The cartoon Dilbert has been around for about three decades. It always had a specific audience in mind and that was anybody who had ever worked in a corporate or government environment. That was because such people were the ones most attuned to the insanities and inanities of those worlds, particularly the meetings they involve and especially the ones involving senior management.

If you’d never worked in that world you likely didn’t get the humour, which was gentle and poked fun at the endless stream of ideas that constantly sweep through the worlds of corporations and governments, many of them being ideas far removed from the objectives of increased revenue, reduced costs, increased productivity and, of course, profit – or in the case of government, running things competently and not at a continuous loss that screws future generations.

The eponymous character is an engineer, chosen because often they’re often the most based people in an organisation, since the stuff they design and build has to work in the real world. But engineers often find themselves at odds with marketing, advertising and HR people, not to mention that good old senior management.

The cartoon has done pretty well over the decades, spreading around the globe and becoming known to denizens of the non-corporate world as the issues Dilbert and friends cope with emerge into everyday life as well.

However, clearly there’s a limit to which ideas fun can be poked at any more. Clueless, amoral managers, marketers, and advertisers pushing crazy shit is one thing as a target, but Woke World is quite another. And so, inevitably:

Here’s the cartoon that triggered it.