Scott Adams' revolution was to get users to give him plot lines.
He was the first to publish an open way to communicate with him in order to out the corporate crazies, and readers did in droves, explaining the inanity of their workplace and getting secret retribution for stuff they clearly couldn't complain about publicly.
A good percentage of youtubers and substackers today actively cultivate their readership as a source of new material. They're more of a refining prism or filter for an otherwise unstated concerns than a source of wisdom.
Doing this seems to require identifying with your readers and their concerns. That could be disturbing to the author if the tide turns, or to the readers if they find out their role model was gaming them or otherwise unreal, but I imagine it is pretty heady stuff.
I hope he (and anyone facing cancer) has people with whom he can share honestly, and has access to the best health care available.
> a refining prism or filter for an otherwise unstated concerns than a source of wisdom
Grand Budapest Hotel starts with the author stating that when you're an author, people simply tell you stories and you don't need to come up with them anymore!
This is a common trend now on TikTok for any "creator" with a moderate follower count. The template goes something like "I'm bored, tell me the thing you bought that you can't do without". The creator doesn't have to do anything, the followers create the content for them in the comments.
Here's a theory why Scott went from funny to a bit weird alt right. For much of the time he was getting users sending office stories by email, but in more recent times was on twitter and getting info from the alt right bunch on there who push a lot of weird stuff. The reason he got banned from most papers was getting sucked into this stuff https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_okay_to_be_white
A lot of people seem to have constructed a history of Adams where he suddenly got sucked into the Twitter alt-right sometime around the rise of MAGA, forgetting that his whole cartoonist origin story is white male resentment stemming from his belief that his progress in management was being hampered by women and minorities and that his decline from that low starting point was being remarked on long before the MAGA era, to the point that it was treated as a long-established fact around the time the term “alt-right” was coined.
If you look, there's a lot of articles and books about "anti-whiteness" and a crusade to both claim a "white race" doesn't exist and that it's also enslaving others. If you live in a segregated area, race relations from blacks to white people have significantly declined. Everyone's radicalized. Add to this the widespread promotion of violent crime statistics and innocent people being attacked and murdered. Unequal justice by juries etc.
Scott just quoted a study saying black people didn't want to be around white people. Whether or not you agree with the above, it doesn't change the reality. Obscuring the history of the Arab slave trade, whites being enslaved, Africans selling Africans into slavery, and dozens of other historical deceptions, have backfired and permanently divided people.
Consider alcoholism: some people never drink anyway, plenty of people can have one drink or a few drinks and then stop. But some people can't stop and destroy their lives. Consider gambling: similar distribution applies. Many people never gamble, many people have a little scratchcard or sport bet now and then, and some people get out of control and sink all the money they have into it.
Gambling is an idea that's a trap. Some people get like this with ideas on the internet. In fact there's an XKCD about it: "can't sleep, someone's wrong on the internet".
Usually there's a single atrocity or injustice that triggers it. Maybe it's real, maybe it's been subject to distorted reporting. But it becomes a monomania. You can't counter them with statistics or variations on "most people aren't like that".
Dilbert was such a revolutionary comic strip in a lot of ways. Here are a few things related to Scott Adams and Dilbert that have stood out to me over the years. Apologize in advance if any of this sounds like it came from an LLM. Me and most of my family just like to info dump on subjects of interest.
I didn't understand it much as a kid, but later read an old copy of his book on how offices and office culture works (basically each chapter is Scott describing office did functionality with a liberal sprinkling of related Dilbert comics) and literally almost everything was 1:1 with the company I was at, only it was a good bit toned down of course. The beauty was that it was somehow generally applicable anywhere a company gets above a certain amount of employees. There was a lot of good information there such as how the company tries to get you to poop on yourself in your performance review in order to justify not giving you a raise or firing you (see - you yourself said that you needed improvement in working with others). There are many other insights as well that I found useful in my career. A lot of it is common sense, but it helped me come to terms with the irrationality of the corporate world. Every few years I reread it and find it more applicable than before.
He later wrote a book on why he thought Trump beat Hillary and it also had a ton of insights I didn't think about as I'm not a marketer. Anyone on Hilary's campaign team should read it. Of course it doesn't cover how Hilary was painted as some kind of evil queen from a fairy tale since the 90s. Scott kinda acts a bit nuts in this book though as he goes off on frequent tangents about being a trained hypnotist and how he recognized that Trump was doing the same thing. One of the many examples was that both of them went on SNL, but Trump attempted to act presidential, while Hilary was attempting to act more like the common person and it just didn't work and came off unprofessional. He also flew in a plane that looked like Air Force One and gave press conferences with a little fake Oval office desk.
