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.
Were they? Can you cite an example? Because I also grew up with Dilbert, and I was never aware of it.
The strip that got him dropped in 2022 featured a black character (first in the history of the cartoon) who "identifies as white".
And as the other commenter says, it also mocks trans people. By applying their language to something presented as arbitrary and surface-level.
But also for the DEI thing specifically, what's going on is that objecting to the implementation details is proof that you oppose the stated goal. Even if what you're doing is pointing out that the implementation is counter-productive to the stated goal. I think it might be some sort of tribalism thing.