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.
this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2025
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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.
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?
Intel.
Pretty sure Intel is still alive and their problems are systematic from many years ago when AMD released Bulldozer and Intel decided it can stop innovating. So don't think they fit here.
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?
Microsoft is doing pretty well so I wouldn't call it "dismantling", it seems to be working for them.
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 ~/Library in any case. Might have been the appropriately named IntelligencePlatform databases, 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.
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Microsoft sees Clippy everywhere: Oh they must really like him, let's make him our new AI mascot!
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Fair point. Has meant IT companies.
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.
Thank you for sharing analognowhere content
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