Adams also came up with the term "confuseopoly" to describe companies that make it so hard to compare products and companies that you have to purchase on vibes. Economics textbooks use it now along with his blog example of trying to buy a truck. I see this dark pattern everywhere now.
I hadn't really thought about the twitter angle you talk about, but did notice his blog started changing back in 2016ish. I just attributed it to him running out of ideas for the comic and finding that grifting made him more money. I guess you really can see some of the shift in reading the more recent books, which is sad.
> good percentage of youtubers and substackers today actively cultivate their readership as a source of new material. They're more of a refining prism or filter for an otherwise unstated concerns than a source of wisdom
Isn’t that all comedy? It’s halting because it’s true. And sure, we may find striking truth through meditation. But it’s more likely to hit you in the real world.
You see it sometimes on Reddit in /r/comics, where someone will post a comic and then the idea for the next comic comes from a comment on the first one etc.
Some of you cite your favorite strips. I will too.
Dilbert comes down to the caves where trolls (accountants) reside and gets a tour. The guide points to a troll sitting behind a desk, and mumbling in a stupor: "nine, nine, nine...".
Guide: And this is our random numbers generator.
Dilbert: Are you sure those are random?
Guide: That's the problem with randomness - you can never be sure.
There's one somewhere where they're eating lunch and I think Wally asks Dilbert if he has any extra napkins and Dilbert says he won't know until he's done eating.
I remember reading this one in the late nineties. Never been able to find it again. It was probably in one of his books:
------------
pointy haired boss making making a presentation:
"research shows that customers want high-quality products at low-prices.
but we make low-quality products.
so we are going to sell them at high-prices and call it a strategy"
-------------
If anyone has a link to the original comic, please share it, I would like to see it again. It captures so many themes succinctly, and was very very astute for the late nineties when corps were doing crazy things and calling it a "strategy".
I actually had this happen back in high school. The teacher gave us “anonymous” surveys to gauge her performance. She analyzed the handwriting to determine which one was mine. I actively tried to change my handwriting as well, but I guess not well enough. I’ve never trusted a survey was actually anonymous after that.
We've been tasked by a client for 2 years to create an anonymized survey, and my mind has gone to great lengths to devise a survey where even our own employees (or superusers with full DB access) cannot figure out who a respondent 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)
When I was in grade 2 we had a secret santa, but it was the competitive variant, where the "winners" were able to guess who gave them the gift.
So on the card I provided with my gift, I signed off the name of someone else in class, and partially erased it. Made sure it was still somewhat legible and then wrote "From your secret santa" beneath it.
They didn't believe the gift was from me even after the teacher provided them with the original draw, and their supposed gift giver identified someone else as their recipient.
When I quit a unicorn tech startup several years ago, they sent me an anonymous exit survey. It was was on a name-brand survey platform and the platform’s UI indicated the survey was anonymous. In my later in-person exit interview with a guy from HR, he had us go over a copy of my answers! Based on his demeanor, I don’t think he knew it was presented as anonymous.
In college once I took a course that was being offered for the first time. They gave a midterm survey (usually we only had final surveys). I filled it out honestly, saying that my partner for our group projects was not pulling his weight. I had forgotten that I was in the only group of two (all the other groups were of three). The professor actually pulled me aside to let me know that he was aware our group wasn't working out - unfortunately there wasn't anything he could do.
The same thing happened to a friend of mind in junior highschool. The teacher even called him out in front of the whole class for giving her bad ratings. We all did, but she recognized his handwriting in particular:-D
I worked at a startup (that is still a startup going nowhere 12 years later) where the ceo and cto made a big show of the town hall and in particular the “open questions” part. Anyone could go on a little internal app, ask an “anonymous” question, and they’d answer all of this week’s questions each week.
In reality, they cherry picked the questions that they wanted to talk about and ignored the hard ones. We could tell because all asked questions were publicly visible in the app. But not all answered “ah we’re out of time”
So I once posted a question about why were the interns unpaid while writing code we shipped in production. I posted this question just after the previous town hall so that it would stay visible in the app for the longest time until the next town hall and would also be top of the list of pending questions.
For a couple weeks they said they wanted to answer it but needed to ask clarification questions to make sure they understood correctly, so could please the asker reveal themselves as it’s only fair. I never said it was me and nobody said it was them either. They couldn’t just delete the question like they usually did with unanswered questions before as this had stirred quite a little storm between employees. And it would clash with the “we’re open and fair” koolaid they were serving us.
