John McAfee's suicide in a Spanish prison gives us another opportunity to ponder the interconnections of family life, psychology, and creativity:
Mr. McAfee grew up in Roanoke, Va., the son of a road surveyor and a bank teller in an unhappy marriage. He said in press reports that his father was a severe alcoholic who beat him and his mother, and who fatally shot himself when Mr. McAfee was 15.
“Every day I wake up with him,” Mr. McAfee told a reporter for Wired magazine in 2012. “Every relationship I have, he’s by my side; every mistrust, he is the negotiator of that mistrust.”
McAfee Associates, the software company he founded, was once a household name in computer security. He started it in 1987 in his small house in Santa Clara, Calif., in response to the news of a Pakistani computer virus called Brain, thought to be the first to attack personal computers. Mr. McAfee said that, at the time, it reminded him of the way his father would suddenly attack him.
Once the company grew past the startup phase, McAfee no longer felt comfortable there, so he sold out for $80 million. Most of which he proceeded to lose in a series of bad investments. Then he got involved in promoting cryptocurrency – in ways the SEC and the IRS say were illegal, which is why he was arrested – and got shabbier and sleazier until nobody was surprised by the way he died.
How much of our progress, our art, our creativity do we owe to people like John McAfee? How much does our civilization depend on a legion of sad, crazy artists, inventors, scientists, and more? How much of the energy that drives life forward comes from the darkness, from places most of us would rather not look into or even know about?
How much of our progress, our art, our creativity do we owe to people like John McAfee? How much does our civilization depend on a legion of sad, crazy artists, inventors, scientists, and more? How much of the energy that drives life forward comes from the darkness, from places most of us would rather not look into or even know about?
ReplyDeleteMcAfee himself didn't actually do much.
He got lucky with catching an emerging market and establishing his company as an early leader, making a ton of money in the process, but he himself didn't contribute much to the actual progress of anti-virus technology or theory, and even most of his company's "contributions" to the field were the direct product of simply buying up other small companies who actually did the real work in order to use their tech.
John McAfee didn't contribute anything to our progress, art, creativity, etc. He just was in the right place at the right time to make a bunch of money and then cash out and walk away. His only real contribution to society is that he became a common household name through good luck and market branding.
So many people know the name of John McAfee, but who knows the names of the actual coders and innovators who developed anti-virus technology rather than simply successfully repackaging it and selling it to the home computer market? If you want to ask about what society owes to people, consider that the most rich and famous ones we owe little to nothing, and the anonymous ones who toil in obscurity are the ones we actually owe something to.
I suspect far more of crazy, depressed, drug addicted, damaged people live their lives in quiet desperation with little to show for it. I think it's a romantic fantasy that such people are productive. But who knows.
ReplyDeleteOn average, suffering is bad and people who suffer do worse in life. But great artists and scientists are not average. People who suffered early tragedy are overrepresented among Nobel prize winners, and modern statistical studies have confirmed the old belief that artists are crazier than other people. One study of British artists I posted about here found that they are more than twice as likely to be mentally ill as the rest of us. I recently read a review of a memoir by a musician from the Seattle grunge era who said that all the people in the top bands were depressed drug addicts, and furthermore that their success did not make them happy because they felt like they had sold out.
ReplyDeleteHappy childhoods seem mainly to produce middling people.