zlacker

Scott Adams died today. I want to acknowledge something complicated.

He always felt culturally like family to me. His peaks—the biting humor about corporate absurdity, the writing on systems thinking and compounding habits, the clarity about the gap between what organizations say and what they do—unquestionably made me healthier, happier, and wealthier. If you worked in tech in the 90s and 2000s, Dilbert was a shared language for everything broken about corporate life.

His views, always unapologetic, became more strident over time and pushed everyone away. That also felt like family.

You don’t choose family, and you don’t get to edit out the parts that shaped you before you understood what was happening. The racism and the provocations were always there, maybe, just quieter. The 2023 comments that ended Dilbert’s newspaper run were unambiguous.

For Scott, like family, I’m a better person for the contribution. I hope I can represent the good things: the humor, the clarity of thought, the compounding good habits with health and money. I can avoid the ugliness—the racism, the grievance, the need to be right at any cost.

Taking inventory is harder than eulogizing or denouncing. But it’s more honest.

>>jchall+(OP)
I don't get "avoiding the ugliness" when someone dies. We need to acknowledge the ugliness and try to do better.

Acting like "oh, he was trolling", or "it was just a small amount of hating Black people and women" is exactly how you get Steven Miller in the fucking White House.

We need to make it shameful to be bigoted again, and that means calling out the bigotry even in death.

>>spanka+g9
By this standard, many, of not most of the artists that lived prior to the Civil Rights Era are to be thrown out.

I don't really want to study fluctuating levels of religious bigotry in Bach's life when I listen to his works.

>>inglor+Qf
I think there's a big difference between the following:

- enjoying the work of an unrepentant bigot who died hundreds of years ago, whose work is in the public domain, who does not materially benefit from your spectatorship (what with them being dead and all)

- enjoying the work of an unrepentant bigot who is alive today, whose work they have ownership of, who materially benefits from your spectatorship

- enjoying the work of an unrepentant bigot who died mere minutes ago, whose work is owned by their estate, whose heirs materially benefit from your spectatorship

I think the first category is fine, the second category is unambiguously not fine, and the third category is ambiguous, but I would err on the side of "don't consume".

>>zemo+Ci
Is it fine to pirate such works, then?

I don't think I ever paid for a Dilbert comics strip, though I never downloaded them from somewhere illegal either.

>>inglor+rj
I personally would go with no, because you're still propagating their cultural product. One rarely consumes media with the intention of keeping it a secret; half the point of watching a movie or tv show is to talk about it. The entire sociological function of celebrities is that we talk about them. "I am doing research on Scott Adams and I want to consume some Dilbert as a research device", um, sure, I guess, I dunno, why are you doing research on a recently dead bigot, what is the purpose of that. etc.

I'm not -your- conscience, I can only explain my own. To me? No, that's not fine.