Eventually, they deleted the question without annswering it “since the asker doesn’t have the courage to reveal themselves” and I was laid off which was “totally unrelated to the question you asked”.
Before leaving I dumped the database for that app out of curiosity. You bet that every single question also had an entry of who asked which question. They knew all along.
I try to be careful about e.g. changing punctuation and spacing if I want anonymous feedback to stay anonymous.
After some shuffling at work, I ended up spending some time under an awful manager. She approached me after an anonymous round of feedback and said "I noticed you wrote _____." I had, in fact, not written that.
On some level, having her guess wrong seemed even worse, but it also felt nice to be able to honestly say "I did not." Hopefully taught her to respect anonymity next time.
> “I’d like to extend my respect and compassion and sympathy for the ex president and his family, because they’re going to be going through an especially tough time,” Adams added.
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.
Sure, but one wishes that it didn't need to arrive on the back of a face-to-face encounter with his own mortality. That understanding of a shared humanity is accessible in other ways, though cancer diagnoses do have a way of shoving it in your face.
We have seen this pattern repeated with numerous people who share Adams' political opinions, in that this level of empathy only seems to arrive once they themselves go through a similar experience. People who have that empathy without the need of that direct experience tend to have different politics.
This is why I'm personally unimpressed by "I supported Trump until it personally affected me and my eyes were opened" narratives.
When I see these stories, it's clear that nothing about that person has fundamentally changed. They didn't care that this same thing was happening to others; in many cases they cheered it on. Only when that same injustice is personally turned against them do they actually care, and they will go back to no longer caring the moment their own pain ends.
Except of course this other dig at Biden elsewhere in the article:
> “I have the same cancer that Joe Biden has. I also have prostate cancer that has also spread to my bones, but I’ve had it longer than he’s had it – well, longer than he’s admitted having it,” Adams said.
The use of the word "admitted" implies that Biden is either lying about how far it has progressed, or that he has known about it longer than he has admitted.
I’m no doctor but I know PSA test would have identified its existence long before this stated progression. It’s a blood test that would be routine for any male his age, he’s probably had them at least annually for decades of his life at this point
>The use of the word "admitted" implies that Biden is either lying about how far it has progressed, or that he has known about it longer than he has admitted.
Adams doesn't need to imply it when medical SOP implies it.
I understand why Biden would not want to share that info and think that he made the right call for the situation he was in at the time (even before you consider domestic politics it's generally unwise for heads of state to talk about medical problems unless they're imminently stepping down because of them) but every man in this country over 40 knows that this cancer is screened for and someone getting "head of state" level care doesn't just get surprised by this kind of cancer at this stage unless many people were negligent.
"admitting" could also be in the sense of "disclosing". I wouldn't expect anyone, even an elected leader, to immediately disclose a health issue that requires some amount of understanding and decision-making.
There's a segment of the population that thinks he knew while he was running for president but didn't disclose or "admit" the issue to the public. Given that this is an aggressively metastatic cancer, and Biden's campaign ended nearly 10 months ago, I think that's implausible to the point of being ludicrous.
> or that he has known about it longer than he has admitted.
Which is probably true. And it's fine, he has no obligation to disclose this until he wants to. In contrast his dementia though ....... that's something he should have disclosed earlier.
That would explain his rather obvious lack of energy these days.
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.
Dilbert also failed to keep up with the times. Despite publishing strips about AI or remote work or etc, you can still tell that he has spent so long away from that world that he no longer has any novel insight into it. All of the jokes come secondhand from anecdotes that he hears or reads about.
And Adams failed to keep with himself with his fawning over who could be described as the pointy-headed-boss in chief.
Seriously, making your whole career deriding stupid, clueless, cruel top managers and then lionizing Trump... I guess there isn't a single mirror in his house.
It's almost certainly hard to maintain the energy/inspiration needed for a daily comic strip/comic. I also think Scott Adams had trouble moving beyond the 1990s Pac Bell environment after he was no longer part of corporate (much less startup) life.
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.)
I grew up dreaming of being a cartoonist, and while Gary Larson, Berkely Breathed, and Bill Watterson were my holy trinity Dilbert wasn't far off. Always admired Adams and his humor - and like you even more so once I ended up in the corporate computer world.
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.
It was a little sad to watch him get radicalized in real time. I really enjoyed reading his blog before this started to happen. But then a few publications started quoting blog posts of his out of context as rage bait -- I remember he was particularly butthurt about some Jezebel posts that took things he said out of context.
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.
