Daikloktos posted:

He certainly falls back on the easy character gags to pad out his productivity but, as you say, what made Dilbert such a cultural phenomenon in the 90's was the specificity of its subject. Office workers would read a strip about being assigned rotating cubicles or getting reorganized into a workgroup apart from your project team to build some manager's fiefdom or the excitement of finally getting an internet connection to goof off on and it connected with them. But obviously the further Adams got from his time as an engineer and the more the corporate landscape changed the harder it was to maintain incisive commentary. You can tell in his early 2000s strips when he tries to tackle new management fads like ISO 9000 or Seven Sigma he only has a second-hand, surface level understanding that he tries to paper over by analogizing them to his increasingly irrelevant experiences - I haven't kept up with the strip but I can only imagine his poor grasp on the nuances of open-plan floorspace or agile development. So he could either give up on being a relevant satirist with #1 bestselling pop philosophy books under his belt or he could transition to the field where he was still vital - being an early-internet blogger. And as a result, instead of only being thought about these days by used bookstore patrons and people flipping through Comedy Central at 1 am he gets invited on Fox News to discuss the nuclear crisis in North Korea.