Real Dilbert fake praise
By Techgirl

Dilbert is one of the most popular cartoon strips among the Indian IT-BPO workers.  Few cartoons capture the sometimes surreal comical and farcical incidents that happen in Offices than Dilbert.  Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, is a multi millionaire many times over because his cartoons are syndicated to more than 2000 newspapers worldwide.

Even though I have only worked as a journalist for a few years, one thing that struck me was how fragile the egos are in the media.  While they are happy to criticize politicians, businessman and sports stars, very few journalists can take criticism of any kind.  Many artists and writers are the same.

Gawker has just revealed how the brilliant Scott Adams, whose Dilbert pokes fun at everyone’s ego, is not beyond leaving fake comments on websites to praise himself

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For months, Scott Adams has been pretending to be the world's biggest Scott Adams fan under the handle "PlannedChaos." (Planned Chaos is a book by Austrian economist and libertarian hero Ludwig von Mises.) Today, he fessed up to his sockpuppetry.

It started with a thread on link-sharing community MetaFilter about Adams' Wall Street Journal op-ed on how awesome and successful he is even though he didn't get straight-As in school. Some people said mean things about the article, suggesting Scott Adams wrote like someone who has "actually convinced himself… that he's the smartest guy in the room."

That's when "PlannedChaos" weighed in, furiously defending Adams: “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.”
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And there were many more fake comments praising and defending himself.

In a way, it is reassuring for ordinary mortals like me who sometimes gets attacks of low self esteem that even a 24 carat genius like Scott Adams needs to create a pseudonym to praise himself once in a while

Techgoss note:  Techgirl is a senior Tech journalist who reports on the IT, KPO and KPO Sectors for a leading media house.  In her spare time, she dabbles in satire in her blog techgirltalk.blogspot.com.  Techgirl has been ejected from Twitter for satirizing an Indian Minister.  Her satire blog has links to her Times of India interview detailing her being kicked out of Twitter, and then being invited back.