I used to love Dilbert because it echoed (down to every single minute detail) my work environment (which, like Adams', was a telco).<p>Then it became creepy because it anticipated everything that was coming to pass (sometimes the very day, sometimes within a week, we'd have reorgs, discussions with Marketing, trips to our equivalent of Elbonia).<p>The peak, for me, was when Dogbert was hailed as a cloud guru the week I started leading a cloud transformation project...<p>Now it's just borderline insane, but still eerily realistic, despite what one might think of Adams himself (I don't think they should be directly associated in some contexts, and it is just a cartoon, not a political essay).
I find it humorous that the usual tone deaf HR stuff suddenly becomes a lightning rod of "wokeness" for certain folks because it personally offends them.<p>But with Scott Adams, you can see that this sort of stuff always irked him - look back at Dilbert poking fun at sensitivity training in the 90's - he did have the progressive take of making Asok and Alice as the equally, if not more, competent than their peers(ed: though fraught with presentation errors itself)<p>Now however, he has taken an approach that is as subtle as a Ben Garrison "comic."
I work at a Fortune 100 and we used to have Dilbert comics plastered up all over the place. Breakroom, cubicles, randomly around the copier, etc.<p>A lot of them might not have been the best thing to have up at work as they talked about 'evil corporations', slacking off at work, making fun of inept management... but they stayed up.<p>A short while back, someone complained that the Elbonian strips were a 'racist trope', and down they all went. It happened right about the time when we 'formed a global alliance' with an off-shore consulting firm and displaced over half of our in-house IT staff.<p>I can't imagine what would happen if the strips in the OP were stuck on the lounge fridge.
Dilbert was on point in the 90s and is on point today. 2022 Silicon Valley is full of activists with a chip on the shoulder who constantly vent on corporate forums, creating hostile environment for everyone else. Many of us has been working in diverse workspaces for past 30 years and no decent person mistreated a woman, a black coworker or a gay person. OF COURSE there are always jerks, but the vast majority hated them and reported them to HR even back then. I also worked as the sole non-Asian in a startup before and had no serious complaints on account of race. Maybe I had to try some new food at offsites, or ask people to switch to English from time to time, big deal.I will not tolerate group shaming and neither should Scott Adams.
I used to read Dilbert when I was a kid in the 90s, which perhaps made me a weird kid. With that background, it's actually quite strange to see the examples of recent strips this article presents -- because they show the pointy-haired boss as the "reasonable" character. His role earlier on was almost-always as the deranged influence of management, causing problems for others. (I feel that a similar joke ~20 years ago would probably have used Dilbert as the viewpoint character, frustrated at his coworkers' abuses of the system.)<p>Seeing him framed as the audience-identification character suggests things about Adams' shifting viewpoint, I guess?
I don't see any issues with the Dilbert strips highlighted.<p>I've learned just to enjoy things that I find entertainment from and not follow there creators on twitter because that is usually just a recipe for disappointment.<p>I'd rather avoid drama and division, i'd rather just brush my teeth than worry about what the CEO of my toothpaste brand thinks about politics, yes i'm all for fighting for justice and rights, but i'd rather stick to the issues in front of me.
"But underneath that is profound loneliness – the kind only a genius in a world full of idiots could possibly understand."
Are you mind-reading loneliness into Scott(he has never said he's lonely)?
Btw the edgy cartoons are the funny ones. Are we not allowed to talk about the new vectors people take advantage of in the new system? That in and of itself seems like a vector(create a problem people aren't allowed to talk about).
Adams has been like that for years. If anyone remembers the DNRC period[0], it was <i>full</i> of really nasty stuff.<p>I do not consider him to be a nice person, but I have enjoyed Dilbert, quite a bit.<p>These days, I don't really follow Dilbert, anymore. Adams just got so bad, that I couldn't follow Dilbert, without thinking about his creator.<p>[0] <a href="https://en-academic.com/dic.nsf/enwiki/208698" rel="nofollow">https://en-academic.com/dic.nsf/enwiki/208698</a>
Adams would like to pivot his career from cartoonist to political pundit. He's okay with burning bridges to do it because just about everything involving newspaper comics is bygone.<p>He will be successful because the Incredibly Online people haven't yet learned the golden rule: don't feed the trolls.<p>With this article, and these comments, consider him fed.
> Dave is hired merely as an act of workplace tokenism before wrapping up with what appears to be an attempt at a thinly-veiled transphobic joke.<p>That particular strip is actually a hilarious joke that is probably lost on people who have never been in the position of being the minority who isn’t meeting expectations for “adding diversity.” It’s not directed to trans people at all, but rather pokes fun at some people’s rigid notions of race (it’s defined by how other people perceive you) in contrast with their fluid notions of gender (it’s defined by how you perceive yourself).
The easy answer to the title question is that Scott Adams gained enough wealth that he lost touch. That seems to be a common experience of commercially successful artists. The author never explores this explanation.
Remember "Doonesbury." Might've been funny once but degraded into political polemics for the last decade or more. Once you've got an audience the temptation to use their trust to persuade them of, well, anything; seems to be hard to resist. Moreso when you have opinions that others emphatically do not share.<p>I can think of dozens of "liberal comics" that never <i>tried</i> to be funny, that were merely political propaganda in comic form. Most of Ted Rall's work, for example.
The cancel culture is strong in this one...<p>At what point did we loose the ability to make fun of ourselves? The world used to be such a pleasant place.
> But in the process of addressing whatever the problem at hand is cold and analytically – whether it’s writing up a report or a securing a second date – he fails to consider the human elements involved.<p>I definitely know people like this. They believe that the way people should work internally is according to hard, cold logic, and that any sort of deviation from logic is a problem to be addressed with them.<p>The problem obviously is that people don't work that way, and never will. Not even the people trying to hold others to that standard - they just take their feelings and emotional needs and rationalize them into some logical framework without recognizing that they don't originate from that framework. ...To the extent that they acknowledge these things at all! It's a profound over-investment in classical intelligence, without any investment in emotional intelligence.<p>> But underneath that is profound loneliness – the kind only a genius in a world full of idiots could possibly understand.<p>Adams is lonely not because he's a genius, but because he likely drives the people in his life away. See: Above.<p>I have certainly seen such brilliant and logical people struggle with this. Getting into shouting matches over why the most rational thing to do is to date them and not break up.
The token hire strip would be funny if it wasn't an actual reflection of the strip and it's lack of diversity (and the obvious reticence of the creator to consider diversity as important). What would have been a smarter and less controversial move would be to subtly introduce people of color over time, then add a strip about a diversity hire, with the other characters visibly getting ticked off.
Some of the referenced strips from the article are just bad.<p>Who deals with this stuff actually and not in an imagined way? No one is complaining about made up cramps and if they did you would just tell them to file the sick day.<p>Dilbert used to be easy to identify with but these just don't seem close to reality at all.
Scott Adams is a ridiculously thin skinned MAGA-type on Twitter. If you ever want to talk to him, just disagree with one of his hot takes and he almost always engages you. I eventually had to block him.
Looking at the strips in the article, it looks like he is still doing what he always has: satirising work-place culture by exaggerating it. It just happens that work-place culture in many places is "woke" culture now. Perhaps it is one sighted with where his focus, though I can't judge that based on a cherry picked selection of strips such as this.
I still think it's AS funny (not necessarily funny, just not less, not more) . Dilbert has always been about making fun of thing Scott Adams may find absurd in corporate environment regardless of political correctness[0]<p>it's just that the article author reached the point where he thinks is serious is what Scott Adams.<p>It's the old "you can joke with anybody, you can joke about everything, you just can't joke about everything with everybody"<p>[0] <a href="https://dilbert.com/strip/2015-07-13" rel="nofollow">https://dilbert.com/strip/2015-07-13</a> -> talking about owning slaves (and I didn't need to search far, just put a random year )
I have long viewed Mike Judge[0] as the anti-Scott Adams. He works with many of the same topics but the result is far, far funnier. And he does not try to shove any particular political point of view at the expense of basic humor.<p><i>In reviewing Idiocracy, Salon stated, "Judge's gimlet eye is so ruthless that at times his politics seem to border on South Park libertarianism".[73] A writer for the libertarian magazine Reason seems to agree, comparing King of the Hill to the anti-authoritarian point of view of South Park and The Simpsons, though he calls the show more populist, noting the disdain King of the Hill seems to have for bureaucrats, professionals, and big-box chains.[74]<p>Still, Judge denies having political messages in his shows, saying in an IGN interview about King of the Hill:[72]<p>"I try to not let the show get too political. To me, it's more social than political I guess you'd say, because that's funnier. I don't really like political reference humor that much. Although I liked the episode "Hank's Bully" where Hank's talking to the mailman and he says, 'Why would anyone want to lick a stamp that has Bill Clinton on it?' To me that's just like more of a character thing about Hank than it is a political joke or anything. I don't want to do a bunch of stuff about the war, particularly."</i> [Wikipedia]<p>[0]<i>King of the Hill, Office Space, Beavis and Butthead, Idiocracy, Silicon Valley</i>
What has happened to Scott Adams is what happened to a lot of people in the last 20 years, internet radicalization. I first noticed this with Islamic extremism in the 2000s, now the same thing is happening to liberals and conservatives in 2010s.<p>The way we engage on the internet is toxic and over time leads to radicalization and violence. We have not provided anyone with outlets to compromise or pathways to understanding. We just live in filter bubbles cursing each other every day for the most minor of offenses. Tech companies have also continually isolated people from healthy community engagement.