Yeah I remember binging his blog while between classes in university - he wrote well and had interesting thoughts on marketability, mastery, business, etc., all things that I was interested in as someone learning to be an adult and find his place in the world. Then Trump ran for president, and honestly the blog was still good - Adams had some genuinely good insights about why Trump appealed, and suggested that he might be using the Republicans to get into power but he really doesn't share their values and will shake things up for the better. But then somehow Adams' identity got wrapped up in the idea of Trump not being as bad as people think and he just supported Trump more and more even when it became clear that Trump did not have a master plan to liberalize the Republican party.
I liked his blog at first and thought it really declined with video and short form content. It’s like his written editing slowed him down and made him less clickbaity than when he could post a video with no editing in just minutes.
> 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.
OneFTE was brilliant, and the creator explicitly talked about what he was doing differently from Dilbert - that you could mock the absurdities while still acknowledging the positives of the corporate life. And then he took the whole thing down :(.
100% agree ^^^ He went full Elon Musk, before Elon Musk. But yeah, back in the 90s/2000s, when my career in Corporate America started to settle in, his Dilbert comics brought my loads of comic relief. My favorite character was Wally; he always seemed to "fail up". I recall Wally meeting with the pointy-haired boss to tell him he'd returned from his 3-week vacation. The boss said, "You were out on a 3-week vacation?" Wally, the master, replied, "Sorry, I misspoke. I'm leaving now for my 3-week vacation." LOL
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.
As weird as he is, his claim that Trump uses a form of mass hypnosis is still the best explanation for Trump's success that I've heard. But why then Adams would support Trump, who is clearly the ultimate PHB, is something I never understood.
If you've ever read Thinking Fast and Slow, Trump is great at appealing to System 1. He's spent his entire lifetime focusing on his branding and what people think of him. I dislike almost all of Trump's policies and his tactics; however, he's great at oversimplifying things and getting the visceral reactions he wants.
Chapelle's SNL monolog about Trump is pretty spot on too.
Don't underestimate the extent to which sexism and racism factored in to his victory also. The level of competence, integrity and patriotism between the two candidates was staggering, and yet...
One of Bernie Sanders campaign slogans in his first primary campaigns which started in 2015 was “Bernie Beats Trump” - the lack of enthusiasm around Hillary Clinton was palpable.
Democrats snatching defeat from the jaws of victory is a vintage meme at this point. He may have been the most famous person to say what so many of us expected first, but it just means he paid attention.
My one "boomer" take: Something I wish the younger generation would learn is that it's useful to be able to separate a work from its author. Some of my favorite films were produced by Harvey Weinstein. They're still my favorite films. The fact that a slimeball was a force behind making them doesn't detract from their content. I like Robert Heinlein sci-fi, even though, judged by today's moral yardstick, some of his views were... questionable. I still like Harry Potter even though J. K. Rowling went totally bananas. Troubled and/or terrible people can make great art and music, and it's OK to like the art and question the artist.
>Adams has become a controversial figure in recent years.
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.
I think the thing with "manifesting" is it's almost impossible to write something down a 100 times a day, everyday without also doing other things about the goal, as it's on your mind so much. Obviously if you write "I'm going to become an olympic athlete" but just sit on a chair nothing will happen. But if you're writing that daily you're going to end up doing more exercise because you're thinking about it. You might spot opportunities that you would otherwise miss because your brain stops skimming over it because it's such a repetitive pathway now.
And while that obviously has limits, and is far from the magical technique some might claim - it's very hard to argue against things that work.
I always had trouble knowing what he actually believed and what he just said for fun/attention/as some sort of experiment in what he could get away with saying.
But I do think that the wild admiration of manipulative people was genuine.
Lol, Garry Shandling "manifested" if you deeply care enough about something to actually spend the time to write it out 100 times in a day, you might also take some other actions...
The claim that conservatism is rooted in an inability to process reality is a misrepresentation.
The actual cornerstone of conservatism is an instinctual preference for stability, order, and the familiar. The danger arises when this instinct is hijacked by a rigid ideology that resists truth and seeks control rather than continuity.
Which is, you know, what the American right is doing.
> inability to process information clearly and think in reality in lieu of ideology is the cornerstone of conservative thinking.
It is absolutely not a unique failure to conservatives. But it does explain why there is so much interchange between crunchy granola hippies and qanon militias.
That is misinformation. There is nothing in traditional conservative thinking which depends on inability to process information clearly or think in reality. Those mental deficits can be found across the political spectrum. We might not agree with conservative value systems but let's at least be intellectually honest in our criticisms instead of using strawman arguments.
