the myth of the good tech giant

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.

Move out to a rural area were our speeds are mind-numbingly slow and you can still experience the phenomenon you describe. Only problem is now a days there isn't much you can do about it if forced to use Windows.
- You used to be able to tell what every process was doing on your computer. Nowadays there are so many processes running and they all have tons of child processes that you can't tell what is doing what.

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 agree with most of his general sentiments, but I don't really like him. He always comes off as a tad arrogant to me.
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 thought the whole "clippy just wanted to help" meme was sarcastic since clippy's nagging was just as intrusive as the current AI being forced into everything, but it seems it is not.
- clippy’s nagging was just as intrusive as the current AI being forced into everything
  I thought the opposite was (part of) the point. Just right-click the assistant and tell it to go away, that's it. If all the AI garbage that's being integrated into Windows and many applications was that easy to get rid of I'd be considerably less annoyed by it. It was clumsy and misguided but not nearly as intrusive, also didn't require an account and an Internet connection.
- Fwiw, I still think it's sarcastic.
Clippy is a symbol of a decent company, pre-enshittification
- Lol. As if. MS has been predatory and nasty during all its existence. Even during the MS DOS days, it pulled some incredibly shady stuff against DR DOS, and it's only gotten worse since then.
- What timeline is this? xD If anything, Microsoft is less hostile these days than they were in the 90s and early 2000s
- 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.
- Never read the Halloween Documents, have you?
Could be wrong, but that looks like a generative AI version of Clippy. It doesn't look like an actual paperclip and the text bubble is coming out of his eyes.
So using big tech to mock the use of a big tech logo to fight big tech is like 2 layers of irony.
- "You criticize society, yet you partake in it. Curious!"
- Generated images don't use "AI". Also, this wasn't generated.

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

Companies are dismantling themselves for one more good quarter
Any example of this?
- Intel.
- What do you think laying off your workforce does? These are the people who produce the things that make money
  For a clear cut example, Microsoft and gaming. They lay off entire studios the moment they release a hit
  It costs like 18 months+ of salary to replace a role like that, and you'll have to pay them more. It'll make you a bit more money next quarter... But in 2-5 years when there's no new game?

Random trivia: The clippy movement is not saying that Microsoft was noble. It’s saying we need to go back to the 90s version is the internet.

new meta: putting "random trivia:" before your contrarian comments
- Random Trivia: I gotta start doing this in all my comments

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.
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 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.

Well, to be fair, it’s not utilizing Microsoft as a mascot, but the era of buying and owning and keeping, as opposed to the current era of renting forever.
Back then, you bought a computer and it came with the programs you needed and they were yours until you got rid of the computer. Then they were the property of whomever got the computer next.
That’s what people are calling for. Which is depressing in and of itself because it’s so little to ask for. They’re the hand that’s starving and robbing us. We shouldn’t be asking for them to stop robbing us, we should be taking the hand and using it to distribute to all who need.

Thank you for sharing analognowhere content

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.”
- There's also diffusing responsibility across the organization. It's easy to achieve unethical things, when the individual's part of the job hardly seems "bad" at all.
At least in the US, companies have a legal fiduciary duty to protect their investors interests above all else.
- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.
- A change made through court cases in the mid-century. Basically the result of a neoliberal ideological campaign that first normalized the feduciary duty concept in the business world before forcing it on board rooms through the justice system. Before that, boards of companies could make decisions on ethical grounds and not just fiscal grounds. Today, that precedent has transformed boardrooms into terrifying financial automatons.
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 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.
People are good and care about good things.
We have trouble understanding what’s going on because the average person can’t comprehend the levels of greed that modern Wall St capitalism selects for.
Just like the average person cannot comprehend a million years, the average person can’t appreciate the level of avarice some of our rich and powerful operate at. Only a few of us have interacted with people that broken.
There a tons of good people and good businesses out there. They are currently victims to levels of avarice we can’t bring ourselves to admit exists.
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….

Microsoft sees Clippy everywhere: Oh they must really like him, let's make him our new AI mascot!

Random trivia: The clippy 3D animations were created by Deadpool director Tim Miller (of Blur Studio).

I guess not many people remember that Microsoft was convicted of antitrust violations against Netscape (which effectively destroyed that command).

Microsoft nowadays is one of the evil companies. Microsoft back in the day was the evil company.
- What about Monsanto (Roundup) and Philip-Morris (lol)? You could probably include Dole. As well as the East India Company.
The video that started this clippy campaign mentioned that. The message is that those sort of transgressions seem so minor compared to what companies bot only do, but get away with now
Clippy was hated at the time, but an annoying useless assistant that doesn't send anything to the Internet, let alone your personal data, seems like a dream now.

Random trivia: there was also a dog

And a wizard, genie, cat, robot and more

I remember Microsoft in the late nineties.

Stop trying to make clippy look bad! He is our symbol to fight against the enshitification now!

That’s an odd stance bc at the time it was introduced clippy was almost universally reviled and seen as an example of microsoft taking something that was fine (office 95) and making it objectively worse (office 97 introduced product activation, the stupid paper clip assistant, an arguably dumb UI refresh, and the most hostile part: a new version of the proprietary doc format that wouldn’t render correctly in word 95, forcing people to upgrade)
enshittification wasn’t a concept back then but microsoft certainly lived up to it time and time again
If anything this comic doesn’t make sense because no shit, microsoft started selling your data the nanosecond it became viable to do so. They were always evil. Whereas google at one point literally had a motto of “don’t be evil” in their guidelines or whatever, which fooled a lot of people in the 90s. they famously had to remove because once data collection was becoming obvious it was kind of silly to keep that bit around I suppose
- It definitely is strange. But that doesn’t change that it has submerged as this symbol (just look up some new videos about clippy on YouTube). Many people probably do that because of counter-culture; clippy is liked because it had been hated for a long time and many (most?) people don’t know why.
- Louis makes a lot of the points you're making in the video. He points to Clippy as an example of universal repulsion where we "didn't know how lucky we had it", versus the wolf dressed up in social media's clothing we have today.
  I agree with a lot of what you said, but it's still worth watching the video. His overall aim is an honourable one and the choice of Clippy is pretty smart in light of the aims.
- Link here. Clippy never tried to sell our data. He just wanted to help, even if he was bad at it.

And we, working class traitors that we are, would have helped it.

Clippy would've never!

steal your data

Do they break into my computer or accounts & take it unauthorized? Is it data in my private systems/networks/accounts that I exclusively own or is legally protected as exclusively mine?

You sign ownership away when you scroll past 35 pages and click "I Accept"
- So, it's their system & it's not theft by usage agreement?