Scott Adams admits he’s a troll online
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Back when Dilbert creator Scott Adams was being castigated for a post he wrote on men’s rights which included comparing women’s preferential treatment to the mentally handicapped he made a curious statement:
I’m embarrassed to admit it, but I was enjoying all of the negative attention on Twitter and wondered how I could keep it going. So I left some comments on several Feminist blogs, mostly questioning the reading comprehension of people who believed I had insulted them. That kept things frothy for about a day. Now things are starting to settle down. It’s time for some DMD.
Now we’re learning that Scott has been doing this for quite awhile. Lately he’s been using the name PlannedChaos on the website Metafilter to argue with critics and to brag about how successful and intelligent he is. It was revealed that PlannedChaos and Scott are one in the same.
In one post on Metafilter, Scott declares himself to be a certified genius:
As far as Adams’ ego goes, maybe you don’t understand what a writer does for a living. No one writes unless he believes that what he writes will be interesting to someone. Everyone on this page is talking about him, researching him, and obsessing about him. His job is to be interesting, not loved. As someone mentioned, he has a certified genius I.Q., and that’s hard to hide.
On his blog, Scott defends his actions and explains why trolling is useful.
Some time ago, I learned the hard way that posting messages with my own identity turns any discussion into an orgy of name-calling. When I’m personally involved, people speculate that I’m being defensive, or back pedaling, or being a douche nozzle, or trying to weasel my way out of something. Speaking with my true identity also draws too much attention to the very rumors I’m trying to extinguish. In contrast, when my spunky alter ego weighs in, people generally focus on the facts presented, including checking the source material to see my writing in context. The masked vigilante strategy worked well until recently. And I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t fun.
Go ahead and read the whole thing so you can get the full context yourself. Personally, this latest episode and the misogynist post makes Scott come across as going Charlie Sheen on everyone.
I’ll close this post by quoting a fake interview between himself and this pseudonym persona that he’s posted on his blog:
Are you just a troll?
Scott: If I understand the term, trolling involves off-topic comments with no purpose other than to get people worked up. My main purpose is generally to add context to the stuff that trolls and issue advocates have posted online about me. My primary motivation is economic as opposed to evil. But I do have a twitchy trigger finger when I run into sadists and bullies online. So while I generally enter an online conversation with the intent of suppressing damaging misunderstandings, I’ve been known to empty my clip once I’m there. I’m not proud of that. I’m also not proud that my personal hero is the bigger kid in this video. I’ll own that.
Here’s the video he references.
One last thing. In his post to defend himself, Scott says that he does this as damage control – that rumors on the internet can cause so much damage to his brand and income. All I can say is… if damage control is your goal… you’re “winning.”
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