The conspiracy theories of decades past seem downright quaint in 2026. Case in point: The pilot episode of Fox’s X-Files spinoff The Lone Gunmen, which begins with Richard Langly (Dean Haglund) bringing a tech-world cocktail party to a halt by making the shocking accusation that the company’s new microchip is secretly…collecting data on its users. Twenty-five years later, not only are tech companies blatantly doing exactly that, but the public doesn't seem to be worried about it at all. Still, the scene seems prescient in retrospect — although it wasn’t the series’ most stunning prediction, as we’ll see.
