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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.
At least in the US, companies have a legal fiduciary duty to protect their investors interests above all else.
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.
Random trivia: The clippy 3D animations were created by Deadpool director Tim Miller (of Blur Studio).
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.
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.
Microsoft sees Clippy everywhere: Oh they must really like him, let’s make him our new AI mascot!
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.
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.
This is why I use Linux
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.
The thing is, we have to be reasonable with our expectations. You or I may remember that Microsoft has always been shady and anti consumer, most people don’t. They remember a time when you bought things and owned them, and it didn’t feel like we were being nickel and dimed quite so hard. We are not going to start an anti Microsoft (or whatever corporation) movement and actually be able to rile the masses to support that cause, but we might at least be able to get them to demand things go back to the quality they were at 30 years ago
I don’t interpret it as “once upon a time, Microsoft was a good company”, I interpret it as “this meme-y and goofy character gave the maximum amount of assistance and intrusion I would like in the products I use”. I think anyone would agree that Louis is pro-consumers and tend not to think highly of any megacorp.
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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
I kinda got sucked into that Clippy thing for a while then took a moment to think about like everyone.
Kinda cringe, to adopt anything coming from microsoft for a pro ownership movement.
I agree 100% with the cause but we could go with any other resistance symbol that could mean actually something.
Well, to be fair, it’s not utilizing Microsoft as a mascot, but the era of buying and owning and keeping, as opposed to the current era of renting forever.
Back then, you bought a computer and it came with the programs you needed and they were yours until you got rid of the computer. Then they were the property of whomever got the computer next.
That’s what people are calling for. Which is depressing in and of itself because it’s so little to ask for. They’re the hand that’s starving and robbing us. We shouldn’t be asking for them to stop robbing us, we should be taking the hand and using it to distribute to all who need.
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.
It’s your system
Evil techcorp’s servers (hosting online services I send requests containing data to) are mine? Cool! How do I sell those?
Or are we referring to local software that gets & sends my data without authorization?
you either accept it or don’t get to use what you bought
Claiming that’s theft seems like (taking artistic license with the word steal to express) wanting an agreement that wasn’t offered. Like
How dare evil techcorp make a service I want to use with voluntary conditions I don’t want? That’s stealing!
I don’t think computer hardware typically has those types of agreements, and I can change the software & choose online services.
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
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.
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.
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.
Are we debating whether we like or dislike the particular flavor of the chosen symbol for consumer activism? “Maybe if it was cornflower blue?”
Are you telling me there was no shift in how companies want to make money over the last 30 years? That is absurd. They would have never done that in the 90s.
