by Daniel Yim
Yet, there’s no hope even this will work with the Pointy Haired Boss. He likely will make the worst possible decision and send the office down a rabbit hole of useless work, toil, trouble, and with an impossible deadline. You’ve been down this rabbit hole, haven’t you?
Can we assume that Microsoft had Ockham in mind? As we will see, not in the way that Ockham saw his minimalist maxim. For example, in July 2011 when the Pointy-Haired Boss tries to build his own PowerPoint deck, Dilbert asks questions about what he wants. The Boss’s response? Too many questions. Well, what about Dilbert? See, he’s confined to a cubicle—just about the same size as the PowerPoint footprint in one of those open offices where the walls are short and people peer over them. This is where the term talking head comes from. What a world, what a small and inconsequential world.
So, is Adams also a victim of PowerPointlessness? The horror, the horror (Yeah, Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness . . . or the movie Apocalypse Now). You see now how pervasive this minimalist thing is?
PowerPoint Etiquette
PowerPoint etiquette suggests that you keep the bullet points per slide to three and the sentence to one line, if it needs to be a sentence. “My name is Jill” is a great example of an informative PowerPoint bullet point. However, business-speak, jargon, acronyms, and the gobbledygook you get from a presentation on new software, the cloud, cybersecurity, and even from the new workspace office designer, are for the most part indecipherable even if written in cozy one-liners.
Then there is the aggressive PowerPoint junkie who pours her heart into the program, producing lurid graphics of competing colors, flashing things, and way too many lines of code—bullet points per slide. Slide transitions—always annoying. These are the crammers. Their slides are like looking at a wall of graffiti: much ado about nothing; or if it is something, not something I will ever get. In an August 2008 Adams cartoon, Wally crams all his material onto one slide which is as black as Malevich’s black square. So, what’s it with Wally? He’s a schemer. He is an antiestablishment hero of sorts, though he is quite ineffectual. His life’s goal is to figure out how to game the system to his advantage, of course. However, this usually backfires or blows up in his face.
I am worried now. I just counted. Adams’s website has fifty-six cartoon strips where PowerPoint is a key word. You think he’s obsessed? Has he been taken in by PowerPoint—and not in a good way? It is possible.
The Iranian Connection
Now take Dogbert, the anti-hero pup who dogs Dilbert. Who else could come up with a conspiracy theory but Dogbert? That’s his stock in trade. In one Dilbert strip in June of 2007, Dogbert suggests to Dilbert that Dilbert’s company funds terrorists. Dilbert makes a flimsy excuse that they aren’t bad terrorists to which Dogbert asks how Dilbert became brainwashed so quickly . . . The Iranians gave the terrorists PowerPoint, says Dilbert.
You think that the Pointy-Haired-Boss will love this? Do you think he will understand the implications? No, he’ll jump on it and push everyone but himself into taking Persian lessons. Then when Wally produces a PowerPoint presentation full of Persian looking gibberish, the Pointy Haired Boss will nod authoritatively . . . You get the picture.
This suggests that there can be a dark side to PowerPoint and minimalism in general. Ockham, recall, said that given two good and complete explanations, we should choose the one with the fewest assumptions. The issues we must discuss are good and complete. Turning back to Jill. You just met her, and she says, “My mommy is a nurse” rather than give her own name. That could be, but we know nothing about Jill other than that she appears to be a little girl. We have too few assumptions or answers in this case to know who this little girl is other than that her mommy is a nurse. We have less than what’s necessary to make even a minimalist assumption. With this revelation, however, we have only scratched the surface. Much more lies hidden . . . which I will soon reveal.
Now to the Iranians. Washington is like an enormous washing machine on perpetual spin cycle. In recent months we have been subjected to fake news, meddling, click-bait “journalism,” alternative facts, sound-bite reporting, conspiracy theories, and other jargon (did I say there was no collusion?) that leaves us with the notion that we do not have enough information to make a good decision on just about anything that flies out of the Washington spin machine. This is the peril of minimalism: too little information. We can dismiss the news, or do research, or listen to other takes on what happened, but in the end, we remain unnerved that, like a pretzel without salt, we are missing something important.
