Actually Never

Mika got a new e-reader, which meant that I got a new old e-reader. It seemed like a good opportunity to finally read this PDF that I’ve had sitting around on various hard drives for nearly 20 years.

What I knew

Let’s get the obvious out of the way first. Scott Adams is the Dilbert guy and he has gone absolute bonk shit. In many ways. So many ways. I can’t find the exact moment where I gave up on him entirely (during a speech by a Gold Star family about their late son, an Adams tweet seemed to imply the father beat the mother); I don’t know if he’s scrubbed his Twitter timeline or if Google search just sucks anymore.

I read a lot of Scott Adams before that, though.

Dilbert had its moments. People like to shit on it (and yeah lol the Dilberito) but Dilbert was funnier than average for a newspaper comic. Low bar maybe. It wasn’t art – I remember seeing Adams online soliciting jokes and story ideas from readers, and thinking Bill Watterson (of Calvin and Hobbes unwanted fame) would rather die than even consider the idea. But Watterson created for the art, and Adams created for the money, and was quite successful at it. I think he’d be the first to agree.

Moreso than Dilbert, I enjoyed Adams’ blog. It had life advice, behind-the-scenes stories, and discussions of interesting ideas. I didn’t agree with everything he said, but he referred to a lot of his posts as “thought experiments” and I didn’t feel like he agreed with everything either.

There were controversies early on. I knew the first one to get any real attention was going to be a problem. The wording was going to draw criticism even if he was being ironic or sarcastic, which, maybe he was, maybe he wasn’t. I liked his writing well enough to give him the benefit of the doubt and overlook the occasional misstep.

As Donald Trump ran for President, Adams wrote numerous posts praising Trump’s persuasion skills and control of the media narrative. At the time, Adams claimed he wasn’t supporting either candidate, and persuasion HAD been a frequent blog topic in the pre-Trump era. Eventually he dropped the claim and openly supported Trump, and I took particular issue with the previous claims of neutrality. It felt like he’d been lying all along.

Anyway. The blog posts and tweets got more and more questionable and I hung on until I didn’t anymore. Ever since, his name pops up in online discourse semi-regularly as he seems to become more and more unhinged.

Not long ago, I discovered that I had a few of his old blog posts saved in my RSS reader. I didn’t know they were there for years – they got forgotten about in the move over to Feedly when Google Reader shuttered a decade ago. I winced when I saw them, wondering what red flags I’d ignored. I re-read them, and… I still liked them. Just a few posts of life advice that I thought had some merit. Nothing earth-shattering. But it made me a little sad that this version of Adams no longer exists or maybe never did.

Holy balls I did not mean to write a novel here. No wonder my original plan of once-a-week posts went out the window.

What I knew specifically about God’s Debris, which, lest we forget, is the actual topic

God’s Debris was, to my recollection, Adams’ first attempt at publishing non-Dilbert, non-business writing. I believe it was self-published. I can’t remember if I bought it or not; I think it eventually became available (at least for a time) for free.

This is why I ramble. When I have to talk facts, I second-guess everything.

The book was promoted as one of those thought experiments – a conversation regarding the nature of God and reality. Adams also claimed to use hypnosis and persuasion techniques to make the arguments more compelling.

What I know

When I was in university, we talked about Platonic dialogues in Philosophy 110. The professor said that in past classes, some students had tried writing their own and submitting them as essays, and while he didn’t rule that out for our class, he strongly advised against it. I think I see why now.

The entire book is a conversation between a package deliveryman and the recipient, a mysterious old man named Avatar (or maybe he just IS an avatar). Avatar is God, or God’s representative, or a guy who knows more about God and the universe than the rest of us. Through the book, Avatar asks the deliveryman questions about the nature of humanity and the universe, and the deliveryman has his mind blown over and over again by what he comes to realize.

The thing is, the deliveryman represents the voice of the reader, and here are your persuasion techniques – your stand-in is real quick to agree with and talk up Avatar’s ideas. So if you don’t have your mind similarly blown, the disconnect detracts.

Look, this isn’t terrible. You can easily give it a shot for yourself – it’s short and easy to read, and does have some interesting ideas, even if others never advance past variations of the “can God create a stone so heavy that God cannot lift it” paradox. If you’re young, you might dig this. Maybe I’d have been more into it if I’d read it when I first got it, but for me, the depth isn’t there and the dialogue doesn’t help matters any.