I kind of agree with this view. The problem I see Dilbert running into is the comic previously was aimed at corporate culture and specific jobs and stereotypes. In a way, it was punching up at more powerful, impersonal forces.
Now, he appears to be punching down at people less powerful than him (individually) who have been fighting to get recognized.
Despite these rather nasty policies governments and companies have implemented, it hasn't fixed much and just polarized the issue.
And now Dilbert come in targeting harmful and ineffective policies and hitting a lot of innocent people in the crossfire.
Personally - I think Scott Adams is more than a little bit batshit insane, but I certainly don't think he's punching down in the strips presented here.
The issues themselves aren't punching down, but the way he's using the characters is. Imagine Alice deciding to falsely accuse the PHB of sexual harassment to get rid of him. Or Asok becoming a manager and only promoting members of his caste. I feel like this is like that.
I transitioned at work, and I've tried really hard not to be this character. I asked people to use my new name and pronouns but never complained to HR if they didn't. I made an effort to be as friendly and hardworking as possible, so that my conservative coworkers wouldn't see me through the lens of the "culture wars" like this that they're fed. This kind of comic was the stereotype I faced.
It worked for me. I changed peoples' minds, got respect for being reliable no matter my looks, and eventually started passing so nobody remembers I'm trans anymore.
> eventually started passing so nobody remembers I'm trans anymore.
Exactly, so by presenting in a particular way, you were able to get people to use the pronouns you wanted. I think this is the key to why people find pronoun declaration so meaningless — pronouns are meant as a shortcut chosen by the speaker to refer to another person based on who that person appears to be. Making pronouns into a declaration breaks a fundamental piece of language functionality for very little gain.
In the strips shown in the article it's easy to see who he's punching at. If it was up at corporate HR policy, we would see Catbert. Instead we see Dilbert's peers.
Dilbert works by personifying roles. It doesn't do much in the way of role subtext.
Dilbert's very clear on its role personification. That's what makes the comic work.
It's how Dilbert is every engineer, PHB is every clueless boss, and Wally is every elder peer, Asok is every junior peer. That's what makes the comic relatable. It also, as the article points out, what provides constraints to these characters as well.
If it was mocking HR policy, then it would be signified with Catbert. It's not. It's very simple.
When people who are and have been marginalized, after centuries of fighting, finally get some of the establishment on their side, it doesn't suddenly become "punching up" to mock and satirize the efforts to get them the recognition, opportunity, and equity they deserve, even if said punches are, on the surface, aimed at individuals with positions of power.
To me, at least, the difference between what Scott Adams is doing and a good-faith definition of "punching up" is that he's trivializing genuine issues faced by marginalized people, and trying to make it all about him (the way most things have been about well-off white men for so much of Western history).
I think that if you really wanted to make a workplace comic that skewers HR departments' often hamfisted attempts to promote diversity (which is often because they themselves don't really care about it, and have just been given a mandate), you need to center the people with the real issues, rather than the ones who are being mildly inconvenienced by it.
Have a trans employee complaining that HR is happy to jump down people's throats for accidental misgendering, but still hasn't actually processed their name change paperwork and informed IT, so the intranet is still deadnaming them.
Have an employee of color upset that they've plastered black, Hispanic, and Asian people all over the company's website, but he's just gotten passed up for promotion for the third time to a white guy who worked there less than a year and who does nothing but kibitz all day.
Have a Jewish employee angry that the company has branded kippahs that they give out alongside their other swag, but won't give the Jewish High Holidays off as paid holidays.
In general, play up the empty tokenism, while emphasizing what's really important. (Making it also funny is left as an exercise for the reader; I don't claim to be a comic.)
How do you target harmful and ineffective policies without hitting a lot of innocent people though?
Affirmative action is a harmful and ineffective policy, but if you speak out against it, you are racist. I'm not here to argue whether you agree with that or not, just using it as an example of something you simply can't criticize without offending innocent people.
More to the task at hand though- I question if he's even really punching down anymore(or even if this is possible- societal status shouldn't shield you from criticism, and there is a difference between critique and baseless insults).
Anecdotally, one of my friends was interviewing a candidate- and the other person conducting the interview asked a thinly veiled political question. The candidate was rejected because of their stance, or lack thereof on this question. This was acknowledged internally, and embraced, and several meetings ensued until HR got involved and had to tell engineers that no- they couldn't discriminate on the basis of political beliefs. And that being sneaky about it by bringing up controversial tech figures in the community and gauging reactions was not actually legal.
I would say the fact that companies have so over-rotated on this stuff means he is still punching up. It’s no longer a marginalized position when corporations are now codifying culture war issues as part of their ideology.
> Now, he appears to be punching down at people less powerful than him (individually) who have been fighting to get recognized.
I don't feel like this is true.
The comic where one character identified as "white" isn't punching down at black people. There are no people of color who identify as white. He is punching up at insane corporate rules that make the color of a person's skin important when it comes to hiring: an inherently racist thing.
The comic where a character identifies as a "birthing human" isn't punching down at trans people. It's punching up at corporation rules which need a specific reason on why an employee can go home or not. It shouldn't matter why you're feeling unwell, go home if you're sick.
Corporate policies on its employees should be as broad as possible and not target individual minorities and their intricacies.
The issue isn't so much with Dilbert as the context Dilbert is in.
Let me try to explain this.
The sarcastic "I am X identifying as Y" joke is a good example. The structure of the joke is Y is something no one will seriously identify as. This means "X = Black, Y = White" pattern matches.
For the LGBT "context", the common usage of sarcastic "I am X identifying as Y" translates to "I don't think transgender identities are valid". The Non-LGBT context doesn't assign a specific meaning to the phrase.
This sets up a scenario where one group has a rule saying "X -> Y" and another has "X -> ?".
And here's where the problem comes in. Comic strips have limited bandwidth and they rely on context to be understood.
So when Dilbert says "I am Black identifying as White", the LGBT context immediately translates this to Y, wherewas the Non-LGBT context does a page fault and looks elsewhere for what it could mean.
In isolation, this looks like LGBT people are being overly sensitive, but every human is "overly sensitive" in some way. We all operate in our own context based on what we've experienced.
Indeed, I can't help but notice that in the first 4 comics cited in the article, the pointy-haired-boss is the protagonist and the employee the antagonist. Definitely seems like a reversal from what I knew Dilbert to represent in the past.
The demographic most likely to claim to be the opposite sex, and use that to try to hold control over other people, are straight white men. I mean just look at how many there are in tech companies - and typically comfortably wealthy too. He's punching up no matter how you look at it.
The entire punching up/punching down dichotomy is just a theoretical justification for "rules for thee but not for me". It's all well and good when the PHB is at the other end of the cartoonist's pen, but when they come for my sacred cows, well that's different.
Now, he appears to be punching down at people less powerful than him (individually) who have been fighting to get recognized.
Despite these rather nasty policies governments and companies have implemented, it hasn't fixed much and just polarized the issue.
And now Dilbert come in targeting harmful and ineffective policies and hitting a lot of innocent people in the crossfire.