John McAfee discusses the value of ignorance in new essay

So says cyber security pioneer and crypto advocate John McAfee in an essay for Spectator USA. “I maintain that eventually, the data set of things that an individual does not know will be orders of magnitude larger and more valuable than the set of all other things that we know about them. Mathematically this is a certainty,” he writes.

The first group to co-opt this data, he believes, will be “the least upstanding members of society – those who consistently try to cheat or take advantage of people’s ignorance – confidence men, cults, telephone marketers, salesmen of miracle cures, questionable fringe products, etc. A data set of a person’s ignorance would be the goose that lays golden eggs to this group. From beginning thus, knowledge of people’s ignorance will be adopted throughout the business world.”

McAfee flags up the time he claimed to be part of a club in Hawaii which involved having sex with humpback whales. “Anyone who considered for a moment would see the impossibility. I even spelled out this impossibility but couched it in terms of ‘is whale fucking consensual?’.

He then selected 100 random commenters on his various tweets and asked them two questions: Do people really have, erm, intimate relations with whales? And has McAfee done so? 62% answered ‘yes’ to the first question. 41% answered ‘yes’ to the second.

“What this shows is that disinformation, which is ignorance of the truth, is simple to impose, even if logic denies it. What is even simpler is discovering a person’s ignorance set without imparting knowledge,” McAfee concludes.

Going dark

Last month, we reported McAfee’s belief that the US government would soon act in order to silence him.

“I want you all to know that everything I have done, I have done for the cause of freedom. I want a world in which authorities discover crimes, not manufacture them. A free world,” he told his almost one million Twitter followers.

McAfee is on the run from US authorities who earlier this year indicted him, his wife and four members of his staff for tax fraud.

And last week a dramatic statement appeared on Twitter. “Developing events have made it necessary for John McAfee to go dark,” someone wrote on his account. “Please be advised that this account will be operated by staff until further notice.”

Taking aim at media reports that he had been incarcerated, a photo was also posted of McAfee and his wife, Janice, in “their new backyard”.

That was followed by a link to an interview with Newsweek, carried out a couple of weeks ago and in which he said: “I’ve seen a lot of shit that people have not seen. I see a world in America that makes me want to cry”.

He added that “we are being lied to by the government from every single corner of the world. The CIA provides [info], which is deceptive, manipulative. The government provides information which is manipulative and deceptive. So if you ask me, for example, what my position is, on anything, how the f*** would I know? Because I don’t have any information that is real.”

Americans, he insisted, need to wake up and understand that they have a corrupt government, a system of slavery, in effect. “I mean we work for three to four to five months every year for the government for free, in terms of paying income taxes. Is that not slavery?”