the point that the two threats his members report most often need almost no code at all. One is a phone call to a help desk. The other is a fake résumé. People, lying to people, about who they are.
And the defense that keeps working is the oldest one we own: the flinch, the hesitation, the small animal instinct that something is off. We keep trying to automate away the part of us that pauses. Lee spends his days proving the pause is the point.
Then there was the cost of standing guard, which the event finally named out loud, on stage and on the risk register, not in a wellness pamphlet.
Bronwyn Boyle (https://youtu.be/bH2tRghfeBU), a CISO who came to security through classics and philosophy, gave me the sentence I keep turning over: we can talk about vulnerabilities for hours, she said, but we cannot talk about vulnerability when it hits us. She had run herself to the edge of burnout without a word for it, until Peter Coroneos (https://youtu.be/MJ5Za5LAjgs) — who founded the non-profit Cybermindz to treat the mental state of defenders as part of the network's resilience — described the symptoms and she recognized herself in the list.
Peter, whose background is in neuroscience before it was in cyber, framed it in a way that could be the mission statement of this entire newsletter. Our brains evolved for threats that arrive and then leave. A predator, a rival, a branch cracking in the dark. The system escalates, you deal with it, and your body gets the all-clear and stands down.
A cyberattack sends no all-clear. It is invisible, and it never ends. So the ancient machinery stays switched on, week after week, year after year — an analog brain locked inside a digital siege that never lifts, paying a price nobody designed it to pay.
What Cybermindz teaches, a protocol born in trauma therapy for soldiers, is essentially a manual override: a way to tell the body by hand the one thing the old world used to tell it for free, that the danger has passed. Brilliant, and also an admission. We built a place with no all-clear, so now we manufacture the all-clear ourselves.
Which left me with Peter's question, and mine: if the system you built needs the people inside it to constantly talk their own nervous systems down from a threat that never ends, is the problem really in them?
Not every conversation came from inside cybersecurity, and that was deliberate. Maggie Alphonsi (https://youtu.be/Usz4osyQIsU), a Rugby World Cup winner, stood on the keynote stage and then sat down with me to talk about who gets to decide what your strengths are worth — who holds the pen.
For years women's sport got two sentences at the bottom of the back page, if that; someone else decided whether you existed. Then the phone in every pocket changed whose hand was on the pen, and athletes began telling their own stories with nobody's permission. She loves this, and she does not fully trust it, and neither do I, because the same platform that broadcast her strength also filled her feed with cruelty.
The tool is neutral. The hand on it is not. We are all made of stories, and the technology decides only how far a story travels — never whether it was worth telling. That part stays ours.
All of which is the long way of arriving at the conversation where I stopped being a journalist reporting the floor and started being a sociologist arguing with it. Near the end of our talk, Madelein and I got into metaphors, which is the kind of thing I live for.
Her research points somewhere specific, toward security becoming a function of trust and assurance, toward jobs that do not exist yet — trust engineers, people whose whole task is to confirm that an autonomous agent did what the business actually intended, not merely what it was told.
Joseph Weizenbaum would have understood the anxiety completely. He built ELIZA, one of the first programs that could hold a conversation, watched people pour their hearts into a machine that understood nothing, and spent the rest of his life warning us not to mistake the performance of comprehension for the real thing. Now we are building agents we have to hire other humans to interrogate, just to be sure they meant what we meant.
I reached for Frankenstein, the reference I come back to at every one of these events — and this time I went past the monster to the girl who dreamed him up, one more of the ghosts watching from the broken windows across the water. Mary Shelley was not yet nineteen, shut indoors by the rain of a summer that never arrived, passing the long grey evenings trading ghost stories, when she imagined a man who assembles a being out of spare parts and then cannot bear what he has made. Two centuries later, in another week of English rain, we are still stitching things together — all these tools and agents and smart-city systems — and then teaching them to move as one.
