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 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.
Fair enough, and clippy was indeed trying to be helpful, no matter how misguided xD
I think this is what Louis was going for. He doesn’t want to ask for no more companies, just companies that make a product (doesn’t even need to be a good one) where its sole purpose is to try (doesn’t even need to succeed) and be useful to the consumer.
I think he hit his mark pretty well for the symbol, but whether or not I agree with his view on things is a different story entirely.
Clippy is a symbol of a decent company, pre-enshittification
What timeline is this? xD If anything, Microsoft is less hostile these days than they were in the 90s and early 2000s
I’m just talking about the quality of the product, not their shady business practices. By the way, it’s easy for them to appear less hostile now that they almost have the monopoly on pc and office apps
Microsoft, if anything, has become more decent (releasing at least some of their stuff as free and open source software) since the 1990s.
Kids these days don’t know about the Microsoft anti-monopoly suit sagas, or how the world felt about Bill Gates before he spent several decades and millions of dollars scrubbing his PR. They’ve always been awful and generally reviled, from the start.
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.
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
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.
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.”
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.
The love of money is the root of all evil.
Remember that one time Jesus lost his cool? He made a whip and went H.A.M. on some crypto bros in the temple.
So yeah….
Here’s the thing… Once an organization grows to a certain point, it takes on a mind of it’s own.
Decision making becomes fragmented. Details are lost between the decision and the decision maker
It’s impossible to manage 100, let alone 1000 people directly, so metrics creep in as a way to reward good performance (and maybe punish low performance).
And because we’re a hierarchial society, we further group into divisions and teams. The people who get the best metrics out of their teams are more likely to move up, the bad managers are more likely to be towards the bottom. And honestly, good lower management is mostly taking care of your people
So you’re more likely to get managers who don’t have the integrity to take a firm stand, so maybe when a worker realizes “oh shit, were leaking into the groundwater” it gets watered down to “we found a leak, but it won’t impact production” before it gets up to someone who could authorize a shutdown and fix
It’s possible for a company to do horrible things without any bad actors, and we do have plenty of bad actors around.
It’s possible to fight against this sort of thing through culture or policy, but the natural inclination is always going to maximize the metrics at any cost
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?
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.
I remember Microsoft in the late nineties.
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.
Clippy would’ve never!
Random trivia: there was also a dog
And we, working class traitors that we are, would have helped it.
