Adams has become a controversial figure in recent years. Regardless of what you think of him, as someone who has worked in Corporate America for over a decade, there really isn't anything quite like Dilbert to describe the sort of white collar insanity I've had to learn to take in stride. My first workplace as a junior developer was straight out of Dilbert and Office Space. I have a gigantic collection of digitized Dilbert strips that best describe office situations I've run into in real life – many of them including the pointy haired boss.
He's expressed a lot of what I would consider... stupid opinions these days, but I would be sad to learn he's no longer with us.
Probably also because, like e.g. "Yes (Prime) Minister", part of the depicted did come from anecdotes, instead of fantasy.
He spoke at MIT (early 90s?) and I remember him talking about making fun of PacBell colleagues in his comic: They would recognize themselves, ask him to autograph the comic for them, and then go away happy (thus making fun of them a second time.)
Catbert on work life balance: "Give us some balance, you selfish hag" https://steemitimages.com/p/7258xSVeJbKnFEnBwjKLhL15SoynbgJK...
The other, I can never seem to find. They're all in a meeting, and the Pointy Haired Boss says, "This next task is critical yet thankless and urgent, and will go to whoever next makes eye contact with me". Everyone stares at the desk, and then Alice pulls out a hand mirror and angles it between the PHB and Wally.
Better link: <https://dilbert-viewer.herokuapp.com/1998-05-05>
> The other, I can never seem to find.
Here you are: <https://dilbert-viewer.herokuapp.com/1993-08-30>
Just because the tech scene became this lefty hell circle, we should not consider controversial a thought that is so widespread in today's culture that it puts a president in the oval office twice.
If you squint so hard your eyes are closed, maybe
oh hell, I shouldnt bother. But this isnt really how reality is shaping out and in fact one of techs biggest names is a sieg heiling member of a far right presidential admin.
Nah there’s plenty of Trumpers in tech. Go on Blind, you’ll see.
At this point, he basically started leaning into controversy for pageviews. He'd start linking to the controversial section of each post right at the top of the post. After a few months or so I had to unsubscribe, after years of reading his blog and Dilbert cartoons/books.
He's become such a gremlin that I won't be 100% sure he's serious about this until he actually dies.
Was sad to me to see someone so good at lampooning absurdity get sucked into such a toxic mindset, but I'll also be sad to hear he's gone and I'm sad to hear he's up against it.
He has had some questionable views all throughout his life. In his book "The Dilbert Future", which was from 1997, the last 2 chapters are some wacky stuff about manifesting - i.e if you write something down 100 times a day every day it will come true and other stuff like that.
And while that may seem a far cry from the alt-right stuff he eschews, its really not - inability to process information clearly and think in reality in lieu of ideology is the cornerstone of conservative thinking.
Of course, you are not going to write down that you will win the lottery and then win.
But most people are their own worst enemy and self limiting to some extent. Focusing on what you want in life, and affirming it to yourself over and over, is effectively a way to brain wash yourself to change your own self limiting behavior and it’s not surprising that this is often successful.
But that's mild compared to what he says. He basically says he can influence the stock market with affirmations.
You should read the chapters. https://www.scribd.com/doc/156175634/the-dilbert-future-pdf. Starts on 218.
He does not say that.
> Starts on 218.
Actually it’s page 246.
Can we not do this kind of thing please?
This is rather well said. It explains so much of the draw to conspiracy theories and 'alternate facts'.
The podcast If Books Could Kill manages to stumble on a fair amount of overlap between "power of positive thinking" / "The Secret" crap, and right wing politics in the books they review.
Chapelle's SNL monolog about Trump is pretty spot on too.
However, the fundamental ideas of System 1 and 2 have made me rethink so many things.
I still ask for the PSA test. I've never been offered ultrasound.
Dilbert was a good comic though.
Well, I enjoyed Dilbert for years, in any case. It shares the throne with "Office Space" for representing the pre-remote-work era of corporate IT.
As others have said, very Muskian, and I'd add J.K. Rowling to that list. I guess when you have literally no problems in your life you're driven to make some up, like trans people existing somewhere or black people getting jobs you don't want or whatever.
If I got a billion dollars, you'd never see my ass again. I'd buy a reasonably sized/somewhat large home in the middle of fucking nowhere with a huge garage, and I'd spend my days tinkering on my cars, playing videogames, and working on passion projects.
Of course, they can be wrong. But I always find it odd when people say “I don’t understand” when it seems so obvious to me. They see things as right vs wrong and want to make things right even if it hurts them.
It's such a bizarre hill to die on.
What I don't understand is spending your days shitposting on Twitter about it. I'm not sure if that applies to Adams, but it definitely applies to Musk and Rowling.
