The office cubicle has always been a double-edged invention. To some, it is an unnatural enclosure, proof that human beings were never meant to spend long hours boxed into grey partitions, staring at glowing screens. To others, particularly an expanding army of freelance and contract workers, the cubicle represents something far more desirable: Stability, a pay cheque and benefits.
It was this contradiction that cartoonist Scott Adams understood so instinctively. He once addressed an audience that believed in what his most famous creation preached with mordant wit: “On the keyboard of life, always keep one finger on the escape key.”
Through Dilbert, Adams became a folk hero to office workers across the world, articulating their quiet rage, boredom and existential absurdity with deadpan precision. His death at 68, following a battle with cancer, closes a career that once defined workplace satire. Yet it also leaves behind a complicated, and ultimately tarnished, legacy. While Dilbert endured for decades as a cultural shorthand for corporate dysfunction, Adams’s later years were dominated by inflammatory remarks on race, gender and identity — comments that led to his professional unravelling and the collapse of the very empire he had built.
A strip that understood corporate despair
For more than three decades, Dilbert skewered the follies of the modern, technology-driven workplace. Its central character, Dilbert, was a frustrated engineer condemned to life in a cubicle. His closest confidant was Dogbert, an intelligent, articulate, anthropomorphic dog with ambitions of world domination. Alongside co-workers Alice, Asok and the perpetually disengaged Wally, the strip chronicled daily encounters with the incompetence of the Pointy-Haired Boss and the malevolence of Catbert, the self-described “evil director” of human resources.
For countless office workers, Dilbert functioned as a form of daily therapy. It captured simmering frustration, powerlessness and quiet despair with uncanny accuracy. In many workplaces, there was always a Dilbert… and often a Dogbert, too.
Adams once said his creation represented “anyone who has ever had a feeling of powerlessness or helplessness as they sit inside their cubicle”. Beneath the humour, his characters frequently drifted into unexpectedly thoughtful discussions about ethics, environmentalism and animal rights, elevating the strip beyond simple office jokes.
Before becoming a full-time cartoonist, Adams worked at Pacific Bell, drawing liberally from the culture around him. Two years into the job, he sent samples of a fledgling strip to cartoon syndicates. In 1989, United Feature Syndicate agreed to distribute Dilbert to 35 newspapers. By 1995, Adams had left Pacific Bell to focus on cartooning full time.
“People often ask if I quit or was fired. It was a little of both,” he wrote in 2008. By then, Dilbert had turned him into a minor celebrity among technology workers, even helping his employer attract visitors to the lab. But the strip consumed too much of his time. “It was clear I would soon need to quit or be fired.”
Earlier, in 1983, Adams had moved to San Francisco, working at Crocker National Bank while attending evening classes for a three-year MBA programme at the University of California, Berkeley. His minimalist art style was deliberate. “I noticed that people had that potato-shaped body with glasses,” he told Computerworld in 1994. “I used that shape to doodle a composite of my co-workers.”
At its peak, Dilbert appeared in more than 2,000 outlets across 57 countries and was translated into 19 languages. Adams received the National Cartoonists Society’s Reuben Award in 1997, the profession’s highest honour. Management thinker Michael Hammer once described him as “the pre-eminent business thinker (and observer) of the late 20th century”.
Right place, right time... and the Internet
Adams never set out to become the champion of the office worker. He simply wanted to succeed as a cartoonist. At 11, he applied to the Famous Artists Course for Talented Young People, only to be rejected for being a year too young. He later majored in economics at Hartwick College.
In his own writing, Adams credited his mother, a landscape artist, for his artistic instincts, and his father for his economical humour. As a child, he became obsessed with Peanuts, dreaming of becoming another Charles Schulz. Between the ages of six and nine, he even created his own comic strip, Little Grabbers, imagining gremlin-like creatures responsible for everything that went wrong at home.
A chance television moment altered his trajectory. Flicking through channels one evening, Adams caught the end of a programme on cartooning and scribbled down the host’s name: Jack Cassady. He wrote asking for advice. Cassady responded with a two-and-a-half-page handwritten letter filled with practical guidance.
Rejection followed — including from The New Yorker and Playboy — prompting Adams to pack away his art supplies. Then another letter from Cassady arrived, unexpectedly. Adams resumed drawing, sketching pre-Dilbert cartoons on the whiteboard of his office cubicle.
Persistence paid off. After rejections from Universal Press Syndicate and King Features, Adams received a call from United Media. When editor Sarah Gillespie listed the company’s clients (Peanuts, Garfield, Marmaduke), Adams realised his life was about to change. His first royalty cheque arrived: $368.62.
Cartooning was lonely, he later recalled. Feedback was scarce, cancellations frequent. But his business training proved invaluable. As the Internet began to take off, Adams added his AOL email address to the strip. Reader response exploded. Dilbert became the first syndicated comic strip offered free online.
By the mid-1990s, the dot-com era had begun. “Dilbert was the right character at the right time,” Adams said. Technology workers embraced it as one of their own. The media treated it as shorthand for downsizing, bad management and cubicle oppression. Readers invested the strip with meanings far beyond its creator’s intentions.
Capitalising on this success, Adams published a series of satirical business books, beginning with The Dilbert Principle in 1996.
Borrowing from the Peter Principle, he argued that incompetent workers were systematically promoted to management — “the place where they can do the least damage”.
The collapse of a cultural icon
The same Internet that amplified Adams’s reach ultimately hastened his downfall. In a 2006 blog post, he questioned the Holocaust death toll. In 2011, he wrote that women were treated differently by society for the same reasons as children and the mentally disabled, claiming “it’s just easier this way for everyone”.
In 2023, Adams repeatedly referred to Black people as members of a “hate group” and said he would no longer “help Black Americans”. Though he later claimed hyperbole, he continued to defend his position. The backlash was swift. Major newspapers, including The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times and The New York Times, dropped Dilbert.
Later that year, Adams posted on X that his health was “declining fast”. His death closes a chapter on a career that once defined office satire, before collapsing under the weight of its creator’s own words.
The legacy he leaves behind is conflicted. Dilbert was sharply funny, resonating with workers whose logic and goodwill were crushed by lazy, incompetent bosses. Yet Adams’s political views in his final years were widely seen as reprehensible.
Dilbert captured the texture of office life in the late 20th century with rare precision. Unlike Peanuts or Calvin and Hobbes, however, its afterlife is inseparable from the unraveling of its creator; a reminder that cultural longevity often depends as much on restraint as on insight.