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".
He was told explicitly by his boss that they weren't promoting white men.
> The strip that got him dropped in 2022 featured a black character (first in the history of the cartoon) who "identifies as white".
That wasn't what got him dropped, he did an interview with Chris Cuomo where he explained what actually happened and why: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_bv1jfYYu4
This is what he claims but I find it very difficult to believe. Why would management even say such a thing and expose themselves to a lawsuit? Let alone "not promoting white men". It's preposterous.
The 1980s were not the 2020s. I can probably drop a half dozen working anecdotes from that time that would blow your mind…on all sorts of things.
However, latter half of the 90s I was in a high enough position in a couple of organizations to experience conversation in management meetings that the hiring of diverse candidates as a preference if possible was often discussed. Although in hindsight you would probably consider it more tokenism than a concerted effort at diversity.
So, these types of policies did exist at the time. But I'm sure there was a continuum of policies in effect at different institutions in that era.
Of course, to me it's perfectly plausible that Adams' boss told him they weren't promoting white men, but largely because I could see the supervisor lying to Adams simply for the purpose of not looking like the bad guy. ("Hey, I wanted to promote you, but you know how the Dems keep meddling in corporate affairs, right? My hands were tied.")