PicoBlog

Sometimes, I get reader questions:

In case the content of the tweet isn’t showing up for you—who knows, with Twitter these days—David Hamilton asks: “What role do you think Social Warming has played in the sad story of Scott Adams [cartoonist creator of Dilbert] and his increasing radicalisation, which seemed initially to crystallise with his support in 2016 for Donald Trump?”

It’s a good question. For those who haven’t kept up (and why should you?), Adams’s comic strip about the life of the mostly cubicle-office-bound mouthless Dilbert, which has been printed in papers since the 1990s, has been dropped from syndication by newspapers after he went on YouTube and went on what seemed to be a racist rant.

The rant—that white people in the US should “get the hell away” from black people—followed a poll by the right-wing polling company Rasmussen which asked the peculiar question of whether people agreed or disagreed with the statements “It’s OK to be white” and “Black people can be racist too”. Half of black people polled agreed with the first statement. Which led Adams to go onto his YouTube channel, and as CNN reported:

“If nearly half of all Blacks are not OK with White people – according to this poll, not according to me, according to th is poll – that’s a hate group,” Adams said Wednesday on his YouTube show “Real Coffee with Scott Adams.”

I won’t go into the weirdness of why a polling company would ask such strange-sounding questions, which originated as a racist 4chan trolling effort. Parker Molloy has written an excellent takedown of it.

I’m more interested in what happened to Scott Adams. So let’s recap a little about him. The Wikipedia page about him has some interesting detail. What stands out to me are:

• he’s fascinated by people who are persuasive: he studied hypnotism, he took Dale Carnegie Training, he predicted Trump would win as early as 2015 because of what he saw as Trump’s powers of persuasion.

• he thought the cancellation after two seasons of the Dilbert cartoon in 2001 by UPN was because it wanted to concentrate on “an African-American audience”.

• he thinks hyperbole is a great form of humour. An example, from the Wikipedia page:

Adams said that he temporarily endorsed Hillary Clinton out of fear for his own life, stating that he had received direct and indirect death threats ("Where I live, in California, it is not safe to be seen as supportive of anything Trump says or does. So I fixed that.").

• he has nearly a million followers on Twitter, having joined in October 2014.

• he has included his email address on his comic strips since the 1990s so that people can get in touch with him; he says this helped get suggestions for future strips.

• he’s proud; though I think “prideful” is a better word. He has won multiple awards, written a few books, had a hugely successful cartoon strip syndicated in hundreds of papers that became part of the zeitgeist, won awards.

So. As a reminder, my hypothesis about social warming is that being on social networks for extended periods drives you into extreme positions that you already agreed with, and you take more extreme postures against ideas you disagree with. Everyone gets angrier as a result because no nuance and no compromise is possible; there’s insufficient room for the former, and the latter is treated as weakness.

Does any of this apply to Adams? The thing that really stood out to me, from all of his Wikipedia page, is that cancellation by UPN. It really, really rankled. That, right there, is to me the origin of all Adams’s current problems. He was still fuming about it nearly 20 years later, tweeting:

In reality: not true. The show was cancelled because ratings tanked. It’s also extremely unlikely that he would have been fired, or let go, from two jobs in “corporate America” because he was white, and the chances of being told that just don’t exist; the lawsuit would write itself.

So to me, it looks like this. Adams started out as a driven person (getting up at 4.30am to draw cartoons), fascinated by the power of persuasion. He achieved remarkable success, getting the cartoon syndicated. Then he discovered that even though he was successful in some fields, he couldn’t achieve what others could, such as getting a long-running cartoon series. Or even a three-season-running cartoon series.

That bred resentment, which grew like a cancer and hardened like a stone.

In 2014 he joined Twitter, in the midst of Gamergate—that wild fight of reactionary and progressive, which would of course push any reactionary observer, or one who felt he had been wronged by progressive policies, further into his corner. And someone who uses hyperbole as humour will soon find that the internet doesn’t get it. “If Trump wins there will be war and whites will be targeted so I’m backing Clinton” seems like a hilarious line if you’re into exaggerating for effect; you’re trying to say “I hope Trump wins”, but in a really roundabout way. In a sense, the loop is the same as the setup for a three- or four-panel strip: the setup, the dip, the hit. Decades of writing in that format against a deadline will shape your mind. (I know that many years of writing pyramid-format news stories to daily deadlines has shaped how I tell people information.)

Where the Dilbert cartoons were, for a very long time, resolutely unpolitical, Adams’s own internet presence became more and more aggravated, and politically motivated. And you can see his followers (those who agree with him, on his YouTube channel) and on Twitter (where he’d get pushback) driving him further and further to his political extremes. Social warming? Sure looks that way. To the extent that when people have pointed out to Adams that the Rasmussen poll was asking a purposefully racist question, and that maybe he should have investigated it, he roars back at them:

The way to decide whether this is really social warming, though, is to ask the counterpoint. What if Adams hadn’t joined Twitter, or YouTube? He would still have been the same resentful person, certain that he had been racially discriminated against not once, not twice, but three times in his professional life; certain about Trump’s potential, making hyperbolic jokes to his friends. But he wouldn’t have had the same opportunity to torpedo his own career. The latter is a classic outcome of social warming: getting so wound up that you crash through all the social boundaries until eventually you hit that one that everyone agrees is Too Far. Adams found it.

For years and years, one of the notable things about Dilbert, the character, was that he didn’t have a mouth. He could say things, but had fewer apparent ways to say it than an Easter Island moai. (This finally changed in October 2013, for no obvious reason.) Maybe in the same way that there was no going back once that mouth appeared, Adams had no way back from the effect the internet was having on him. It just helped amplify those resentments boiling away in his mind. (This has been neatly captured in “MAGAbert”, a cartoon by Ruben Bolling.

In effect, he signed off from syndication with his Sunday strip, about a character called “Bob” who gainsays anything you do, or don’t do. (There are more strips to come, because syndication takes a while to wind down.) “Bob believes your thinking process does not extend beyond your fears”, says (the also mouthless) Dogbert. Strange how Adams could write it, yet not understand it.

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(Of the what? Read here.)

• LLMs are coming for Amazon novellas, and then everything else, suggests Suw Charman-Anderson. Much tsunami. Very flood.

• Snapchat is putting ChatGPT into its app: it becomes another pal to chat with, in effect (but won’t write answers to your homework).

• Wired isn’t going to use AI to write stories, but:

We may try using AI to suggest headlines or text for short social media posts. We currently generate lots of suggestions manually, and an editor has to approve the final choices for accuracy. Using an AI tool to speed up idea generation won’t change this process substantively.

We may try using AI to generate story ideas. An AI might help the process of brainstorming with a prompt like “Suggest stories about the impact of genetic testing on privacy,” or “Provide a list of cities where predictive policing has been controversial.” This may save some time and we will keep exploring how this can be useful. But some limited testing we’ve done has shown that it can also produce false leads or boring ideas. In any case, the real work, which only humans can do, is in evaluating which ones are worth pursuing. Where possible, for any AI tool we use, we will acknowledge the sources it used to generate information.

• “A tech worker is selling a children’s book he made using AI. Professional illustrators are pissed.” Pretty much the whole tsunami story there in a single headline.

• Back in two weeks, if spared. Enjoy.

• You can buy Social Warming in paperback, hardback or ebook via One World Publications, or order it through your friendly local bookstore. Or listen to me read it on Audible.

You could also sign up for The Overspill, a daily list of links with short extracts and brief commentary on things I find interesting in tech, science, medicine, politics and any other topic that takes my fancy.

• Back next week! Or leave a comment here, or in the Substack chat.

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