Nerding Day: The Dilbert Future

The Dilbert Future is a book about the future, written in 1997, by Scott Adams.

I’ve chosen to re-read The Dilbert Future. That’s right: “re-read.” In the late 90s, I was a tiny precocious ‘Dilbert’ fan. I read The Dilbert Future cover to cover, because I wanted every idea and joke I could get from my favorite cartoonist (Scott Adams). I also lacked money or agency (small child). So I acquired TDF by requesting it as a Christmas present. And I received it, which proves dyslexia was right: Santa is in league with Satan.

I revisited this spooky crypt of a book. And I was confident it would go fine. I’m now girded with the wisdom of adulthood. The perspective of actual hellish work experiences. The unfair advantage of pooping on guesses about the 21st century from that century. Still, Adams’s text contained a few shattering surprises. Maybe most shocking: mid-1990s ‘Dilbert’ comic strips hold up as pieces of comedy writing. You’d enjoy them! Some have a vile premise (e.g. “it would take a magic raygun to make male employees respect female employees, and that’s not the male employees’ fault”). Some have lousy art (e.g. every strip). But even those cartoons have a fully functional setup-punchline-tag. And I learned this about Scott Adams’s strips, because an astonishing percentage of his “new book” is reprinted ‘Dilbert’ comics. The Dilbert Future is more padded than a refurbished body pillow.

It advertises itself as a book featuring new material, future material even, and yet a huge amount of it looks like this:

Scott's rare thoughts on the future are surrounded by endless artifacts from the past. At one point he lines up five straight pages of raw regurgitated Strip-Dilb. And when you do hit solid blocks of the written word, you’re playing “did Scott already get paid for these words” Roulette.

Between my childhood and now, I forgot about this scamming. And I think that makes me special! I might be the only person who’s ever let The Dilbert Future mind-burgle them twice. I even bought it twice. The Brooklyn Public Library doesn’t have one, which I assume is thanks to an in-house exorcist. And I no longer own my childhood copy. That’s probably because I gave it away in an apartment move. But I can’t rule out the possibility that my Dilbert Future packed itself up, carny-style, to swindle the next town.

There’s much more to say about this book beyond “it’s a cash-in.” That describes many branded products. But the cash-in nature of this book points to a larger Trumpism. The second tremendous surprise of The Dilbert Future is that it’s written by Modern MAGA Scott Adams. He told us exactly who he is, in 1997, and it took until 2016 for us to catch on.

Are you aware of the Scott Adams timeline? The photo above is Adams’s 1997 author headshot. I like that guy. He looks like the sweet, whimsical cubicle-expat he sold himself as. I’m even jealous of his Dogbert denim, and would pay all the riches in Brooklyn for a Snoopy-sax version. However, here is Scott Adams now:

I’d also love to point you to a great book, containing words. Joel Stein’s wonderful 2019 book In Defense Of Elitism (tongue-in-cheek title! Joel is good!) tells the story of Joel schlepping to Scott Adams’s home to interview him (Joel is also a try-hard!). Joel learns Scott Adams lives in a 8,372 square foot East Bay mansion. Here is a tiny sampling of its carnival of strange features:

• Scott Adams’s house has a bathroom just for cats.
• Scott Adams’s house had an entire room for wrapping gifts. It’s now a room for his drums. That’s because Adams wrecked most of his personal relationships, with his own Trump nut stuff. So he no longer has a large enough friend group to need a gift-wrapping room.
• Scott Adams’s house has a tower overlooking its swimming pool. The tower is shaped like Dilbert’s head. On purpose. Right down to its two round windows mimicking Dilbert’s yawning-void eyes.

Adams’s transmogrification once shocked me. Because I remembered the Scott Adams of gentle cube-farm resistance-gags. But Adams also wrote “books” like TDF. They’re part of the revenue that built Mar-a-Lagbert. And when you read The Dilbert Future’s (occasional) text, you discover 1997 Scott Adams was a harrowing blaze of Sturm und Yuks.

Yeah! The first ~100 words of this book advocate a global eugenics program. In a ha-ha way. In the same way Idiocracy advocated it. But I’d like to think most turn-of-the-millennium jokesters outgrew that. Scott Adams chose to grow [Joker voice] stranger. He didn’t even outgrow his mid-2020 prediction that a Joe Biden Administration would kill most Americans by mid-2021. Scott Adams thinks the bad guy, in the situation of him broadcasting a mass-death threat, is anybody but Scott Adams. His wisdom “grows” about as fast as a Pet Rock.

