2d ago

the myth of the good tech giant

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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.
  
  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
  
  Yeah the "good" thing about the Internet of the nineties and the naughties was the difficulty of actually making any money on it. There wasn't much reason for big corporations to try and take over, and the companies that did have a significant presence on it were mostly run by tech nerds, not finance bros. The web was mostly static sites and the concept of collecting data on users beyond their IP addresses didn't really exist.
  The companies and the products are different now, because the people in charge now have different ideas about what is possible, reasonable and profitable compared to 20 years ago. Add to that all the changes to the underlying technology and social norms - it's a very different environment.
  It's true that we can't go back to the way things were, because that would require the context of the entire world to shift. But we can still indicate our desire for products that are less invasive, less exploitative.
- 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.

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