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.
Caring about the man this much is like caring about Colonel Sanders or Tony the Tiger, it's weird and kind of gross.
Shakespeare, Alexander Pope, Dostoyevsky have changed my life. Just as much as family.
You can loudly say “no” and I’m loudly saying “yes.”
To the extent that is arguably true (and I’d argue it mostly is not, there may be a one-way effect and/or a parasocial attachment, but “personal relationship” requires two-way interaction, and confusing a parasocial attachment for a personal relationship is the start of...lots of bad things) those relationships quite literally do not share the “you don’t choose family” aspect that applies to (a subset of) family relationships.