Random trivia: The clippy movement is not saying that Microsoft was noble. It’s saying we need to go back to the 90s version is the internet.
Random trivia: The clippy 3D animations were created by Deadpool director Tim Miller (of Blur Studio).
The entire clippy thing baffles me.
Let’s use the mascot of Microsoft, a tech giant who invades every inch that they can, to say we don’t like tech giants!
I don’t think any company that uses AI or scrapes data gives two shits what your avatar is. It’s the equivalent of changing your twitter profile to show support for the victims of something, and then carrying on as usual.
Microsoft would kill for Clippy to be remembered as a friend. Because that just sanewashes their history as a company when clippy was a thing. Yes, please ignore the anti-trust busting in Congress. Please ignore how we made computers worse for the end user by restricting what you can do on your purchased computer.
“Clippy was your friend. Clippy didn’t want to steal your data. Clippy just wanted to help.”
Help infantize the masses with “It looks like you’re writing a document, do you want help with that? Yes, or maybe later?”
This entire clippy thing is just basically free whitewashing and advertising for Microsoft, one of the biggest players in the reasons why people use the avatar.
At least invent something new, if it’s about protecting artists, instead of copying a jpg from a 90s corporate milquetoast mascot.
I don’t think any company that uses AI or scrapes data gives two shits what your avatar is.
Didn’t Rossmann say the whole point of changing your profile to clippy was to show everyone participating how many people would be willing to actually fight for consumer rights?
So instead of fighting it they changed their profile picture. Might as well post “Down for this sort of thing, I hereby declare Facebook can’t steal my posts” and then never actually do anything to help stop it.
So I suppose you never watched his follow-up video?
I don’t think they would’ve, they already had the market, and the attitude about privacy was very different back then
This also was before late-stage capital converted to endgame capitalism, back then they wanted to protect the cash cow. They cared about customer loyalty, because they cared about future revenue
Now? Companies are dismantling themselves for one more good quarter
Companies are dismantling themselves for one more good quarter
Any example of this?
What do you think laying off your workforce does? These are the people who produce the things that make money
For a clear cut example, Microsoft and gaming. They lay off entire studios the moment they release a hit
It costs like 18 months+ of salary to replace a role like that, and you’ll have to pay them more. It’ll make you a bit more money next quarter… But in 2-5 years when there’s no new game?
Intel.
I kinda miss the days when computers and the Internet were so slow that you would notice if something else than what you were running was happening. Data logger calling home on my 28k modem would have been noticed right away. Trying to screenshot my pc screen every time I type or click, no way I could miss that. Scanning my HDD would lock it down so much I would have been stupid not to notice.
Move out to a rural area were our speeds are mind-numbingly slow and you can still experience the phenomenon you describe. Only problem is now a days there isn’t much you can do about it if forced to use Windows.
You used to be able to tell what every process was doing on your computer. Nowadays there are so many processes running and they all have tons of child processes that you can’t tell what is doing what.
Even on Linux where it’s easy to find what any running service does, the are so many
And they have so much processing horsepower anymore, things that weren’t conceivable just happen and there’s no easy way to disable them, like how Macs run
mediaanalysisd(which you can at least see, but disabling will break OS updates) that scrape every image file on your computer and OCR/categorize them and tag them, iPhones/iPads do too, and you can’t even find or see the running process let alone kill it.So every piece of media on your computer/phone just gets analyzed without your consent. Sure, maybe it is neat that you can search for a word that was in an image and that image comes up, but it would be nice if users of devices were allowed to choose what is/is not indexed.
Its like you’re a passenger on your tools anymore, rather than the driver.
And media analysis is like the least creepy shit Apple does. They also analyse your social networks (based on who you interact with using Apple services), and the database where they store that shit has labels for eg. political affiliations etc. (can’t remember off-hand which of the many many Apple spyware dbs it was. One of the sqlite databases under
~/Libraryin any case. Might have been the appropriately namedIntelligencePlatformdatabases, but I’m too lazy to check right now)
I remember struggling with the idea that all companies care more about the bottom line than anything else. People are good and care about good things. How can companies who are made of people always cause problems? There must be at least one good company out there, right?
It’s only after I spent some time in the world that I figured out that money really messes with things. It pressures companies to do whatever they can get away with. It separates the people who run the companies from the bad outcomes that company creates.