> And while that may seem a far cry from the alt-right stuff he eschews
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.
get-rich-quick schemes have been the bread and butter of the self-help/manosphere/conservative environment for quite a while. Its not a mistake that most "famous" people in these circles are either selling courses to make you "rich" or supplements to make you "strong".
and with a population desperate for any improvement in life these things end up finding a place, just like all the betting platforms all over the place. the only reason to bet is if you think you'll win.
It's not controversial to believe one lying politician over the other. Approximately 50% of your country does that. If you squint you'll see that both parties are an expression of the same statist ideology and there's very little difference between them. Now anarchists are a different breed but they're a ridiculed minority.
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.
Even if what you were saying is true (and its most certainly not), its funny how everyone who makes this argument always tends to fall on the conservative side, that in fact does significantly more lying as a verifiable statistic.
I appreciated Dilbert, but then he started showing up in my timeline amplifying pro-Gaza bombings tweets.
I was surprised and disappointed with that as those Hasbara takes were the geopolitical propoganda equivalent to pointy-hair boss's office politics speech balloons ("the only way to rescue the hostages is to bomb everything, including the captors... and the hostages").
smh at these people, Israel went full mask off and had the gall to blame "anti-semites" for... what exactly? Demanding justice for people they're bombing.
Wild disgusting times.
But Scott had gone full mask off a ways before that. It's very sad that people we once admired turned out to be disgusting.
I'm using my real first name here and I hope he uses his remaining time to contemplate the ethnic cleansing he has championed. He isn't done yet; I pray he reverses.
I found it hard to reconcile his charming and witty comic strips with some of the ugly things he wrote elsewhere. I would never usually throw a book away, but I made an exception for one of his books, because I didn't want anyone to see it on my bookshelf and I didn't want to give to anyone else.
I have a personal convention for books like that - I don't have any Dilberts on the shelf but a lot of Neil Gaimans, plus an artsy TTRPG book ("Maze of the Blue Medusa") that's also made by someone who is now widely considered a serial sexual assaulter - I don't (always) remove them from my shelves but I turn them upside down, like a flag indicating distress.
The more interesting question is: what do we do with the art of people who were revealed to be terrible? I first saw people wrestle with this idea for Michael Jackson and recently it has been a big issue related to Kanye West.
It was an awfully big thing. I had a number of his books along with a little Dilbert doll sitting on top of my desktop PC, and threw it all away for the same reason as the parent poster when I learned of the awful things he'd said.
I had "Defective People" in the 90s and it was effing crazy how the last chapter went off about how he could manifest reality. That's when I knew he was off his nut.
I always found the bitterness and resentment underlying (but clearly coming through in) the comics in perfect tune with the rest of the works, even if the comics were more prone to focus on areas of life where the bitterness and resentment were more common and less divisive.
Consider that we wouldn't have the life we have today if cancel-culture was the norm several decades ago. Not everyone will be perfect at everything, so just take the good and ignore the rest. Genius and insanity tend to be very, very close.
'Cancel culture' was the norm several decades ago. And several centuries before that.
Just in semi-recent history we had mccarthy 'cancelling' people for purportedly being linked to communism, and that was a whole lot more serious than some modern publisher refusing to buy your book or twitter banning you.
A few decades before that, it wasn't real uncommon that if your neighbors objected to who you were or what you said, for them to hang you by your neck from a convenient tree until you were quite dead.
Humans have always suffered penalties for being on the wrong side of their neighbor's majority opinions. These days the penalties are frankly pretty minor.
It's preventable by closing your eyes, but you need to be very persistent. Some people manage to keep their eyes closed for decades, which I find impressive. The rest of us just come to terms with reality.
I think death of his stepson might have impacted him deeply at personal level turning him into a bit of a racist. In Trump he saw a hero who would take up the cause.
Adams did such a great job exposing the absurdities of the American white collar workplace, as seen by the underlings. So it is puzzling how he went over to the dark side of the pointy haired Boss. And the Boss's masters.
I hope some pharma underling might have cooked up some good meds for Adams, despite all the pharma bosses and their backers.
> Adams did such a great job exposing the absurdities of the American white collar workplace, as seen by the underlings. So it is puzzling how he went over to the dark side of the pointy haired Boss.
Adams was an MBA, a manager that was resentful that his advancement in management was not as fast as he thought it should been when he left Crocker National Bank for Pacific Bell, and then resentful that he couldn't break into management at Pacific Bell, even while publicly mocking Pacific Bell management (I don't mean indirectly in the comics he was writing while working there, but directly in the media interviews he gave about the comics.)
