Anti-Virus Icon John McAfee Leaves Behind A Legacy of Trolling
'Iconoclast. Lover of women, adventure and mystery. Founder of McAfee Anti-virus.' This is how cybersecurity legend John McAfee defined himself. In life, he was an absolute maniac. In death, he's still breaking the internet.
McAfee never had a normal life. When he was just a kid, his father died by suicide. By the time he was a young adult, he took DMT while working at the Missouri Pacific Railroad and admitted to Wired Magazine that he'd felt like he was on the verge of a breakdown from then on. He continued abusing hard drugs and alcohol throughout adulthood as he accelerated his career in the computer software industry. Later in life, after McAfee cleaned himself up a bit, resigned from McAfee Anti-Virus and sold all his shares, the real insanity began.
In the aughts, McAfee moved to Belize to pursue business opportunities in antibiotics, but according to Wired, he rapidly grew paranoid in Belize, convinced that people were constantly watching him. He got really into the idea that he could achieve immortality through 'quantum suicide.' Eventually, he realized he had completely severed ties with 'society.'
"My fragile connection with the world of polite society has, without a doubt, been severed," he wrote. "My attire would rank me among the worst-dressed Tijuana panhandlers. My hygiene is no better. Yesterday, for the first time, I urinated in public, in broad daylight." (Source: Wired)
In 2012, McAfee was questioned by Belize authorities for the death of his neighbor Gregory Faull. He fled to Guatemala soon after, where he was arrested on charges of illegally entry and sent back to America. His return caused a media frenzy and thus began McAfee's downward spiral into social media madness.
Whether he was a criminal or meme to you, no one can argue that he's as much an enigma in death as he was in life. As you might have heard, the cybersecurity legend was found dead in his prison cell yesterday by apparent suicide. He was awaiting extradition from Spain to the U.S.
Were his 2019 tweets about 'getting whackd' by the government sincere or were they the beginnings of an elaborate troll? Was his mysterious posthumous 'Q' Instagram post a genuine nod to QAnon or did he just want to keep us all guessing, even after his death? Don't know what the hell we're talking about? Join us on a short dive into the weird world of John McAfee.
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This probable gag didn't age well...
Conspiracy theorists are reading into this tweet from November 30, 2019 and pointing to it as proof that McAfee didn't kill himself.
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Was it 'quantum suicide?'
Others believe that John McAfee isn't actually dead and that he has achieved 'quantum immortality.'
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Posthumous trolling?
The @officialjohnmcafee Instagram account posted an image of the letter 'Q' minutes after his death was reported. Unsurprisingly, the mysterious post caused a hysteria of paranoid speculation across the internet, especially among the QAnon minions. McAfee's account has since been deactivated, which has only fanned the conspiracy flames. Was this some next-level posthumous trolling on McAfee's part?
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Meanwhile, the QAnon community loses it on Telegram
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4Chan weighed in, as expected
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McAfee was a notorious Twitter troll
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And then there's the whale thing
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And of course there were memes
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Twitter was quick with the jokes
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