Microsoft isn’t the only culprit in this dive towards minimalism. Most text apps trim messages into 160 characters; Twitter stops out now at 280. Both are simple versions of PowerPoint with a twist, restrictions against cramming the slide with too much stuff. Is 280 characters enough to satisfy Ockham? Maybe, if “My name is Jill” is all you need to know. However, we have political leaders, political wannabees, pundits, and critics who try to explain public policy, complicated news, and other things using the Tweet. Certainly, Ockham was speaking about brevity, but not at the expense of the assumptions required to formulate a good answer. So where did this dive to minimalism come from?
It Came From DARPA! (Coming Soon to a Theater Near You)
It came from DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), the black operations arm of the defense department that cooks up James Bond–like contraptions and other devices, programs, and tools of defense and offense used in both cold and hot wars. They’ve hitched mines to porpoises, used pigeons to guide bombs, designed hypersonic aircraft, done a lot of stuff with programming, including worms, viruses, and other invasive or disruptive hacks. They are presumed to be behind the Stuxnet worm that sent Iranian centrifuges to spin into self-destruction. How apropos that Washington’s spin cycle could destroy something.
I know that Scott Adams knows that DARPA was behind PowerPoint. We can see it in the code words in Dilbert, like: engineering and puppet (April 2011), infinite turtles as in the creation myth that the earth is a turtle and there are turtles all the way down (February 2011), portal to another dimension (September 2011), garbage and flies—think bugs, worms, hacking (September 2011). That’s just in 2011. And you didn’t see the conspiracy when you read these, did you? Tisk, tisk.
The whole PowerPoint conspiracy theory begins like a good DARPA mystery thriller. Why is PowerPoint not two words? Why is it pushed together, and why does it have two capitals? Early researchers brushed this off as a holdover from Microsoft DOS days, when you got that annoying %20 every time you used a space. Remember DOS . . . as in . . . Format c: y (look it up!). Even that cannot erase this annoying PowerPoint conspiracy.
Others claim that since other programs of Microsoft Office are one word, PowerPoint needs to be one word. What they all miss is the coded message in the word itself—Power. That’s right, with a capital P. It was this simple explanation (Thank you, Ockham) that sent me down the path to where I could finally understand the implications of the program and what it means to human civilization. It was a code word for something much dastardlier, as you are about to find out.
You see, there is even a deeper secret than ‘Power’, one that is just becoming known. You can hear the rumors and rumbles of this throughout the Internet and beyond, but it is in the form of broken code, misleading tweets, click-bait advertising, and on a billboard outside of Atlanta that references a cold beverage that will not be named. All these seemingly inconsequential bits of information do fit together quite nicely to explain the origin of PowerPoint and how DARPA was involved. Yes, the simplest explanation is the best, and quite frankly, there is no simpler explanation than I am about to give you. However, while the explanation is simple, the bumpy ride that is the history of PowerPoint will bruise your bones and put a chill down the skin on your back—goosebumps will rise for a very important reason.
From the Gulag to the Suburbs
It came by way of Siberia. We now have incontrovertible proof that
DARPA engineered PowerPoint in collaboration with Microsoft in 1990 to take down the Soviet Union. Vladimir Putin, then a KGB spook, discovered PowerPoint and its mind-numbing power but did nothing about it. He wanted power for himself, you see. Well we all know what happened. After PowerPoint slowed the economy and brought down the Soviet Union, Putin let PowerPoint run rampant through the Russian economy, to simplify it, by eliminating the Soviet five-year plan nonsense so that money could be made. But this also produced Boris Yeltsin, the first democratic President of post-soviet Russia. He was, you might say, a buffoon. Yeltsin was Putin’s next great leap to assert the power he possessed by hacking PowerPoint and its code.
