In the early days of August 2026, a quiet threshold was revealed to have already passed: machines now generate more internet traffic than humans do, a crossover that arrived months ahead of even the most forward-looking predictions. Cloudflare's CFO, speaking from an earnings call, placed a number on what comes next — a thousandfold machine advantage within five years — framing it not as alarm but as arithmetic. The internet, long imagined as a human commons, is becoming infrastructure for a conversation between machines, and the companies that understand efficiency rather than accumulation ma