It's never a waste of time to discuss the foibles of mass-culture, because
that's where the politics of transnational capital get fought out. Heiner
Mueller, the great German playwright, once wrote that "Der Text weist
mehr als der Autor", or, "The author's text knows more than the author
him/herself." Dilbert is about the discontents of the informatic
workplace, and is actually more revealing about the true costs and
stresses and strains of the Silicon Valley lifestyle -- its essential
idiocy, its cruelty, racism and sexism, and the terrible competitive grind
of the 24-hour workdays put in by the cyberwizards chasing stock options
to the next galaxy -- than many an allegedly Leftwing sociology textbook.
The comic strip knows more than the cartoonist.
-- Dennis
