Thank you for sharing analognowhere content
Using a mascot from big tech to protest against invasive big tech is tad confusing…
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.
“You criticize society, yet you partake in it. Curious!”
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
iirc prahou also posts on mastodon
Their site is linked in the main post.
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.
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.
new meta: putting “random trivia:” before your contrarian comments
Random Trivia: I gotta start doing this in all my comments
Random trivia: you can problematize anything if you’re good enough
Well that just sounds like a motivational quote!
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.
Random trivia: The clippy 3D animations were created by Deadpool director Tim Miller (of Blur Studio).
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.
I guess not many people remember that Microsoft was convicted of antitrust violations against Netscape (which effectively destroyed that command).
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.
Microsoft nowadays is one of the evil companies. Microsoft back in the day was the evil company.
Microsoft sees Clippy everywhere: Oh they must really like him, let’s make him our new AI mascot!
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?
