Around 17 minutes into Scott Adams’ YouTube livestream on February 22 a viewer noted in the rolling online comments, “Scott [is] going for a real cancellation today”.
Referencing a dubious survey, the creator of satirical workplace comic strip Dilbert had just subjected his audience on Real Coffee with Scott Adams to a racist commentary, denigrating black people as a “hate group”. In response to the resulting backlash, Adams later protested that he was opposed to any discrimination against individuals and that his recent comments had used hyperbole to “extend the conversation”. (When I contacted him for comment, he referred me to this interview).
That viewer’s comments were on the mark, however. Portfolio, part of Penguin Random House, has scrapped plans to produce a new self-help book by Adams. Many newspapers have ceased publication of the widely syndicated Dilbert strip.
It may come as a surprise to office drones who used to pin Adams’ observations to their cubicle walls in the 1990s and 2000s that Dilbert is still going. It may even come as a surprise to Adams. When I interviewed him in 2013 at the comfortable California home that Dilbert helped pay for, he predicted he would have retired the eponymous everyman-engineer by now. (Those were more innocent times: my scoop from that interview was that the character would soon lose his trademark tie, which he duly did in 2014, when his office dress code switched to “business dorky”.)
The Dilbert legacy seemed assured back then. The Dilbert Principle, which states that “the most ineffective workers will be systematically moved to the place where they can do the least damage — management”, had been the subject of academic analysis. Adams’ early adoption of digital distribution, for the comic strip, merchandise, and his own wider views seemed to stand him in good stead to reap the online rewards well into the future, even as print media withered.
Adams also claimed he had helped influence the actual practice of management. He told the Harvard Business Review — which came calling for his insights around the same time I did — that the fact that underlings sent Dilbert strips anonymously to bad bosses “has been a little bit of a control on the worst of the management fad excesses”.
At the time, Adams wanted to use the next phase of his career to pursue and promote world-changing ideas, such as online courses. Instead, he has become better known as an online provocateur. He was one of the few who predicted that the conditions were right for Donald Trump to win the US presidency in 2016, based on his analysis of the entrepreneur’s powers of persuasion, and later expressed sympathy for some of Trump’s ideas.
Fans of the Dilbert strip noted a parallel shift towards blunter satire, reflecting the polarising issues of the Trump and post-Trump years. Adams himself made headlines for a variety of provocative statements, including a claim in 2020 that a Dilbert TV show had been cut from the schedules because Adams was white.
To some fans, office “wokeness” now presents a legitimate target for the strip. In fact, Dilbert was already lightly mocking the trend for “diversity sensitivity training” in the 1990s. But publishers who have dropped the strip say its tone has changed since then.
The editor of The Oregonian, Therese Bottomly, explained to readers this week that because of Adams’ “racist rant”, the paper would “not extend his reach and we will not support him”. Dilbert’s habitual lampooning of office culture had “veered into mockery of people’s pronoun use and gender identity”, she added. For instance, when Adams introduced a black character last year, he identified as white. “If this one doesn’t get me cancelled, more chances to come,” he tweeted.
Adams is far from cancelled. He can continue to livestream, blog, and, indeed, publish his daily comic strip through online channels, untroubled by the sensitivities of old media. Meanwhile, managerial faddishness, favouritism and outright incompetence endure. But Adams’ inflammatory remarks have finally driven Dilbert, subversive icon of a bygone office age, into exile.
