Scott Adams is asking members of his channel to help him rename his cartoon strip Dilbert, now that it will be moving to subscription only.
Scott Adams is asking paying members of his subscription channel on locals.com to help him rename his cartoon strip Dilbert, now that it will be moving to a subscription only paywalled publisher. “Naming Dilbert 2.0. What should I call the upcoming Locals-only version of Dilbert? Dilbert Unleashed? Dilbert Unchained? Dilbert Raw? Canceled Dilbert? Ideas?” I am sure you have a few. Whether you will want to subscribe to Scott Adams’s private subscription channel to make them, is up to you. But how did we get here?
Once upon a time, bad actors on the internet began popularising the phrase “It’s OK to be white” as an attempt to troll society, something that was objectively true and inoffensive, and then tagging it to white supremacist groups, and claims of white victimhood, to the extent that to many, and quite deliberately, it became a dog-whistle signifier of racism. Basically pretty much what happened to Matt Furie‘s cartoon character Pepe The Frog. Or, for that matter, a Hindi image representing prosperity, a hundred years ago.
The right-wing polling company, Rasmussen, asked an undetermined number people if they agreed with the phrase, and only half of those designated Black Americans agreed. Less than three-quarters of white Americans agreed with it. It is pretty likely that the disagreements were down to being aware of the recent use of this specific phrase but there was no reported “why?” follow-up question.
Dilbert comic strip creator Scott Adams then decided that this meant that Black Americans were a hate group. Or, he decided to decide that. In an intentionally provocative YouTube video which he promoted as something that would get him cancelled, he stated that white people should stay away from Black people and wondered how cancelled this would get him. Turns out quite a lot. Because while newspapers were able to ignore his dog whistles before, these statements were a little out-in-the-open, undeniable and irreconcilable. Newspapers started dropping the strip in droves and announcing it too. And now his own syndication network, book publisher and agent followed. All on the same day that this Dilbert strip dropped on his website.
But Scott Adams is on the move, stating that “Dilbert (and more) will only be available on the subscription site http://scottadams.locals.com when sorted out.” Whatever name it eventually appears under. How about Dickbert? That seems, more than anything, to represent where he was going with this. Or how about Shillbert, given the thousands of people who are paying him $7 a month or $70 a year right now.
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