Anyway, The Dilbert Future harps on Adams’s prediction that genetic “Induhviduals” will Great Replacement Theory the rest of us. He also recycles a comic strip where he already wrote this idea.

You discover this phenomenon throughout The Dilbert Future’s strip-to-text laziness. Whenever Scott Adams has a vile belief in his heart, and needs a comic strip that can run tomorrow, he places that vile belief in a Dogbert speech bubble. Scott Adams’s actual beliefs match that character. A character described as “a sadistic megalomaniac” on the Dilbert fan Wiki. And the readers of two thousand newspapers in sixty-five countries consumed those supervillain beliefs, while interpreting them as “humor.” Because dog!

In this context, The Dilbert Future’s author photo is a grim warning. Adams crams two cartoon characters into the frame. The characters? Two Dogberts. The rest of the back of the book? A third Dogbert.

That makes this book magic! It de-Dogberts Scott Adams, making his personal cruelty as plain as Times New Roman. For instance, he can’t get past page 4 without sharing the mindset guiding his futurism:

Scott Adams knows how to write and construct a joke. This list is not jokes. This list is megalomania, with a couple grandiose adjectives tacked on, decorating it like those old suction-cup Car Garfields. From there he shares what I can only describe as threats:

I am not exaggerating! This book is Scott Adams jumping up and down, waving his villain-arms, begging us to notice that he wants mass brainwashing to prevent kids from becoming Greta Thunberg. He only fails to predict the specific system that will do this brainwashing (2010s YouTube). Because he’s bad at futurism. But he’s crystal-clear on being an awful human being.

He also seems to know he’s bad at futurism. Because there’s not much futurism in Scott Adams’s futurism book. Scott Adams’s few actual future predictions are tedious guesses about how much more dial-uppy dial-up can become:

The rest of the time, he takes a confident stance, and makes it “humor” by making it both evil (so edgy!) and underbaked (too cool for school!). For example, he achieves a chirpy Jay Leno “have you seen this” tone on this page, about this topic:

Immediately after “solving” poverty with a heartfelt “if math was magic you’d have food”, Adams pivots, putting much greater energy into this crisis:

By the way, early in the book, he jokes about your total lack of consent for receiving this concept:

Scott feels flashing is funny if you’re also lazy about it, and appropriating Japan. That’s bad. He’s bad! And I’ve saved Adams’s grimmest chapter for last. It’s the last chapter of the book. And it begins the scariest way a “comedic” text can:

The final chapter of The Dilbert Future is pure uncut thinksperiments. It is Scott Adams repressing his Very Good Actual Jokes, so he can show us truths he attained by rejecting Very Confirmed Actual Science. It’s a cult leader’s manifesto, written by a guy whose #1 formative experience in the entertainment world was a cameo in the orbit of Joe Rogan. You deserve safety from this chapter. To keep your mind unharmed, I will only expose you to its table of contents summary:

To give you a taste of the incredible sourcing for its scientific trailblazing, one of his theories came to him in a Newsweek article he tripped over:

And another came to him in a dream, which he thought might be too embarrassing for a human, so he blamed it on his cat:

And some come from real science, maybe, but not fully remembered, though he thinks you'll sort of get the general idea. His words, not mine:

And finally, one of his theories comes from a friend who wrote a book about wishing, but he doesn't remember what it was called or who wrote it. Scott proceeded to transcribe that guy/girl/cat’s premise into Scott’s own book.

Wow: Scott is a great friend! You can see why he needed a gift-wrapping room just for gift-wrapping!

Anyway the chapter concludes with a section claiming magic affirmations have the power to bend reality. Not make you more confident, more driven, or other basic behavior adjustments. Scott Adams writes an entire additional appendix about how to do magic affirmations. Adamsffirmations, which he believes have a supernatural impact on events around you. Why does he bother to do that actual writing so late in the game? This reason:

That’s this book’s final, worst surprise. The titular Dilbert Future is a world where millions worship at the altar of DIY sorta-prayers. And as I finish thinking about this book, forever, I am so grateful it didn’t brainwash Child Me into becoming a Scott Adamstafarian.

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Alex Schmidt makes Secretly Incredibly Fascinating, a fun podcast based on facts he read in better books.

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