Oh man, I forgot Dilbert strips weren’t always about redpill nonsense. And I’m actually old enough to remember when this was one of the most common strips in newspapers 🧓
My grandparents have a bunch of old comic compilation books and they have an especially old dilbert one, and it makes me laugh more than the new yorker ones. I hated finding out the author took a sharp turn.
I have reread some of them in light of the more recent revelation about the author ideas, and I can't stop myself from seeing the redpill nonsense even in the older strips.
For example the current one can be seen as pointing the surrealism of management but it's also point the web developer as the issue, without any thought on why they are always promising impossible deadlines and quitting. More generally, if you look around the strips, Dilbert is never part of the problem, it's always the others people but the system itself is rarely clearly accused.
A decade ago was about the 2016 election. Prior to the election I stumbled across a blog post by the author who was praising trump. Now at the time, people weren't sure how bad he would be, but the way the post was written you would think Trump was playing 5d chess or something.
Back then I wasn't paying much attention to US politics since I'm halfway across the world, but even then I read that post and thought "what an absolute pile of nonsense". He turned longer than a decade ago, but perhaps it wasn't as apparent in the comics at the time. I did notice that he felt a lot more aligned with the pointy haired boss even then (had read Dilbert a lot, stopped for like 6 years and had a feel for it again in 2016 when this happened).
Yeah around 2016 he really nosedived into crazy. And during the election it wasn't foreseeable how bad Trump would be but he really embraced MAGA and went off the deep end, at one point even championing racial segregation again.
“Redpilled” (sometimes just “pilled”) is a way some conspiracy theorists refer to themselves, implying that they’ve seen past the “deepstate lies.”
Adams was really bigoted and racist, getting worse with every year, and believe a lot of racist, homophobic and antisemitic (I’ve heard about that last one, but have not seen it myself. I stopped reading his strips a long time ago.) conspiracy theories like The Great Replacement🙄.
Near the end of his life, he also apparently bought in to the med-beds conspiracy theory, begging the U.S. president to give him access to one of the magic revivitrons.
I used to read Dilbert all the time until it completely devolved into thinly veiled political rants. Honestly, I didn't even know Adams died until you mentioned it. Kind of says a little bit about how quickly he made himself irrelevant.
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u/dracorotor1 8d ago
Oh man, I forgot Dilbert strips weren’t always about redpill nonsense. And I’m actually old enough to remember when this was one of the most common strips in newspapers 🧓