Scott Adams was always like this. I was at a book signing of his in San Francisco circa 2000 where he was ranting unironically about how straight white men are discriminated against in Fortune 500 corporations so he had no recourse but to become an independent cartoonist.
Scott Adams is yet another one of the media “renegades”, who posture themselves as a secret source of knowledge, rather than a bad actor feeding on widespread doubt and distrust. Typically, their content is misanthropic (aren’t the sheeple libs stupid?) and hyper-focused on ephemeral culture war noise (look at what libs of TikTok found!).<p>These people fixate so much on narrow issues that they totally miss larger cultural trends that refute their apocalyptic fears: Biden won, Eric Adams won, the SF education board was recalled, wokeness/CRT bills passed in many red states, roe v wade overturned, etc etc etc.<p>Adams is a fucking idiot. Most of the “intellectual dark web” are as well.
He's gone off the deep end. I've seen the same happen with some friends and wrote about it, it's a sad thing when formerly intelligent human beings start losing it and fail to recover only to sink further and further into their own version of reality.
Dilbert remains some of the most cutting, divisive and fearless American satire. I'm sure some people are deeply hurt buy it, but I would hate to shy away from conversations about this topics.
> So aggravated with being stifled by the “woke” masses is Adams that he recently shared a poll on Twitter to ask followers whether or not he should force himself into retirement by “getting cancelled”.<p>He's playing himself. You can't get canceled as a political cartoonist -- it's normal for them to make a point through extreme, and often very "offensive", situations. That's their job.
It is very odd that Adams says he is an "ultra liberal" because he believes women should have a right to choose to end a pregnancy. I have a hard time thinking of any liberal who thinks that position is "ultra liberal". It seems to be only an extremely conservative person thinks that position is ultra liberal.<p>Adams has often said nutty things then when there is blow-back falls back on "it was just a joke and some people have no sense of humor," then goes on to say things that indicate that he was serious about it all along. I try to avoid Adams, but the story I remember best is him claiming that he was voting for Hillary Clinton in 2016 because, "Clinton supporters have convinced me – and here I am being 100% serious – that my safety is at risk if I am seen as supportive of Trump"<p>He also said in 2020, "If Biden is elected, there's a good chance you will be dead within the year." That was just a standalone tweet, not the punchline of some joke. He followed it up with, "Republicans will be hunted."<p>Some ultra-liberal.
From the article:<p>>> This, of course, mirrors an ongoing controversy in certain conservative circles over the use of gender-neutral terms in place of the word ‘woman’ in order to include trans men and non-binary individuals in increasingly pertinent conversations about bodily autonomy.<p>I think is a terrible strawman.<p>>> This, of course, mirrors an ongoing controversy in certain <i>gender critical</i> circles over the use of gender-neutral terms in place of the word ‘woman’ in order <i>to maintain women-only spaces</i>.<p>There you go.
I do not appreciate the forced parallelism at the end. Dilbert is a social inept, the author said that strips are 30% based on his life, so the author is indeed a suffering social inept and so he is turning acid and angry at the world.<p>I enjoy his strips and this post made me discover the more controversial ones, which I had missed. Thank you to the author.
I imagined, based on the title of this article, that Dilbert had turned into something like the Babylon Bee. (If you don't know, the Babylon Bee is a deeply unfunny attempt at a right-wing Onion.)<p>Instead, I found myself laughing at all of these comics. Yes, Adams has gone full nutjob, but the restraints of the comic strip format seem to keep his more bizarre views in check.
What's wrong with mocking HR? It's so easy to have a meritocracy rather than measuring the immutable characteristics of your employees...<p>I can't fathom how HR can justify selective racism without lawsuits galore.
