Life & Wisdom Quote by Ken MacLeod

MacLeod turns paranoia into landscape: not a shadowy backroom, but "one big grassy knoll", the most over-interpreted patch of turf in modern American myth. The joke lands because it treats conspiracy not as a fringe hobby but as a dominant ecology. The world is a crime scene now, and everyone is hunched over it, squinting for the angle that proves they were right all along.

The phrase "crawling with lone gunmen" flips the JFK-era contradiction on its head. "Lone gunman" was the official story meant to close the case; MacLeod uses it as a multiplying species. It's a neat, bleak gag: if everyone is a lone actor, the loneliness becomes collective, a crowd unified by suspicion. Then comes the sharper barb: they "think they're the Warren Commission". Not "the CIA", not "the puppet masters", but the investigators - the people who get to launder chaos into an authoritative narrative. The subtext is about power disguised as explanation. Conspiracy culture isn't only about distrusting institutions; it's about wanting to become one, to claim the prestige of final judgment.

As a science fiction writer shaped by late-Cold War politics and the internet age, MacLeod is writing into a world where information is abundant and trust is scarce. His line captures the era's signature move: replacing shared reality with competing dossiers, each one performed with the confidence of a government report. The cynicism isn't that truth is impossible; it's that everyone wants to be the one who declares it closed.