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BonziBuddy was a herald of the apocalypse.

This is my new pfp btw

Holt shit this is so good

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.

Isn't it about clippy and not microsoft

No! If we just change our avatars to Clippy the tech giants will feel really bad and stop harvesting our data and locking us out of our products! Then we'll be able to keep forking our money over to those same companies but it'll be okay 'cause they'll be nice now!

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!'

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?

The teeth are terrifying lol

Embrace, extend, and extinguish

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

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

I know that it is common to turn a symbol initially built against you into one which now benefits you, but I don't think that's whats going to happen with Clippy primarily because of message here isn't "Clippy wants us to move into a future where we own our tech/social infrastructure" but instead "man, im really nostalgic for the way corporations used to treat us"

I have no problem using a symbol developed my Microsoft to spread anti-big tech messaging. The problem is that to a lot of people, the messaging doesn't feel ant-big tech or anti-capitalist so much as it is just nostalgic. Microsoft was never a nice company. Even in the 1990s they were exercising their E.E.E (Embrace, Extend, Extinguish) strategy to beat federated and decentralized platforms and technologies. The goal of these companies (and you can see it now in their attitudes towards AI) is to own as much social infrastructure as they can. From where you get your news to where you get your friends. The only way to work against this is to work against big tech. There is no other way.

Part of me wonders if the message behind the current Clippy symbol can be bent into something more forward facing, but I also feel that that would be hard/would feel artificial because of the fact that Clippy is just now so connected to nostalgia.

'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...'

it looks like you're trying to invoke nostalgia for older days, do you want help with that?

They certainly knew how to collect it back then. They just didn't yet have anyone willing to buy it from them.

"Clippy sucked and everyone hated it but tech giants currently do mych more and nobody complains."

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

So... where can we buy this in sticker form?