Before he even came to power, Putin had his fellow cyberspooks rewrite the PowerPoint code so that the oligarchs he created would funnel money into his bank account. Well, becoming the wealthiest person on the planet wasn’t enough. Riding shirtless through the steppes like a rugged Cossack, wasn’t enough. Above all, Putin is about Power, naked, raw, sociopathic Power. He tried for years, even before he came to Power, to influence American politics through his cyber-infected code that produced stupid. How close did he come? He came close with Bill Clinton who asked what “is” is. He got closer still with Bush II and his obsession with imaginary weapons of mass destruction. He got the Birthers to spread the word about Obama . . . Then came Donald Trump.
The Trump Factor
Trump, with his short attention span, became obsessed with how simple PowerPoint made the world seem. After being conditioned by PowerPoint, Trump naturally took to Twitter and has saved the US Government Printing Office millions of dollars because he can no longer read anything more than a tweet. We now know he gained this ability from becoming conditioned to see only the magical bullet point that produces a simple take on the complexities of the world. How did he get elected? He told the American people, who have also been conditioned by PowerPoint, what they wanted to hear, using bullet point simplicities like: disaster, great, so sad, fake news, crooked, and total hoax. Thank you, Mr. Putin.
You see, Russian meddling wasn’t about the elections per se. Putin didn’t rig voting machines. He rigged Trump. PowerPoint is the only connection between Trump and Russia. Breitbart and Fox News and all the others in Trump’s circle are right to condemn any idea of collusion. Trump did it to himself, and well, of course, with the tangential assistance of Putin and his shadowy operatives.
Dilbert and Truth
You want proof. You need to look no further than the pages of Dilbert:
PowerPoint, a regressive and retro-seeking program, has done more to disable the intellectual capacity of humans than any lobotomy conducted in the 1930s in the cause of ending schizophrenia. Perversely, PowerPoint de-evolution requires no genetic engineering, just a return to abject minimalism when a grunt meant something to the caveman. The spawn of PowerPoint, texts, and tweets, and their rigid adherence to character limits have only served to enforce the stupid that Gates, Microsoft, and DARPA used to make the Russians forget their ambitions, let go of their hold on Eastern Europe, and to disremember all they had learned on how to be good Communists. No engineered bird flu virus or Stuxnet worm could have done more damage than PowerPoint.
Now, I won’t regale you with too much evidence. You must go to the Dilbert website and do this yourself. However, I will give you some of the Ockham-rich assumptions that you will find in Adams’s work. We already have seen the coded Iran message and the black square message (think black ops). Here are more.
Take Asok. Remember him? He’s Indian, like, from India, but that doesn’t matter to the story. He’s quite smart and can solve problems just as simply as William of Ockham. However, he gets abused by his office mates because he is a nerd and can’t hide anything. He is a Brainiac with a flexible nose. How often does Asok’s nose grow when he is around Power-Point, and doesn’t that mean that we should all be embarrassed by lies? Yet, is it a lie if we have too little information? What about coma or hypnotic trances after viewing a PowerPoint presentation? Right there in Adams’s work.
In August 2000, after Dilbert shows slide 397, where the audience have suddenly become violently ill, Wally says, “PowerPoint poisoning.” In February 2012 Dilbert explains to the Pointy-Haired Boss, “For my intelligent viewers, I have data and for morons I have manipulative anecdotes.” In December 2005, in his cubicle, Dilbert says, “I am entering the PowerPoint Zone.” Eat your heart out, Rod Sterling.
Finally, in June 2010, after his audience have all fallen into a PowerPoint coma, Dilbert says, “The only thing I can do now is put them into funny poses and leave.” How often have you left a PowerPoint presentation and felt like someone had done something really nasty to you and that everyone was laughing behind your back? You see, right there in the pages of Dilbert.
Certainly, DARPA’s had something to do with this. Phil appears in these strips and we know that when Phil appears, something devilish is about to occur . . . Known as “the prince of insufficient light,” who else but Phil would pull a prank like getting everyone to use PowerPoint? Can’t you see him dissolve crystal meth in Wally’s coffee to make him produce a massively overwritten PowerPoint slide, or fill his jelly donut with some psychedelic substance so he can produce that marvelous Persian-like gibberish?
