THE DILBERT FUTURE

Hardback, $25.00 from Harper Business

Written and drawn by Scott Adams

There was a time when one's professional career ran like this: you got out of school and went to work for a gigantic company, for thirty years. The company took care of you and you worked hard, until you retired. Ward Cleaver probably worked for Lumpy's dad until he died. What did he do? Who cares?

A few years ago, all of that changed. Just as giant companies began to lay off workers to drive profits, new technology changed the skill demands of those same corporations, creating a new breed of "maverick" worker. She might be in a corporation, but she knew to look out for herself. Even full-timers began to think of themselves as contractors of sorts. The most able warriors and biggest winners in this new world were those who could ride the strange and wondrous waves of emerging technology.

"Prediction 15

In the future, technology will continue to make our lives harder and many of us will be delighted about it"

So writes Scott Adams, who's made a career out of illustrating just such points with his daily strip DILBERT for nearly ten years. Adams looked up from his cubicle job at Pacific Bell in the late eighties and suddenly understood the future: technology was a complex, exciting drug dripping right into the veins of a new generation of workers, and those most capable of dealing with it would alter the way work "works." Perhaps no other humorist has better captured the changing world of the end of this century, and of course, Adams been well rewarded for it.

This week's title is a special treat: it's plenty graphic, but it's not a novel per se (I could stretch the label by pointing out that the cartoons have characters, but why bother? It's my column.) THE DILBERT FUTURE is a blueprint for the path that lies ahead, and it's worth reading if you're reading this review on a computer screen right now. Of course a lot of the predictions are nonsense (Adams suggests that elderly people are practicing martial arts so the can rise up, beat us silly and take our stuff,) but he can't help but dispense wisdom with folly.

In THE DILBERT FUTURE, Adams reflects through essays and DILBERT cartoons on the new wired world and the future that will inevitably result: the Dilbert future, where a few savvy technology gurus and "haves" will live wondrous lives, while the have-nots blissfully slide into chronic uselessness. In the working world, those have-nots often become management, and Adams notes with glee that the managed professionals have gotten wise: the people who are smart enough to make software are smart enough to get what they want out of their professional careers. But as they continue to see the drawbacks to having to answer to a know-nothing boss, they venture out on their own. Sometimes the reader is struck by a sensation that Adams is a little hard on management, but he swats such dissension away. After decades of layoffs degrading any sense of loyalty to a corporation, Adams sees a growing population of skilled people opting to answer to themselves alone:

"Prediction 31

In the future, skilled professionals will flee their corporate jobs and become their own bosses in ever-increasing numbers. They'll become entrepreneurs, consultants, contractors, prostitutes, and cartoonists."

Of course, Dilbert remains in the corporate world, because that's where the stupidity and humor really thrives. ("Most professionals are like sheep," Adams cheerfully reports.) We read a Dilbert strip and cut it out, pasting it on our cubicle wall, hoping our boss will read it and secretly betting that same boss will be too dense to recognize himself or herself in the caricature. Those who like to think of themselves as techno-haves love the idea that they're following a different evolutionary path from management: in the end, managers will be cave-like people, eating bananas and announcing "Oog make mission statement," while the engineers go on and revolutionize the world, over and over again.

The book wanders hilariously from technology (the creation of the holodeck would be the end of the world) to gender relations (technology in the end will be a search by dateless men for a replacement for women,) to social issues (we don't need to worry about our privacy if everyone loses it, because most of us are very boring.) None of this was a surprise if you've read DILBERT. It's the expected stuff, and fans will love it, and congratulate themselves for loving it.

Then, we get a real shock: the end of the book. Where Adams begins by making pithy comments about senior citizens and genetically-engineered super-children, he ends by getting downright serious. Scott Adams is completely sold on the theory of smart individuals sculpting their own lives if they just have the chutzpah to defy expectations. He tells the story of how he decided to make it as a cartoonist, and how he became a believer in Affirmations, the technique of carefully listing one's goals on paper, visualizing them coming to pass while one works for them. It's inspiring and chilling to read the Appendix on how to do Affirmations. Write down your goals, and do them. He isn't kidding. Adams believes.

"Prediction 65

In the future, science will gradually free us from the optical illusions that restrict our view of reality."

There's the joke. In the end, perhaps our most noted cynical humorist reveals himself to be an idealist.