His only problem with the PHB was always that it was someone else sitting behind that desk, and not him.
Readit News
He was the first to publish an open way to communicate with him in order to out the corporate crazies, and readers did in droves, explaining the inanity of their workplace and getting secret retribution for stuff they clearly couldn't complain about publicly.
A good percentage of youtubers and substackers today actively cultivate their readership as a source of new material. They're more of a refining prism or filter for an otherwise unstated concerns than a source of wisdom.
Doing this seems to require identifying with your readers and their concerns. That could be disturbing to the author if the tide turns, or to the readers if they find out their role model was gaming them or otherwise unreal, but I imagine it is pretty heady stuff.
I hope he (and anyone facing cancer) has people with whom he can share honestly, and has access to the best health care available.
Grand Budapest Hotel starts with the author stating that when you're an author, people simply tell you stories and you don't need to come up with them anymore!
Scott just quoted a study saying black people didn't want to be around white people. Whether or not you agree with the above, it doesn't change the reality. Obscuring the history of the Arab slave trade, whites being enslaved, Africans selling Africans into slavery, and dozens of other historical deceptions, have backfired and permanently divided people.
I've come to believe that infohazards are real.
Consider alcoholism: some people never drink anyway, plenty of people can have one drink or a few drinks and then stop. But some people can't stop and destroy their lives. Consider gambling: similar distribution applies. Many people never gamble, many people have a little scratchcard or sport bet now and then, and some people get out of control and sink all the money they have into it.
Gambling is an idea that's a trap. Some people get like this with ideas on the internet. In fact there's an XKCD about it: "can't sleep, someone's wrong on the internet".
Usually there's a single atrocity or injustice that triggers it. Maybe it's real, maybe it's been subject to distorted reporting. But it becomes a monomania. You can't counter them with statistics or variations on "most people aren't like that".
I didn't understand it much as a kid, but later read an old copy of his book on how offices and office culture works (basically each chapter is Scott describing office did functionality with a liberal sprinkling of related Dilbert comics) and literally almost everything was 1:1 with the company I was at, only it was a good bit toned down of course. The beauty was that it was somehow generally applicable anywhere a company gets above a certain amount of employees. There was a lot of good information there such as how the company tries to get you to poop on yourself in your performance review in order to justify not giving you a raise or firing you (see - you yourself said that you needed improvement in working with others). There are many other insights as well that I found useful in my career. A lot of it is common sense, but it helped me come to terms with the irrationality of the corporate world. Every few years I reread it and find it more applicable than before.
He later wrote a book on why he thought Trump beat Hillary and it also had a ton of insights I didn't think about as I'm not a marketer. Anyone on Hilary's campaign team should read it. Of course it doesn't cover how Hilary was painted as some kind of evil queen from a fairy tale since the 90s. Scott kinda acts a bit nuts in this book though as he goes off on frequent tangents about being a trained hypnotist and how he recognized that Trump was doing the same thing. One of the many examples was that both of them went on SNL, but Trump attempted to act presidential, while Hilary was attempting to act more like the common person and it just didn't work and came off unprofessional. He also flew in a plane that looked like Air Force One and gave press conferences with a little fake Oval office desk.
Adams also came up with the term "confuseopoly" to describe companies that make it so hard to compare products and companies that you have to purchase on vibes. Economics textbooks use it now along with his blog example of trying to buy a truck. I see this dark pattern everywhere now.
I hadn't really thought about the twitter angle you talk about, but did notice his blog started changing back in 2016ish. I just attributed it to him running out of ideas for the comic and finding that grifting made him more money. I guess you really can see some of the shift in reading the more recent books, which is sad.
https://dynamicsgptipsandtraps.wordpress.com/wp-content/uplo...
"The clue meter is reading zero."
Everyone at Motorola recognized it immediately.
https://archive.jsonline.com/greensheet/there-oughta-be-a-la...
Isn’t that all comedy? It’s halting because it’s true. And sure, we may find striking truth through meditation. But it’s more likely to hit you in the real world.
Dilbert comes down to the caves where trolls (accountants) reside and gets a tour. The guide points to a troll sitting behind a desk, and mumbling in a stupor: "nine, nine, nine...".
Guide: And this is our random numbers generator.
Dilbert: Are you sure those are random?
Guide: That's the problem with randomness - you can never be sure.
Edit: Found it here: https://www.americanscientist.org/article/the-quest-for-rand....
And thank you, Scott - many laughs thanks to you.
[Mordac] "Security is more important than usability. In a perfect world, no one would able able to use anything."