Shall I go on? I believe I must. For we must understand that throughout his body of work on the PowerPoint conspiracy, Adams consistently shows how the slide deck (yeah, slang for PowerPoint) is being used to create stupid, wasted effort, inefficiency, alternative facts, and just-plain nonsense. Projects become mush and department results become incomprehensible, if not complete fabrications.
Now, I have it on good authority that DARPA had originally desired PowerPoint to be only a Russian program. Unfortunately, it’s gone viral and proliferates like the flu. Microsoft continues to mutate it to make it increasingly more “useful” (translated stupid-producing) to unsuspecting people like you and me . . . Just like the flu that captures your attention every winter, PowerPoint remains deeply embedded in your mind as a tool for making stupid—though until now, you didn’t see it that way, did you? In fact, it mutates so often, that like the flu virus, you don’t have time to make antibodies against becoming dumber. Twitter and texting only exacerbate stupid.
You’ve seen it, the Zombie syndrome infecting most of our youth today. Bent over, staring at small screens, they shuffle from classroom to classroom to see, you guessed it, another PowerPoint presentation. Their minds have been dulled to short attention spans and clips of characters that make little sense. They even have created their own code, acronyms, and nonsense words to explain stupid in texts and Tweets. All because a DARPA program got out of hand.
Is there a Dilbert app for your phone, child zombie phones? Not yet, but you think the cartoon would fit on a phone screen? Gasp, the conspiracy is everywhere. Is nothing sacred? After Trump? Not much.
Full Stop NOW!
You’ve got facts in hand, more research to do, and a sinking feeling that all has not been right with the world for some time now. It’s time to put all of this into its proper place, and that is with philosophical theory. Something that we can stuff into a minimalist box. To counteract the underlying untruths that set PowerPoint on its journey into our psyche, we must have truths. How about moral realism as our theory? Sure, if it isn’t a fact, an objective, incontrovertible fact, moral realists cannot say it is moral or not moral. The problem is that, in the murky world of conspiracies, it is most difficult to distinguish the truth from sort of the truth, wannabe truths, and outright lies.
Within moral realism is the idea of minimalism—that is, we cannot assert anything beyond what has been initially said about the act’s moralit
y or not. John lied about his age. Okay, fine enough. Moral or not moral? John has no birth certificate. He guesses his age. Is that a lie? Argh.
See, it is not just about the ‘truth’ but it is also about context. So, we can’t get to moral realism yet from this pesky PowerPoint conspiracy that seems to mangle and mingle the truth with lies, slights, and even fake news. What about other theories? Immanuel Kant says we cannot lie even if it is to save someone else from harm. Do we really want to go there? How about the notion from utilitarianism that the best moral decision is one where the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people is achieved? So, to increase productivity the Pointy-Haired Boss has everyone smoke crack. Everyone is really happy . . . Naw, too expensive.
You got it, we don’t have enough information to use any existing moral theory or develop our own yet . . . and that’s just what the conspiracy-minded minimalists want us to think about PowerPoint. It’s a Lazarus program, the resurrection of stupid. This is why Adams continually bombards us with his brief and colorful missives in Dilbert about the stupid that is the nature of PowerPoint. Folks, PowerPoint is the tool that lets loose moral realism in the form of twisted minimalism, incomplete minimalism, and misleading minimalism. It unleashed the urban legend and floods our airways with conspiracy theories for which we have incomplete information with which to judge their moral claims.
Back to Scott Adams once again. In a January 2010 strip, Dilbert explains that through the new technology being proposed the company can be managed by two monkeys, one to manage and one to look at PowerPoint slides. If we do not want to return to our simian roots, we need to begin to boycott PowerPoint. I mean, throw it to the floor. Well, that wasn’t too bright was it? The laptop is now destroyed. Delete it then, go to uninstall and uninstall it. Reject as spam any PowerPoint you are sent by e-mail. Tell your friends on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and Snapchat to do the same. Reject Homo stupidus to become Homo sapiens once again. If we all do this, we can eradicate minimalism and its minions, PowerPoint, Twitter, and Text just as we have done with smallpox. It’s time to send DARPA and their warped sense of moral realism packing. Spin them back to their lair in Foggy Bottom.