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I think most internet scholars would agree that the world wide web as we know it officially peaked on February 26, 2015, a truly historic day where the globe was brought to a standstill when two llamas in Arizona staged a daring escape and had cameras following their every move. They were eventually wrangled, but the internet barely had time to catch its collective breath when any unity those animals were responsible for vanished after an ambiguously colored dress sparked a heated debate with a scale and intensity unlike any other I’ve witnessed during my time on the planet.
The Dress may have pulled us apart even harder than the llamas brought us together, but a couple of years later, there was another momentous day where the denizens of the online world found a rare excuse to put their differences aside and unite around a common cause: making fun of millennial clout chasers.
I follow approximately zero of the influencers who got paid to lure aspiring influencers to The Bahamas by bombarding them with orange squares, so while I didn’t know anything about Fyre Festival when guests began to arrive on April 27, 2017, it was only a matter of time until I and so many others became intimately familiar with the infamous train wreck that it was.
None of the people who documented the sad sandwiches and decidedly unglam campgrounds they were greeted by when they arrive to Fyre Festival could’ve known what they were getting themselves into but the same cannot be said for basically every single person behind it—most notably Billy McFarland, the mastermind at the center of the event and the two documentaries that were released last year in an attempt to sort out how it all went so wrong.
It would seem safe to assume that a man who orders an employee to perform fellatio to secure a tank of water isn’t even familiar with the concept of a moral compass, and based on everything we know about McFarland, he seems to need to always be scamming someone to survive much like some sharks have to keep moving unless they want their swimming days to come to a permanent end.
Ja Rule may have been able to avoid jail time but the same can’t be said for his business partner, as McFarland was eventually indicted for fraud and reached a plea deal that resulted in him reporting to prison in 2018 to kick off a six-year sentence.
Since he’s started serving his time, McFarland has become buddies with The Situation from Jersey Shore and started working on a book full of stories that definitely aren’t fabricated in the slightest. When we last heard from him, he was attempting to secure an early release from the Ohio prison where he’s being held after discovering how unpleasant it is to be isolated with total strangers run by a staff incapable of controlling the situation when COVID-19 began to make the rounds.
McFarland had his request denied, and according to The New York Post, he has now befallen the fate he was attempting to avoid, as he told the outlet he tested positive for coronavirus last week and was being moved to an area of the prison housing 160 others who have also contracted the disease.
Another inmate said McFarland doesn’t seem to have any severe symptoms, and while I’d be lying if I said I didn’t love the absolutely delicious irony of his initial request, this puts a bit of a damper on things because you have to be a much bigger shithead than he is in my book if you want me to root for you to get it.
At the same time, I feel like even if McFarland had been released, he would’ve gotten it after somehow managing to end up at a party organized by a yoga influencer where facial coverings were banned and attendees were encouraged to use the hashtag #NoMaskK. Sometimes you just can’t escape fate.