[Asok's computer screen]: "To complete login procedure, stare directly at the sun."
[0]: https://dilbert-viewer.herokuapp.com/2007-11-16
https://dilbert-viewer.herokuapp.com/1998-08-24
It has hit home a time or two when the "managers" hire in a "consultant".
https://dilbert-viewer.herokuapp.com/1995-03-25
Dilbert is trapped in the bowels of Accounting.
Dogbert: I understand you have Dilbert. Free him, or else...
Troll: Or else what?
Dogbert: Or else I will put this cap on my head backwards! Your little hardwired accounting brain will explode just looking at it!
Dilbert: What was that popping sound?
Dogbert: A paradigm shifting without a clutch.
35" monitor 20 megs of ram 1.2 gigabytes of hard disk space
https://web.archive.org/web/20150205042406/https://dilbert.c...
Not because somebody did that to me, but I had to migrate two racks of systems in one night under literal and proverbial heat due to former one.
You can think pointy haired as the embodiment of Murphy of Murphy's laws.
Also the one where Wally insists his towel gets cleaner every time he uses it: https://br.omega.com/dilbert/311.html
There's one somewhere where they're eating lunch and I think Wally asks Dilbert if he has any extra napkins and Dilbert says he won't know until he's done eating.
> There's one somewhere where they're eating lunch and I think Wally asks Dilbert if he has any extra napkins
This one: <https://dilbert-viewer.herokuapp.com/1994-10-29>
------------
pointy haired boss making making a presentation: "research shows that customers want high-quality products at low-prices.
but we make low-quality products.
so we are going to sell them at high-prices and call it a strategy"
-------------
If anyone has a link to the original comic, please share it, I would like to see it again. It captures so many themes succinctly, and was very very astute for the late nineties when corps were doing crazy things and calling it a "strategy".
Very nice.
And also, what a cool read that was, thanks for sharing the article.
<Dilbert looks back with a blank stare>
---
Godspeed Scott. Thank you for all the laughs.
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)
So on the card I provided with my gift, I signed off the name of someone else in class, and partially erased it. Made sure it was still somewhat legible and then wrote "From your secret santa" beneath it.
They didn't believe the gift was from me even after the teacher provided them with the original draw, and their supposed gift giver identified someone else as their recipient.
I've seen the pattern repeat with other data collection as well -- "anonymous" data collection or "anonymized" data almost never is.
In reality, they cherry picked the questions that they wanted to talk about and ignored the hard ones. We could tell because all asked questions were publicly visible in the app. But not all answered “ah we’re out of time”
So I once posted a question about why were the interns unpaid while writing code we shipped in production. I posted this question just after the previous town hall so that it would stay visible in the app for the longest time until the next town hall and would also be top of the list of pending questions.
For a couple weeks they said they wanted to answer it but needed to ask clarification questions to make sure they understood correctly, so could please the asker reveal themselves as it’s only fair. I never said it was me and nobody said it was them either. They couldn’t just delete the question like they usually did with unanswered questions before as this had stirred quite a little storm between employees. And it would clash with the “we’re open and fair” koolaid they were serving us.
Eventually, they deleted the question without annswering it “since the asker doesn’t have the courage to reveal themselves” and I was laid off which was “totally unrelated to the question you asked”.
Before leaving I dumped the database for that app out of curiosity. You bet that every single question also had an entry of who asked which question. They knew all along.
After some shuffling at work, I ended up spending some time under an awful manager. She approached me after an anonymous round of feedback and said "I noticed you wrote _____." I had, in fact, not written that.
On some level, having her guess wrong seemed even worse, but it also felt nice to be able to honestly say "I did not." Hopefully taught her to respect anonymity next time.
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.
When I see these stories, it's clear that nothing about that person has fundamentally changed. They didn't care that this same thing was happening to others; in many cases they cheered it on. Only when that same injustice is personally turned against them do they actually care, and they will go back to no longer caring the moment their own pain ends.
> “I have the same cancer that Joe Biden has. I also have prostate cancer that has also spread to my bones, but I’ve had it longer than he’s had it – well, longer than he’s admitted having it,” Adams said.
The use of the word "admitted" implies that Biden is either lying about how far it has progressed, or that he has known about it longer than he has admitted.
The implied timelines don’t match.
Adams doesn't need to imply it when medical SOP implies it.
I understand why Biden would not want to share that info and think that he made the right call for the situation he was in at the time (even before you consider domestic politics it's generally unwise for heads of state to talk about medical problems unless they're imminently stepping down because of them) but every man in this country over 40 knows that this cancer is screened for and someone getting "head of state" level care doesn't just get surprised by this kind of cancer at this stage unless many people were negligent.
