Fatherhood Quote by Ken MacLeod

MacLeod’s line doesn’t need you to “believe in the Devil” to feel the heat of the accusation. It sets up a mock-theological thought experiment and then snaps it shut like a trap: even if you’re secular, you still recognize the cultural shorthand. “Father of Lies” is an old, melodramatic title; “the Internet” is an everyday utility. The joke is the collision. The bite is what it implies about how casually we now live inside a lie engine.

The intent is less moral panic than moral satire. MacLeod isn’t claiming the web is literally evil; he’s pointing at a design feature masquerading as an accident. The Internet doesn’t just allow falsehoods to circulate - it rewards them with scale, speed, and a perverse meritocracy of attention. The subtext is that modern deception isn’t primarily about hiding the truth; it’s about flooding the zone until truth becomes just another content genre. “Certainly invented” lands like a deadpan verdict, the kind you deliver when the evidence has stopped being shocking and started being tedious.

Context matters: MacLeod comes out of a science-fiction tradition that treats technology as politics by other means. Read this against the backdrop of post-truth discourse, algorithmic amplification, and weaponized anonymity, and the Devil isn’t a supernatural being so much as a metaphor for systems that profit from confusion. The line works because it flatters no one: believers and skeptics alike are implicated as users, complicit in the medium’s casual contagion of untruth.