Clippy sucks as a symbol for change in tech.

Clippy has been crowned as a symbol against AI, data collection and post-sale licensing changes by Louis Rossman. Together with his followers he is inspiring a community effort to signal the distaste they have against modern tech.

And I think that it's a pretty shitty symbol, honestly.

Clippy comes from roughly the early 2000s, directly from Microsoft. That is from around the same time that Microsoft got into hot water over the Internet Explorer Antitrust case.

Clippy represented a megacorporation trying to appeal to the regular computer user, make things easier, be an assistant. A bit like what ChatGPT and such market themselves as to us nowadays.

Let me be blunt: If Microsoft could collect all your data effectively in the 2000s, they would have.

If LLMs were a thing in the 2000s, they'd feed it your data.

If stable diffusion was released in 2002, it would have been trained on your images.

source (image is hotlinked from there)

So I find it very ironic that Louis decided to choose clippy as the symbol of change against AI, big megacorp data collection and practices in that vein. Like, seriously? Are we using the megacorp's designs as a symbol against the megacorps?

In this situation, Microsoft is our enemy. Their symbology should not be what we're using to drive change. It's like a subtle nod to their past, which makes no sense given the goals, and even louis' own mention of the Internet Explorer anti-trust lawsuit.

If it were me, I would have come together with some friends and designed something new. I would've leaned a bit into a hopeful future, think solarpunk, but still mostly give it a dystopic vibe to reflect the current state of technology.

If we want to make a change regarding this, we need to focus more on creation, on non-artificial expression of thought. Less on how angry we are, and "how much better things used to be".

just remember:

the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.