The #Dilbert gauge never failed me. The more Dilbert comic strips I saw, the nastier the place was.
I worked at a one place where Dilbert was banned. Specifically, just Dilbert. Sounds extreme, but the bosses knew exactly what #ScottAdams was peddling, and they didn’t want any.
That office ran smoothly and was among the nicest.
5/9
So #Dilbert was my canary in the coal mine. I can’t think of another comic strip that functioned like this. Cathy was drawn almost exactly as badly as Dilbert, but the only thing I learned from seeing that strip in an office was the person pinning it up had body image issues. Peanuts meant the person had self-esteem problems. (Or, contrarywise, they identified with Snoopy.)
6/9
So I guess the moral here is: #ScottAdams was a thin-skinned, egotistical monster who wrote and badly drew a hateful comic strip called #Dilbert, and all his “humor” punched down, and he used sock puppet accounts to brag about his own genius, and was a racist, and he thought Donald Trump was great...
7/9
...but for all that, if I were forced – I donno, at gunpoint, maybe -- to utter one nice word about #ScottAdams, I guess I’d say that for a few years, he was...
USEFUL.
8/9
Further reading: “The trouble with #Dilbert : how corporate culture gets the last laugh”
by Norman Solomon
https://archive.org/details/troublewithdilbe00solo_0/mode/2up
9/9
I remember reading Dilbert when I was at Uni in the late 1990's.
After I did one internship, I realised how true-to-life some of his observations were, and decided that corporate life was not for me. 😁
I stopped reading Adams after he outed himself, but this Chrimbo, my partner gave me a Dilbert calendar, as it had been recommended by Amazon as a gift for me.
The latest cartoons were even worse than I had realised.
Just right-wing talking points raised as humour... :|
@BillySmith @ridetheory Similar timeline for me. In school I related to the "engineer like math more than business" sorts of jokes in there because I was always motivated by learning about new stuff.
Once I graduated and got a job? Eh... They were no longer funny. You see some of the "tropes" in real life, and they get less funny. It turns out people aren't 2 dimensional. The grumpy folks who like to deploy those labels in real life? Not so nice. :-\
I saw the same thing happen with Dave Sim when he was writing Cerebus.
Another interesting creative author, who turned to misogyny and hate. :(
