The Dilbert future
Step aside, Bill Gates! Here comes today's real technology guru and his totally original, laugh-out-loud New York Timesbestseller that looks at the approaching new millennium and boldly predicts: more stupidity ahead. In The Dilbert Principleand Dogbert's Top Secret Management Handbook, Scott Adams skewered the absurdities of the corporate world. Now he takes the next logical step, turning his keen analytical focus on how human greed, stupidity and horniness will shape the future. Featuring the same irresistible amalgam of essays and cartoons that made Adams previous works so singularly entertaining, this uproariously funny, dead-on-target tome offers half-truthful, half-farcical predictions that push all of today's hot buttons - from business and technology to society and government. Children - they are our future, so we're pretty much hosed. Tip: Grab what you can while they're still too little to stop us. Human Potential - we'll finally learn to use the 90 percent of the brain we don't use today, and find out that there wasn't anything in that part. Computers - Technology and homeliness will combine to form a powerful type of birth control.
Stats for nerds
1recommend
21mentions
18people
2007–2026years
5% recommend71% neutral24% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Scott Adams talks about Affirmations here: http://www.mindhacks.org/2007/01/18/scott-adams-affirmations...
A friend showed me the chapter at the end of The Dilbert Future - I definitely recommend giving it a once over.
- > and an _alternative theory of gravity_
For people who haven't read The Dilbert Future: https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/32627/has-anyone...
It's a weird book and not in a great way. He presents a bunch of very strange "theories" in a way where he kind of says "haha just a silly lil thought... unless it's true", which I remember seeing in some of his early Trump stuff too.
- My youth experiences left me with zero desire to ever work anywhere near a tech company. But when I was still in grade school, I once flipped through a Scott Adams book that my father had borrowed from the local library. There's one line that I remember particularly clearly, directed at any woman who felt uncomfortable or ignored in the workplace:
Google tells me this is from "The Dilbert Future", 1997, pg. 146 under "Prediction 38". It's presented as the explanation for when a woman speaks in a meeting, and male coworkers don't listen to, quote, "the woman who is generating all that noise"."WE'RE THINKING ABOUT HAVING SEX WITH YOU!"Adams more or less tells female readers to just deal with it, while also telling male readers that they're broken/lying if they're not engaged in a constant sexual fantasy about their female coworkers.
To be honest, this did real damage to how I felt about sexuality and gender. Not a huge amount on its own, but it's just such a distorted take from a respected author, whose books my father kept checking out, that I read at a young age.
Scott Adams clearly lived an atypical life. Most people don't quit their jobs to write comics about corporate culture. If I had to guess why he took such a hard turn later on, I think, maybe it's something that happens when a humorist can't compartmentalize their penchant for absurdity and need for attention from real life, they can tell jokes that resonate with a lot of people, but at the same time their serious views also end up becoming ungrounded...
- The Dilbert Future (1997), apparently (ref https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Scott_Adams#Adams_knows_The_Se...)
- >Adams has become a controversial figure in recent years.
He has had some questionable views all throughout his life. In his book "The Dilbert Future", which was from 1997, the last 2 chapters are some wacky stuff about manifesting - i.e if you write something down 100 times a day every day it will come true and other stuff like that.
And while that may seem a far cry from the alt-right stuff he eschews, its really not - inability to process information clearly and think in reality in lieu of ideology is the cornerstone of conservative thinking.
- Obligatory: https://xkcd.com/1827/
I'm also reminded of something written by Scott Adams (decades ago, when his reputation was different.)
> Most people won't admit how they got their current jobs unless you push them up against a built-in wall unit and punch them in the stomach until they spill their drink and start yelling, "I'LL NEVER INVITE YOU TO ONE OF MY PARTIES AGAIN, YOU DRUNKEN FOOL!"
> I think the reason these annoying people won't tell me how they got their jobs is because they are embarrassed to admit luck was involved. I can't blame them. Typically, the pre-luck part of their careers involved doing something enormously pathetic.
-- "The Dilbert Future" (1997), by Scott Adams
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