And at the end of the day everyone needs to make a choice. Live and participate in a system that causes problems, or die. I chose to live and I don’t blame anyone else for choosing to live.
People are good and care about good things.
We have trouble understanding what’s going on because the average person can’t comprehend the levels of greed that modern Wall St capitalism selects for.
Just like the average person cannot comprehend a million years, the average person can’t appreciate the level of avarice some of our rich and powerful operate at. Only a few of us have interacted with people that broken.
There a tons of good people and good businesses out there. They are currently victims to levels of avarice we can’t bring ourselves to admit exists.The way laws and bylaws describe the jobs of CEOs and CFOs, the most qualified people to do those jobs are sociopaths. Empathy is practically a disqualifying personality trait.
Companies, especially larger ones, abstract away human responsibility and ethics from the decision-making process, making it easier for people to do bad things.
“We do this for the company!”
Plus, an individual’s ability to live being tied to the continued success of said company doesn’t help things either.
“If I speak out, I’m not a ‘team player’. And those people get fired.”
There’s also diffusing responsibility across the organization. It’s easy to achieve unethical things, when the individual’s part of the job hardly seems “bad” at all.
At least in the US, companies have a legal fiduciary duty to protect their investors interests above all else.
The love of money is the root of all evil.
Remember that one time Jesus lost his cool? He made a whip and went H.A.M. on some crypto bros in the temple.
So yeah….
Microsoft sees Clippy everywhere: Oh they must really like him, let’s make him our new AI mascot!
I guess not many people remember that Microsoft was convicted of antitrust violations against Netscape (which effectively destroyed that command).
Microsoft nowadays is one of the evil companies. Microsoft back in the day was the evil company.
What about Monsanto (Roundup) and Philip-Morris (lol)? You could probably include Dole. As well as the East India Company.
The video that started this clippy campaign mentioned that. The message is that those sort of transgressions seem so minor compared to what companies bot only do, but get away with now
Clippy was hated at the time, but an annoying useless assistant that doesn’t send anything to the Internet, let alone your personal data, seems like a dream now.
Using a mascot from big tech to protest against invasive big tech is tad confusing…
Louis Rossmann is not the smartest cookie in the jar, but he is a cookie, at least.
I agree with most of his general sentiments, but I don’t really like him. He always comes off as a tad arrogant to me.
I like what he does and that he can rally people to a cause, but he consistently misses the mark.
In order to escape the corrupt bureaucracy of New York, he moved to… Texas.
I think he’s a ‘path of least resistance’ kind of guy, not ideologically driven but rather “I don’t wanna deal with it” driven. He has deemed that it is easier to move to Texas because the corruption there affects him less directly and more abstractly, and he chooses to front Right to Repair because it is easier to lobby and rally people than it is to work in his industry without his political influence.
He has a front row seat to the horrors of capitalism and, without missing a beat, says “I’m not a socialist, I’m a capitalist” because it’s easier to be a shitlib than it is to believe in something bigger.
That’s just like Lemmy, ignoring years of hard work in pursuit of positive change because someone doesn’t pass the right ideological purity test.
How many millions of people have you reached about the importance of consumer rights?
You bitch at me for being an ideological puritan and then ask me if I’m pure enough by your standards. Did you miss the part where I said I like what he does?
Yes, I absolutely did miss that part somehow. I still think you’re being too hard on the guy, but the tone of my comment was out of line given that context. I apologize.
How many millions of people have you reached about the importance of consumer rights?
Only my friends, but I don’t then move to CorpoLand, USA because muh free dumbs.
It’s basically saying he was the freedom for ye, not for thee. Texas is where you go when you want to have companies do what they want, as any restrictions on their actions hurts their bottom dollar.
I also thought Louis’s choice of Clippy was a bit odd, but the fact that there is a symbol people can rally around at all is more important than the symbol itself in many ways.
Fair enough, and clippy was indeed trying to be helpful, no matter how misguided xD
I think this is what Louis was going for. He doesn’t want to ask for no more companies, just companies that make a product (doesn’t even need to be a good one) where its sole purpose is to try (doesn’t even need to succeed) and be useful to the consumer.
