1d ago

the myth of the good tech giant

72 comments

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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

BonziBuddy was a herald of the apocalypse.
- I love this!
  I wonder if anyone under the age of ~30 would get the meme.
  
  Lol my ex made that YouTube video. Hilarious to see it here
- We shouldn't have stopped at punching the monkey. We should have been punching CEOs.
  
  Personally, I was spanking the monkey.

Holt shit this is so good
- One of my favorites of theirs, easily.

This is my new pfp btw
- That's allowed!
  
  I love u 😳

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.
  
  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.
- It's also not explicitly not about them either. Kinda the problem with symbols is that they're marred by association. This movement is ultimately symbolic and the Clippy people (Microsoft) are at the heart of everything this symbolic gesture goes against.
  It would be like me trying to make a symbol of how cars are bad by simply showing an old one.

I think if Clippy had teeth back in 1997, he might have been remembered a little differently.

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?'
  
  How long until there is a Clippy Fortnite skin?
- It was kinda hilarious that when you disabled the Windows XP file search dog there was actually an animation of him sadly walking away.

Embrace, extend, and extinguish

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.
  
  And even if it did, it wasn't always connected when running.

Nobody thinks Clippy was good, and that's the point. In the original video Louis Rossmann does talk about Microsoft's shenanigans with IE at the time.
The point is that Clippy was widely considered to be bad, and everyone considered Microsoft to be bad at the time, but everything involving technology has become so much worse since. Microsoft would be considered the most ethical tech company in the world if they still operated the way they did in the 90s. It's not the Microsoft was good in the 90s (far from it!) it's that Microsoft and all of the other tech companies have gotten so much worse since then.
The clippy thing is kinda genius really. We've been boiling the frog on a lot of things and we don't really think about how much worse things are now than they used to be. People in positions of power now probably did encounter Clippy when they were younger. Reminding them about how annoying Clippy was may make them realize how much more annoying they're being when making decisions about technology.
- I hate clippy. As a millennial who did use the version of MS office (briefly anyway) that had clippy I did get a bit of nostalgia and I installed a VM of windows 95 and installed the version of office with clippy in it.
  Then... I instantly remembered WHY I hated him. The reason is that when he pops up to offer you useless advice, he fully takes control and interrupts your work and you have to dismiss him to continue what you were doing. He does it often, too.

The teeth are terrifying lol

'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...'

you have been putting out gold the past few days, love that clippy has teeth but hes talking out of his eyes

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?
- It is just homemade Reddit after all.
- How can you stand to lie to yourself about reality, which is miserable?
  I couldn't live with myself if I didn't face reality and instead pretended I didn't see what was in front of my eyes
- I don't even use computers.
  
  Everything's computer!
  (Some pedophile)
- 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

Clippy, I pirated your software in '97 and I'd do it again if there wasn't just hot garbage to pirate.

If I had known*
- Conditionals hard!

https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/30427558
And so the game of telephone begins.
I have a sudden urge to play Universal Paperclips
- I have a sudden urge to play Universal Paperclips
  Wonderful game, unironically a masterpiece
  If you don't understand why this blank page clicker is amazing; go play it, finish it, and you will be enlightened
  
  Wonderful game, unironically a masterpiece
  
  My favourite song in the game is onto's Expanding Head Band - Riversong

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

People are seriously misremembering Clippy and Microsoft

Thanks I hate it

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
  
  Ahhh, thanks for the link, everything makes sense now
- It's about Clippit, which was a mascot that notoriously annoyed MS Office users in the 90s and 2000s. It did not yet collect your data the way everything does now.

I didn't think I'd get a chance to use this again.

Microshit is the only good tech giant because it’s a company that exclusively employs birdbrains. Anything bad they do as a byproduct of their shit ass work is easily forgivable because they’re literally just doing their damned best

Another banger.

My corporation good, my corporation strong... my corporation kicks you corporations ass.
Seeing Boeing bootlickers, apple dickriders, intel nazis do this shit for decades was annoying... At least now they learned STFU for the most part. useful fucking idiots.

Ahh, I thought that there were some recent controversies with it (reading from the other comments), but I didn't understand if there was

steal your data
How does this theft work? Do they break into my computer or accounts & take it unauthorized? Is it my data?

72 comments