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I will just as soon my Jack2Head finishes downloading the latest update!
Please drink verification can to continue
I’m reading ‘The Circle’ by Dave Eggers right now, and he totally foresaw all knowing corporative control back in the 2010s.
It is a tome at 500 pages, but a great read, so far.
Not gonna shit on Eggers or anything, but I don’t think that concept was new in the 2010s.
Snow Crash is one that comes to mind right away, but I haven’t read The Circle, so maybe I’m wrong about what you’re referring to. I think William Gibson probably wrote about similar themes at some point as well.
If you haven’t read Snow Crash, btw, you should. It’s fucking awesome
Definitely loved Snow Crash. Similar message that everything will be shared/recorded. In The Circle it’s a bit more chilling, for me at least, because every person is a ‘Gargoyle’ that HAS to record and share every thought and emotion and event, and it’s all happening in a somewhat boring cyber-corpo near future dystopia, whereas SC was a madcap over the top cyberpunk playground.
Where I’m at in The Circle, employees of the big tech company are expected to share pics of everything they do and comment on everything their coworkers do. Fill out a minimum of 500 survey questions a day on top of their daily work quota. Everyone’s work performance is shared for Friendly Competition.
I’d go on, but there’d be spoilers.
So, like you said, definitely not an original idea, just a slightly more current and boringly believable dystopia than rad pizza delivering samurais and viral languages developing on pirated barges floating in trash gyres in the Pacific.
I was referring to the setting of Snow Crash. Corporate-owned exclaves, etc.
That sounds interesting though…
BonziBuddy was a herald of the apocalypse.
Lol my ex made that YouTube video. Hilarious to see it here
This is my new pfp btw
That’s allowed!
Embrace, extend, and extinguish
Thanks I hate it
They certainly knew how to collect it back then. They just didn’t yet have anyone willing to buy it from them.
If it’s 97, there’s a good chance the computer doesn’t even have an internet connection.
I’m out of the loop on this one, is it related to real events?
here, the video which started all: https://odysee.com/@rossmanngroup:a/change-your-profile-picture-to-clippy.:e
and where he goes a bit more into detail and talks about many of the points seen in this thread: https://odysee.com/@rossmanngroup:a/you-changed-your-profile-to-clippy-now:6
If I had known*
Conditionals hard!
Somebody in the MS marketing department: ‘Everyone hates clippy. What can we do about this?’
‘Paste a couple gifs of a CGI dog on top of it?’
‘Genius! Let’s go to our two week lunch!’
30 years later:
'Everyone hates us. What can we do about this?’‘Make it fashionable for people born in 2003 to pretend to be nostalgic for Clippy?’
It started from right to repair advocate Louis Rossman. If MS has got their claws in him the right to repair movement has just stalled out.
It’s not really necessary to get their claws in him; the more this trend gains attention, the less nuanced and directed the trajectory will become. Microsoft is much more equipped to algorithmically control the trajectory than what’s-his-name, so they will.
If they’re not too distracted with providing warfighting capabilities to our boys here and abroad.
Is this the anti rosman propaganda kicking in
Ofcorse its true. The point is it couldn’t and it possed us off enough they removed it
Clippy, I pirated your software in '97 and I’d do it again if there wasn’t just hot garbage to pirate.
Isn’t it about clippy and not microsoft
Yes, the people who are somehow getting the message that Louis Rossmann was praising Microsoft either didn’t watch the video or generally struggle with nuance, or both.
If you told Clippy that you were having a bad day, he wasn’t going to use that information to try and figure out which advertiser to sell you to, nor was he trying to steal your personal data or get you to purchase other Microsoft products. He had no ulterior motives.
Talking about what Microsoft as a company might or might not have done or wanted to do in '97 is irrelevant.
The point is that Clippy was a better assistant product because it did not do the things that the current generation of assistant software products do.
It’s not irrelevant. Using a corporate mascot as a symbol against another corporate mascot/product isn’t going to spread the message Louis intended. You argue the people complaining about it aren’t getting his point, but do you really think it will/has survived the word-of-mouth spreading it? The game of telephone that viral trends like this follow is lightning fast and warps messages in extreme ways. And it’s not much of a stretch to assume that, if MS churned out a new Clippy chatbot, people would rally around it to spite the others since they have no understanding of why they were doing it in the first place.
*Also, people already mischaracterize the sincerity of early tech giants. I’ve certainly seen many people lament “the good Internet” of the mid 2000s, as if the very issues we have today weren’t percolating back then. None of those companies were ever good or harmless, the idea that them or their products are “different” now is naive, and relying on that naivety to push for change is a mistake.
My take: if Rossman came out swinging as an anti-corporate revolutionary, his ideas wouldn’t have wide appeal right now, since many people still think the problem is just “bad” mega-corporations. So instead, he’s arguing for less-shitty tech corporations as a first step (symbolized by Clippy, of a less-intrusive software age), rather than “destroy all tech corpos now.” No, Microsoft wasn’t good then, but they were less awful.
If his video were starkly anti-capitalist, it would not have reached 2.5 million people, and I’d say getting that many people to start thinking about rejecting invasive software is a great step in the right direction, as opposed to ideological purism that would only resonate with those who already agree. The need for these baby steps is frustrating for those who already see the big picture, but a few chats with my coworkers quickly reveal how shockingly little some people have actually thought about the sins of big tech.
No, Microsoft wasn’t good then, but they were less awful.
what? when? you could arguably say that about google, but ms was famous for being a major tech ghoul in the late 1990s, early 2000s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIr8Bk8QOHE 3:45 is when he starts talking about his “frustrations with the vocal minority of FOSS cancer”
Watching the video, he doesn’t seem too found of FOSS or any type of anti-capitalist approach (at one point, he uses the word “communistic” in his descriptions of FOSS) Unfortunately the clippy symbol (as also seen in the post we are commenting on) seems less of a “We should move to an internet we control” and more of a “im nostalgic for when corporations were nicer to us” as if control like this has never been the end goal.
this! i’m about to create another account just to upvote this again
I know that it is common to turn a symbol initially built against you into one which now benefits you, but I don’t think that’s whats going to happen with Clippy primarily because of message here isn’t “Clippy wants us to move into a future where we own our tech/social infrastructure” but instead “man, im really nostalgic for the way corporations used to treat us”
I have no problem using a symbol developed my Microsoft to spread anti-big tech messaging. The problem is that to a lot of people, the messaging doesn’t feel ant-big tech or anti-capitalist so much as it is just nostalgic. Microsoft was never a nice company. Even in the 1990s they were exercising their E.E.E (Embrace, Extend, Extinguish) strategy to beat federated and decentralized platforms and technologies. The goal of these companies (and you can see it now in their attitudes towards AI) is to own as much social infrastructure as they can. From where you get your news to where you get your friends. The only way to work against this is to work against big tech. There is no other way.
Part of me wonders if the message behind the current Clippy symbol can be bent into something more forward facing, but I also feel that that would be hard/would feel artificial because of the fact that Clippy is just now so connected to nostalgia.
I know that it is common to turn a symbol initially built against you into one which now benefits you
The idea behind using clippy was that when created, it wasn’t against you; it was always just there to help, with no alterior motive.
The problem is that to a lot of people, the messaging doesn’t feel ant-big tech or anti-capitalist
Seeing clippy is more of a message without a message. It could have been any image, but seeing this one thing everywhere starts to show you how many of us there are and that we are capable of working together to achieve a goal (in this specific case: outreach).
I’ve recently got an idea (a paranoid one) that this
Microsoft was never a nice company. Even in the 1990s they were exercising their E.E.E (Embrace, Extend, Extinguish) strategy to beat federated and decentralized platforms and technologies.
is a popular wrong myth.
Because Sun was still alive. That Sun. Seeming as if half of its employees were geniuses. Seeming as if they had a plan for all the industry for a 100 years forward. Which was the original “corporation of good”, almost nobody dares to treat it as something not sacred.
Sun’s plan was extremely hierarchical, and definitely not decentralization\federation minded.
Saying that a technology is universal (or not) requires understanding of it down to elements.
Maybe the Internet itself is conceived the way that it will always lead to centralization and hierarchy, as a tool to change the society.
See how IRL democracy and interoperability and choice in various situations were and even are absolutely normal, in friend groups and often in community places, but on the Internet you come to a place and it has moderators, appointed by other moderators and administrators, and administrators are gods, and there’s often no interoperability. And the longer it exists, the less interoperability there is.
Maybe we need a new global network, reimagined from ground zero with understanding of the risks. That is, a new common layer, where IP is in the Internet.
It’s a symbol, it’s easily recognizable for it’s simplicity and only aim to help.
It helps us feel less alone and to find the resolve to fight togheter.
Y’all just love to feel miserable don’t you?
I don’t even use computers.
That’s just it, kid: you’re in one.
Everything’s computer!
(Some pedophile)
It is just homemade Reddit after all.
not really. meaningless acts like this only serve to satisfy people enough that they don’t feel the need to do something more meaningful. a protest that doesn’t inconvenient anyone is not a protest. it’s compliance with an asterisk.
meaningless acts like this only serve to satisfy people enough that they don’t feel the need to do something more meaningful
someone who is satisfied by doing a “meaningless act” wouldn’t do something more direct either way.
This is not a protest, this is a rally to arms, misery doesn’t motivate change
- Step 1: Change your profile picture
- Step 2: ???
- Step 3: Surveillance Capitalism is defeated
I’m sorry, next time we start a movement we’ll be sure to send you a detailed plan step by step dumb proof, sorry for trying to get people onto even acknowledging an issue and making people realise that they are not alone
Thank you, that would be a good step in the right direction so we can coordinate together.
BTW, I think it’s more of a call to arms to boycott companies that follow these practices, as a step one. Other steps might be more similar to how one fights fascist regimes.
Are you not familiar with Louis Rossman? I think this “change your pfp to clippy” thing is dumb as hell too, and I’m upset that this is the thing from him that broke into the “mainstream”.
He’s been championing right to repair, boycotting shit companies, documenting corporate bait and switches for years. He started and runs consumerrights.wiki, to document companies pulling shit like pushing out an update to smart TVs that blocks you from continuing to use them unless you agree to let them harvest your data. And ways to work around it. Trying to hold these fuckers accountable.
Only a few weeks ago he put up a $5000 bounty for anyone that could jailbreak a specific smarthome product that is trying to get owners to now pay $100 a year to keep running.
Again, I loathe this clippy bullshit, but “it’s not enough” applies to the people doing it, not the guy who started it. There is a movement, this is just so far the only part of it to hit mainstream.
Louis Rossman’s cool, pure virtue signaling is less so.
if us lefties could only jump over the hurdle of choosing the exact flavour before doing anything. there are more than enough people on the left side of the middle to achieve real change. but we are too caught up fighting minor differences.
fasci, on the other hand, need nothing in common, except an indistinct hatred for random people. the german fascists didn’t like religion at all, but officially worked with the christian church. still they rallied behind a religious symbol and would have died holding it up…
meanwhile we are arguing if even having a symbol is worthwhile
‘Looks like you could use some help investing in crypto! Let me help, but you should have a solid investment in a couple tech stocks first…’