I think he hit his mark pretty well for the symbol, but whether or not I agree with his view on things is a different story entirely.
I thought the whole “clippy just wanted to help” meme was sarcastic since clippy’s nagging was just as intrusive as the current AI being forced into everything, but it seems it is not.
clippy’s nagging was just as intrusive as the current AI being forced into everything
I thought the opposite was (part of) the point. Just right-click the assistant and tell it to go away, that’s it. If all the AI garbage that’s being integrated into Windows and many applications was that easy to get rid of I’d be considerably less annoyed by it. It was clumsy and misguided but not nearly as intrusive, also didn’t require an account and an Internet connection.
Fwiw, I still think it’s sarcastic.
Clippy is a symbol of a decent company, pre-enshittification
Lol. As if. MS has been predatory and nasty during all its existence. Even during the MS DOS days, it pulled some incredibly shady stuff against DR DOS, and it’s only gotten worse since then.
What timeline is this? xD If anything, Microsoft is less hostile these days than they were in the 90s and early 2000s
I’m just talking about the quality of the product, not their shady business practices. By the way, it’s easy for them to appear less hostile now that they almost have the monopoly on pc and office apps
Never read the Halloween Documents, have you?
Microsoft, if anything, has become more decent (releasing at least some of their stuff as free and open source software) since the 1990s.
Could be wrong, but that looks like a generative AI version of Clippy. It doesn’t look like an actual paperclip and the text bubble is coming out of his eyes.
So using big tech to mock the use of a big tech logo to fight big tech is like 2 layers of irony.
Generated images don’t use “AI”. Also, this wasn’t generated.
No it was drawn by pmjv author of analog nowhere, who makes content exclusively for lemmy.
Shame it wasn’t credited.
Check out their other work at Unix surrealism
Their site is linked in the main post.
iirc prahou also posts on mastodon
I am wrong then :)
Thank you for sharing analognowhere content
I remember Microsoft in the late nineties.
Stop trying to make clippy look bad! He is our symbol to fight against the enshitification now!
That’s an odd stance bc at the time it was introduced clippy was almost universally reviled and seen as an example of microsoft taking something that was fine (office 95) and making it objectively worse (office 97 introduced product activation, the stupid paper clip assistant, an arguably dumb UI refresh, and the most hostile part: a new version of the proprietary doc format that wouldn’t render correctly in word 95, forcing people to upgrade)
enshittification wasn’t a concept back then but microsoft certainly lived up to it time and time again
If anything this comic doesn’t make sense because no shit, microsoft started selling your data the nanosecond it became viable to do so. They were always evil. Whereas google at one point literally had a motto of “don’t be evil” in their guidelines or whatever, which fooled a lot of people in the 90s. they famously had to remove because once data collection was becoming obvious it was kind of silly to keep that bit around I suppose
Louis makes a lot of the points you’re making in the video. He points to Clippy as an example of universal repulsion where we “didn’t know how lucky we had it”, versus the wolf dressed up in social media’s clothing we have today.
I agree with a lot of what you said, but it’s still worth watching the video. His overall aim is an honourable one and the choice of Clippy is pretty smart in light of the aims.
It definitely is strange. But that doesn’t change that it has submerged as this symbol (just look up some new videos about clippy on YouTube). Many people probably do that because of counter-culture; clippy is liked because it had been hated for a long time and many (most?) people don’t know why.
Link here. Clippy never tried to sell our data. He just wanted to help, even if he was bad at it.
Link here. Clippy never tried to sell our data. He just wanted to help, even if he was bad at it.
He would have tried to sell your data if he could have. Clippy would use Recall 24/7 if he could have.
Clippy would’ve never!
steal your data
Do they break into my computer or accounts & take it unauthorized? Is it data in my private systems/networks/accounts that I exclusively own or is legally protected as exclusively mine?
You sign ownership away when you scroll past 35 pages and click “I Accept”
So, it’s their system & it’s not theft by usage agreement?
It’s your system and you agreed to licence your data to them. So technically it’s not theft. But also technically, pirating isn’t theft either, you’re not breaking into microsoft HQ and stealing a product key.
On a practical everyday way, yeah, I would say they are “stealing” your data, since they hide that as a clause in a massive EULA that can be altered at any time, and you either accept it or don’t get to use what you bought.
