The TLDW : In the 90s clippy was a symbol of a friendly product feature that wanted to help you do one thing (but you could opt out). Clippy wasn't stealing your data, serving you ads, or anything malicious, it just wanted to help you do one specific thing (e.g. write a letter). The clippy movement is about sending a message to big tech that we don't appreciate ads in our start menu, having our data scraped and sold, being forced into dark patterns, having AI try to take jobs and/or destroy industry, blatant theft of work, etc. Basically, "make computers friendly again".
Yeah, Clippy was one of the early examples of infantilization and annoying anthromorphization in software, no better than the "cutesy" error messages or engagement popups that plague us today. It should be an example of what not to do but I guess nostalgia is a powerful drug.
Despite the "internetedness" of this, it's a pretty concise summary.
I'm actually really proud of these kids for doing this. It probably won't amount to much, but they're increasingly conscious of and vocal about the problems caused by Big Tech.
...tldw? Seriously. Or could you timestamp it? I can't find attentionmaxxed flicks as attention grabbing. It fills up my attention receptors and my brain marks them as done literally 1-2 seconds in with generated mental summaries.
We used to hate Clippy because he felt intrusive. Now AI is much more deliberately intrusive and every service mines your data. Clippy doesn't seem so bad in comparison. Hence, nostalgia mixed with a form of protest against the AI tech space.
Seriously, watch at least half of Louis Rossman's video in the GGGP post. It's worth the 2 minutes at 2x speed it'll take (4mins at 1x speed). You won't get the spirit of the thing quite the same if you don't hear him explain it.
It's a signal of disgust and rebellion against modern evil that companies do — they abuse attention, data-mine, etc. The clippy mascot represents something that, in contrast, may have been dumb and annoying, but was not actively evil. "Clippy just wanted to help."
I can't think of a lower-effort or less beneficial social rebellion, and on top of that the messaging is totally confused and half of the people that encounter it will need it explained to them.
it'll just be purposefully misinterpreted on the corporate level and Microsoft will roll out a clippy that does abuse the user to ride the momentum.
That is stage one which is building the movement. The current action being taken is a campaign of contacting the AE and governors to get them to deny the contract for AI tracking cameras. Louis is one of the few people that actually give actionable steps
Rossmann is the first to admit that Clippy pfps do nothing if the person stops their activism after that one gesture. A 5 second pfp change to spark a conversation (the one we're having, for example) is pretty decent ROI.
Profile picture are literally a meme for performative activism, not something that achieves anything at all. All it does is signal to those that already think alike that you are part of the pack and everyone else will just roll their eyes.
You watched the youtube short? Do you know who Rossmann is? He wasn't in the youtube short. That should've been a hint. GGGP = great-great-grandparent = 4 levels up; the short was 2 levels up.
A dog whistle is intended to be only recognized by those who are intended to "hear" it - like how an actual dog whistle appears almost entirely silent to humans but can be heard by dogs. It exists to signal alignment to those "in the know" while providing plausible deniability that can be used to paint anyone pointing it out as a conspiracy theorist. A lot of far-right/neo-nazi 4chan/8kun memes fall into this category: the "OK" hand sign, the use of Pepe the frog (although that one quickly saw wider adoption making it too ambiguous for signalling purposes), even simply the concept of drinking milk, but also of course "number codes" like 14, 88 or 13/50. These don't have to have an inherent/original meaning as they're often more effective if they're sufficiently obscure/rare but have pre-existing unrelated meaning. Clearly Clippy is not a dog whistle then: although it references a pre-existing thing, there's no semantic ambiguity nor any attempt to hide or deny its meaning. The intent is to get people curious, find out its meaning and adopt it if they agree with it.
Cult symbols are also usually meant to be easily obscured and meaningless to the uninitiated. They're also often used as a form of communication but otherwise usually behave similarly to dog whistles. Unlike the dog whistles I mentioned they usually have no prior meaning (unless they're adopted from pre-existing occult/religious symbolism) and primarily profess shared mantras/beliefs. Some more widely known examples can als be found in Christianity: the crucifix symbolizes the professed belief that Jesus of Nazareth died on the cross as a human and rose from the dead as the Son of God, the "Jesus fish" (ICHTHYS) symbol represents a bunch of ideas in addition to being derived from an abbreviation of the professed belief in Jesus as the Son of God and Savior - the latter is widely claimed to originate very much in a "cult symbol" by allowing Christians to identify each other in a way not obvious to outsiders during times in which they were facing religious suppression. If there is a mantra in Clippy, it's "Clippy never hurt anyone" and that seems a bit too self-referential - plus as I said "followers" will happily explain this meaning to you.
A sibling suggest "virtue signal" and I guess that's a better fit but only through the semantic erosion the term has experienced as part of the US conservative culture war on "wokeness" (a term that suffers from the same problem).
I'd say the French flag profile pictures following the ISIS attacks in France or the rainbow colors adopted by various corporations on social media for Pride Month pre-Trump were a better example for virtue signals. Clippy seems a lot more confined and specific to really fit in the same bucket. The French flag really just expressed some vague notion of "solidarity", the rainbow colors in corporate imagery just vaguely expressed support for "diversity". So they literally exist to signal virtues - vague "support" for a concept generally understood to be positive - nothing concrete. Clippy on the other hand seems to specifically represent opposition to specific common business practices in the (US especially and AI in particular) tech industry.
