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Kim Voynar

By Kim Voynar Voynar@moviecitynews.com

Will the Real Scott Adams Fan Please Stand Up?

Not really sure what to think about this whole scandal around Dilbert comic creator Scott Adams admitting that he used a fake identity as his own biggest fan to defend himself on internet discussion boards.

If you’re not up to speed on the whole mess, Gawker has a pretty good breakdown of it — though I can’t say with certainty that a story that kicks off with “Scott Adams, creator of the great comic strip Dilbert, is sort of a prick.” is setting out to be at all objective. Particularly given their 2007 piece on how Adams, who rose to fame with his comic strips about workplace buffoonery and stupid bosses, was himself a lousy boss.

Fake identities on the internet are nothing new. Last year, the real guys behind the Wise Kaplan and Cranky Kaplan Twitter feeds were unmasked (and if anything, the unmasking just made them all the more interesting), and if you regularly read the comments section of the Hot Blog, Hollywood Elsewhere, The Wrap, Thompson on Hollywood, et al, there are all kinds of folks out there commenting under pseudonyms, or at least under online “personas,” right?

I dunno, to me this just feels less like a “scandal,” and more like a “heh.” Maybe I’m just getting cynical and assuming 99.8% of people are less than completely transparent in one way or another on the internet, whether it’s on message boards, comments sections of blogs, Facebook or Twitter. What do you think? Scandal or not?

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8 Responses to “Will the Real Scott Adams Fan Please Stand Up?”

  1. John says:

    I definitely chalk this one up in the “heh” category. Remember, this is the internet, where the girls are guys and the kids are FBI agents.

  2. Tim Kolar says:

    Commenting under personas is common enough and why not? If you’re a public figure then revealing your name can distract from what you’re actually saying.

    Using a persona to effusively praise yourself in public is a little different though. “Crass” comes to mind. It’s certainly beyond the bounds of good taste.

  3. Kim Voynar says:

    Mike, not arguing with you as to whether he’s a misogynistic ass … he pretty much made that case for himself with that post and his subsequent defense of it. The sad-but-true part of THAT whole story is that he probably actually does have a fairly large reader base who thought what he had to say about “men’s rights” and women generally was spot on.

    I don’t have any stats on what percentage of those men have no sexual relationship with anything other than a blow-up doll or their own hand, but I’d bet it’s fairly high.

    All I’m saying is, is it an issue for a known person to post anonymously under a pseudonym and defend himself? Obviously it’s kind of stupid, but I’m just saying, I bet it happens all the time.

  4. Stephen says:

    The misogynist rant was meant to be satire and he deleted it because it was being treated as literal.
    I don’t think he is a misogynist, but he is often purposefully abrasive in his responses.

  5. Stephen says:

    As far as anonymous posting I think its a non-issue, but agree it is a little odd to post anonymous responses that aren’t responses to arguments, but instead just telling everyone how great you are.

  6. Krillian says:

    Not a scandal.

  7. Proman says:

    This is some sort of a joke. The guy had a right to defend himself under any name he chose to use – as you can see admitting who you are on message boards will have you eaten alive. People are just ready to hate.

Quote Unquotesee all »

It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon