Welcome to the terrifying post-Ashley Madison Internet

The trove of hacked user data from Ashley Madison -- unlike virtually every large-scale hack before it -- didn’t just involve e-mail addresses or credit card numbers or other things one can fix with a phone call to the bank. It included full names, birth dates, marital statuses and, perhaps most damningly, intimate details about its users’ kinks and sexual preferences -- the sort of dirt that, depending on your circumstances, can easily become grounds for firing, divorce, jail time or even execution. In a few keystrokes, an anonymous, ideologically motivated group managed to torch the careers, friendships and marriages of millions of people. That’s not “vandalism,” to use a term that Ashley Madison itself has lately resorted to. That’s terror. And it should terrify you. None of this is a revelation, of course: Much like terrorist events of other, more violent sorts, the Ashley Madison hack hasn’t exposed anything we didn’t already know.

Hackers have managed more than 75 high-profile, large-scale corporate breaches in the past 10 years. If you somehow survived the past decade believing yourself immune, you’re either some sort of security expert or you live in an Internet-free commune. But post-Ashley Madison, the Internet feels fundamentally less safe than it did before. You can smell the tang of anxiety in the panicked rush to build tools that can search the hacked data; in the crunch of people flooding 4chan and Reddit and Pirate Bay for more and dirtier details on the hack; in the bottomless gloating of the people who know, with self-righteous certainty, that they won’t be in it. The post-Ashley-Madison Internet is a paranoid, disquietous place. But don’t worry: You’ll get used to it. If you haven’t already.