Madelein offered a better image. Don't build a Frankenstein, she said. Become a jellyfish. There is a species that works as a neural network, and when two of them are injured and collide, they don't compete — they merge and swim on as a single organism. We spend enormous energy bolting parts together and calling it integration. She was describing fusion instead of assembly: one organism, not a monster made of seams.
And Sean put the sharpest point on it: almost nothing on the expo floor addresses any of that. They are architecting for now, she agreed, not for what is coming. The oldest story in technology: we shout about the future and keep building for the present.
So here is where I land, and it is both a wish and a prediction.
Somewhere along the way, conferences forgot what they were for. They began as places where the people inside a field — medicine, physics, the sciences — gathered in a room to share what they knew and argue about it in person. Then they became a marketplace, and the marketplace is not a bad thing; the economy goes around, everyone eats.
But the room is still packed for the keynotes and the aisles empty during them, and that tells me something about what people actually came for. I found myself at a dinner full of CISOs where almost no one had walked the floor at all; they had come for each other. Knowledge, as Madelein put it, duplicates when you are in a group of people — the conversation you need happens at the coffee machine, not in an online meeting.
I would like the conference to remember its origin: not to abandon commerce, but to become, again, a genuine source of knowledge, more panels, more stages, more Q&A, more of the unpaid and unbranded thinking that a society facing all of this actually needs. A little more university, a little less showroom.
Sean, walking the floor beside me on the last day (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPiHQN9vAfg), sees the same shift arriving through a harder door. His prediction is that none of this will look the same in twelve to eighteen months — that as AI gets adopted inside the security organization, some of what fills the expo hall simply stops being necessary, that companies will run out of runway, that a few will build something valuable enough to be absorbed, and that teams will increasingly want their own AI rather than trusting a vendor's black box.
His is a forecast about the market. Mine is a hope about meaning. But they rhyme, and I think they arrive at the same place: the seams are showing, and something more integrated, more honest, more human, is trying to be born out of the monster we bolted together.
I looked back across the river one more time before we packed up the camera. The windows of the old mill were still broken, the ghosts still watching, the people who first dreamed these machines into being staring out at what we have made of the dream.
Ada Lovelace already told us where the line falls: the machine can execute, orchestrate, accelerate — but it originates nothing. When everything in the hall behind me can be orchestrated at machine speed, the only question worth carrying home is the quiet one underneath all the frameworks and the shiny new job titles.
What still has to be human?
A very big thank you to our Infosecurity Europe 2026 full coverage sponsors — Corelight, Qualys, and Sumo Logic — who make it possible for Sean and me to sit in that press room and chase these conversations down. And thank you to the people who gave me theirs this year: Sarah Armstrong-Smith, Geoff White, Lee Clark, Bronwyn Boyle, Peter Coroneos, Maggie Alphonsi, and Madelein van der Hout — and, as always, my co-host and co-conspirator Sean Martin, whose own field read from the floor runs alongside this one.
Stay imperfect, stay human. — Marco
Let's keep exploring what it means to be human in this Hybrid Analog Digital Age. End of transmission.
About Marco
Marco Ciappelli is Co-Founder & CMO of ITSPmagazine, Co-Founder & Creative Director of Studio C60, Branding & Marketing Advisor, Personal Branding Coach, Journalist, Writer, and Host of An Analog Brain In A Digital Age. Born in Florence, Italy, and based in Los Angeles, he explores the intersection of technology, society, storytelling, and creativity — with an analog brain, in a digital age. His on-the-ground event coverage is produced with ITSPmagazine co-founder Sean Martin under the On Location With Sean Martin And Marco Ciappelli banner.
🌎 marcociappelli.com | itspmagazine.com | studioc60.com
More from our On Location coverage of Infosecurity Europe 2026:
https://www.itspmagazine.com/infosecurity-europe-2026-infosec-london-cybersecurity-event-coverage
https://www.itspmagazine.com/technology-and-cybersecurity-conference-coverage
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As always, let's keep thinking.
— Marco