zlacker

>>dale_h+(OP)
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.

>>w10-1+NQ
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

>>tim333+552
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.

>>dragon+FS2
It's been a while since I read dilbert in the papers, but.. really?

The comic I remember was overwhelmingly about the banalities of working as a corporate engineering type. One of his peers was black, another was a woman, and they were not the butt of the joke. Pointy hair boss was.

>>wooooo+JD3
> One of his peers was black

AFAIK, the only non-White recurring Dilbert character was Asok the Intern, who was Indian.

A black character (who Adams himself described as the first black character in Dilbert) did appear in 2022, but, well...

https://www.reddit.com/r/onejoke/comments/ugunog/after_33_ye...

>>dragon+mJ3
Ahh, yeah, misremembered, I was thinking of Asok.

Still. "White guy writing about banal stuff must be white privilege/resentment" is a real stretch to apply to the comic during its prime. Your 2022 example only highlights the contrast.

The closest example I could think of from the 90s was a riff on whether you're supposed to open the door for women or not in these modern times, and it felt much more "confused everyman" rather than "aggrieved partisan".