Please try to defer judgement as you read this comment, it may take some turns you don't expect.<p>Bottom Line Up Front: Progressives should rework their messaging so that it does not highlight and reinforce differences.<p>If you look at Conservative media criticism of Progressives, you'll see a lot of Anti-Wokeness. Progressives need to understand why this criticism is so effective. Pushing the envelope makes people uncomfortable. There is a very powerful emotional drive to return to a comfortable state, especially when we feel like we are attacked.<p>Examining the media split of the 2010's, several things come to mind:<p>1. Directed and funded media pushing a conservative agenda.<p>2. The Tea Party Movement and Trumpism.<p>3. The end of shame as an effective tool.<p>To expand on the end of shame - in the past, people were more likely to change their behavior in order to avoid being called out for prejudice or discrimination. This doesn't work anymore. Another place you can see this is in the reaction to public masking requests. Shame did not work to get people to mask.<p>Shame is very motivating, but the motivation does not always take the direction intended. If another group is willing to offer cover for beliefs or actions, then individuals will be motivated to join that group instead of being shamed. If you can find something for "ashamed" people to be proud of, they will flock to that banner.<p>This brings us back to messaging. "Make America Great Again" just sounds like a good message, if you can divorce it from the source. People who are tired of being attacked or shamed may find comfort in that slogan. MAGA does not say anything about race or gender, which is part of why Trump found voters (a relatively small part of his voters) from minority races and women. Trump could not say that white men should be proud of being white (just think of the implications), but he could say that Americans should be proud of being Americans.<p>----<p>Now. After all of that, you may have some opinions about me, so let me tell you a little about myself.<p>I believe that structural inequality, including structural racism and structural sexism, is very real and very damaging.<p>I believe that individuals should practice anti-racism. I think that anti-racism training that intentionally includes shame is NOT effective or good.<p>I don't have a strong belief that Progressive politicians are trying to shame white men, but I do see a lot of this shaming in less formal settings, and in communications and training material. Some of it may make sense in context, but it is never good.<p>I do think that it is natural to feel some shame when we reflect on the past. I don't think we have to live with that every day forever. There needs to be a path to resolution.
Simple. Workplace complaints and management priorities have changed, and Dilbert followed.<p>When Dilbert started, the government wasn't yet training employees how to "interrupt whiteness" [1], or Coca-Cola how to "be less white" [2], or Cigna simply forbidding hiring whites [3], nor did academia require mandatory diversity pledges for new hires and promotions [4]. Dilbert is doing what we are told art is <i>supposed</i> to do - hold a mirror to society. Do you like what you see?<p>[1] <a href="https://www.city-journal.org/seattle-interrupting-whiteness-training" rel="nofollow">https://www.city-journal.org/seattle-interrupting-whiteness-...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.newsweek.com/coca-cola-facing-backlash-says-less-white-learning-plan-was-about-workplace-inclusion-1570875" rel="nofollow">https://www.newsweek.com/coca-cola-facing-backlash-says-less...</a> (Note that in all the "debunkings" of this story, Coca-Cola never claims the presentation wasn't shown by their hired diversity experts as part of its diversity training. Merely that Coca-Cola the company didn't require those specific slides. But the slides are completely in-line with rhetoric championed by diversity experts routinely hired to train employees.)<p>[3] <a href="https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/cigna-critical-race-theory-training-dont-say-brown-bag-lunch-mindful-religious-privilege" rel="nofollow">https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/cigna-critical-race-...</a><p>[4] <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-universitys-new-loyalty-oath-11576799749" rel="nofollow">https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-universitys-new-loyalty-oat...</a>
What is Up With Dilbert is Scott Adams is a Boomer and the older he gets the more obvious it becomes. I used to love a lot of the older Dilbert but lately it's just ... irritating.
What happened was racism became acceptable in society, so long as you were using the rural hick stereotype, aka 'deplorables'.<p>We should be asking what the hell is up with society.
What the hell is up with random people trying to character assassinate Scott Adams all the time? With complete falsehoods too. It's bizzare!<p>I listen to his podcast every now and then. The guy's funny, and has a knack for disassembling news into their dark patterns and pointing out absurdity. Definitely not the same guy portrayed in this article.<p>> [Dramatic pause] And inevitably, this will be what leads to the downfall of Dilbert.<p>Geez. Drama much? I can almost see the author patting herself on the back when she wrote that sentence. What a waste of a life.