Many people are incapable of leaving others alone. They think they are right and people who disagree are wrong and must be corrected. Both rich and poor people can be like this. Even if someone else has absolutely no impact on their lives whatsoever, if they are "wrong" they must be demonized.
Rich people have the resources to shout over poorer people and buy influence.
The richest man I know sold his business in an all-cash transaction for $114 million in 2011 when he was in his late 50s. He divided the after-tax sum in half and used one half to write checks based on weeks of service to all of his employees and kept the other half. (I was one of those employees.)
He stuck around for six months making sure the transition was smooth then he fucked off to a beach house in Key West and has spent the last decade fishing and working on vintage Corvettes.
He would look at a trans person, go "well ain't that something" and move on with his life.
He would not wage an international media campaign to demonize them.
I can hear him in my head muttering "what in the hell do they gotta do with me?" just thinking about him being asked about a cultural issue.
Some people (both rich and poor, but you only hear about the poor ones) seethe with hatred and it's sad.
The problem, is that mountains of these kind of people say they are fine with trans people, but voted for this administration, and when you ask, they say "Kamala was going to gender change our kids" or some such bullshit.
So the culture war was fine to them, they just hadn't heard a hateful argument that touched their button yet.
My dad talked for like an entire year about how he's been newly dealing with non-binary and trans folk at the grocery store he was (at the time) managing, and how he thinks they are great and such nice people and their gender or whatever is not a work problem and he thinks "that people just need to have more patience with each other" but he voted for Trump
Because the liberals "have gone too far" with the "DEI stuff" and commented that he was worried that helicopter pilot from that accident was "rushed into someone else's spot"
Because she's a woman. And obviously we don't have like a hundred year history of talented and capable women pilots or anything. And it's not like women have been pilots in American commercial Aviation for decades with a clear trend of increasing safety. And obviously he has always had this consistent worry about woman pilots and feeling like he can't trust their ability and this totally isn't something that Fox News manufactured out of thin air these past couple years.
Which is funny because there is an actual, genuine, air traffic control scandal where a Black institution had perverted some pre-screening to give members of that Black institution an unfair advantage in screening. But even that horrible situation never put an unqualified or undertrained person on the job. It just made more of the members of the incoming training class black.
But that's the actual problem they don't like. DEI doesn't involve passing someone who should have failed, even in the blatant scandal I mentioned above
If you get rich through putting in consistent "work", you absolutely HAVE to do this through a fundamental belief in what you are doing, where it doesn't feel like work.
Your brain is programed to do a certain thing, and you have no choice but to do this thing - no amount of money can reprogram your brain. This is why so many well off people end up going off the deep end.
There is also a factor in the things that you buy as a rich person actually influencing you in ways that you don't even understand.
> I'd buy a reasonably sized/somewhat large home in the middle of fucking nowhere with a huge garage, and I'd spend my days tinkering on my cars, playing videogames, and working on passion projects.
And being isolated like that is just as likely to make you fall into ideological traps. You think that you can keep yourself happy by doing things you like, but the key thing to consider is why you like them. What purpose do you have for doing the things you do. A lot of times, this purpose is misguided (with cars, its not really about the car as much about the attention you get from others), and when you have the monetary capability to do the thing, you quickly find out that its not what you though it was.
I love that show enough to where I actually bought an animation cel from it a few years ago, and it hangs in my basement office.
<Dilbert looks back with a blank stare>
---
Godspeed Scott. Thank you for all the laughs.
I've seen the pattern repeat with other data collection as well -- "anonymous" data collection or "anonymized" data almost never is.
It's been a fun exercise in software architecture. Because I actually care about this.
But we keep pushing this annual survey another year since we never seem to be ready to actually implement it (due to other priorities)
My dad's still ok. He had some localized radiation to beat back the biggest tumors on his spine, then did a round of chemo. This past summer he did a fun immunotherapy treatment, not CAR-T... but something more like that than checkpoint inhibitors. Otherwise his tumors have been kept to almost nothing due to hormone therapy.
Unfortunately, what eventually happens is you accumulate enough hormone therapty resistant cancer cells that the tumors start growing again in a meaningful way, and then there's not much that can be done. I assume this is the stage that Scott Adams has had and that he's been battling it for many years by now. With President Biden, it seems likely that his prostate cancer will respond to treatment, and if this is the case then he will likely die of something else, as is usual now for old men who are diagnosed with prostate cancer.
That in and of itself puts him above what I've come to expect from this low-bar dip in American culture. Good for him.
But thing is—boy who cried wolf—not sure if he actually has the prognosis of cancer he says he has? It sounds mean, I reckon he does have it, but his past descriptions of health problems were confusing enough that I wouldn't be surprised if he recovers next year and spins it into a story about how he found a cure.
Thankfully with all the voice actors and other talent that went into the show, it's easier to disconnect it from the hateful person Adams ended up revealing himself to be.
toomuchtodo•3h ago