There's a segment of the population that thinks he knew while he was running for president but didn't disclose or "admit" the issue to the public. Given that this is an aggressively metastatic cancer, and Biden's campaign ended nearly 10 months ago, I think that's implausible to the point of being ludicrous.
Which is probably true. And it's fine, he has no obligation to disclose this until he wants to. In contrast his dementia though ....... that's something he should have disclosed earlier.
Edit: "Several doctors told Reuters that cancers like this are typically diagnosed before they reach such an advanced stage." from https://www.reuters.com/world/us/bidens-cancer-diagnosis-pro...
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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.
Dilbert is about the 90s.
Seriously, making your whole career deriding stupid, clueless, cruel top managers and then lionizing Trump... I guess there isn't a single mirror in his house.
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.)
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.
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.
OneFTE was brilliant, and the creator explicitly talked about what he was doing differently from Dilbert - that you could mock the absurdities while still acknowledging the positives of the corporate life. And then he took the whole thing down :(.
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.
https://web.archive.org/web/20230301101359/https://dilbert.c...
"Remind me, when are we planning to finish switching over to the new system, again?"
"six months"
"I estimate that it will take 8 months to deliver your feature"
Chapelle's SNL monolog about Trump is pretty spot on too.
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Adams, himself? Not so much. I think he tends to have a rather nasty outlook on humanity, and I had a hard time reconciling it.
I do know that he was/is pretty much about as far away from Diamond Joe* as you can get. Interesting that they seem to be fighting the same battle.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Biden_(The_Onion)
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.
And while that obviously has limits, and is far from the magical technique some might claim - it's very hard to argue against things that work.
If you are writing "Repetitive Strain Injury".
Ye be needing a mirror, lad. A mirror to help ye pull out the log in yer eye.
Can we not do this kind of thing please?
But I do think that the wild admiration of manipulative people was genuine.
The actual cornerstone of conservatism is an instinctual preference for stability, order, and the familiar. The danger arises when this instinct is hijacked by a rigid ideology that resists truth and seeks control rather than continuity.
Which is, you know, what the American right is doing.
It is absolutely not a unique failure to conservatives. But it does explain why there is so much interchange between crunchy granola hippies and qanon militias.
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.
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and with a population desperate for any improvement in life these things end up finding a place, just like all the betting platforms all over the place. the only reason to bet is if you think you'll win.
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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
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Nah there’s plenty of Trumpers in tech. Go on Blind, you’ll see.
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I was surprised and disappointed with that as those Hasbara takes were the geopolitical propoganda equivalent to pointy-hair boss's office politics speech balloons ("the only way to rescue the hostages is to bomb everything, including the captors... and the hostages").
Wild disgusting times.
But Scott had gone full mask off a ways before that. It's very sad that people we once admired turned out to be disgusting.
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The more interesting question is: what do we do with the art of people who were revealed to be terrible? I first saw people wrestle with this idea for Michael Jackson and recently it has been a big issue related to Kanye West.
Basically, what do you value more and what can you excuse?
"I would never judge a book by it's cover."
> because I didn't want anyone to see it on my bookshelf
"Yet I am worried that someone else might."
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Just in semi-recent history we had mccarthy 'cancelling' people for purportedly being linked to communism, and that was a whole lot more serious than some modern publisher refusing to buy your book or twitter banning you.
A few decades before that, it wasn't real uncommon that if your neighbors objected to who you were or what you said, for them to hang you by your neck from a convenient tree until you were quite dead.
Humans have always suffered penalties for being on the wrong side of their neighbor's majority opinions. These days the penalties are frankly pretty minor.
That's how we have the life we have today. People now seem to be taking it to the extreme, ignoring the rest, even when there is no hint of any good.
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After reading his other work, I can’t really enjoy his comics anymore (and I’m a die hard HP Lovecraft fan, FFS).
Anyway, I recommend not looking his other stuff up.
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I hope some pharma underling might have cooked up some good meds for Adams, despite all the pharma bosses and their backers.
Adams was an MBA, a manager that was resentful that his advancement in management was not as fast as he thought it should been when he left Crocker National Bank for Pacific Bell, and then resentful that he couldn't break into management at Pacific Bell, even while publicly mocking Pacific Bell management (I don't mean indirectly in the comics he was writing while working there, but directly in the media interviews he gave about the comics.)
His only problem with the PHB was always that it was someone else sitting behind that desk, and not him.