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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 like what he does and that he can rally people to a cause, but he consistently misses the mark.
In order to escape the corrupt bureaucracy of New York, he moved to… Texas.
I think he’s a ‘path of least resistance’ kind of guy, not ideologically driven but rather “I don’t wanna deal with it” driven. He has deemed that it is easier to move to Texas because the corruption there affects him less directly and more abstractly, and he chooses to front Right to Repair because it is easier to lobby and rally people than it is to work in his industry without his political influence.
He has a front row seat to the horrors of capitalism and, without missing a beat, says “I’m not a socialist, I’m a capitalist” because it’s easier to be a shitlib than it is to believe in something bigger.
That’s just like Lemmy, ignoring years of hard work in pursuit of positive change because someone doesn’t pass the right ideological purity test.
How many millions of people have you reached about the importance of consumer rights?
You bitch at me for being an ideological puritan and then ask me if I’m pure enough by your standards. Did you miss the part where I said I like what he does?
Yes, I absolutely did miss that part somehow. I still think you’re being too hard on the guy, but the tone of my comment was out of line given that context. I apologize.
How many millions of people have you reached about the importance of consumer rights?
Only my friends, but I don’t then move to CorpoLand, USA because muh free dumbs.
It’s basically saying he was the freedom for ye, not for thee. Texas is where you go when you want to have companies do what they want, as any restrictions on their actions hurts their bottom dollar.
He’s your average justice-minded libertarian small business owner. Misses the mark sometimes and maybe not always in the fight for exactly the right reasons, inflated sense of manic self-righteousness that probably corrodes his personal life, but a world built by people like him would still probably be a lot nicer than what we have now.
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 think this is what Louis was going for. He doesn’t want to ask for no more companies, just companies that make a product (doesn’t even need to be a good one) where its sole purpose is to try (doesn’t even need to succeed) and be useful to the consumer.
I think he hit his mark pretty well for the symbol, but whether or not I agree with his view on things is a different story entirely.
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.
Fwiw, I still think it’s sarcastic.
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.
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
I’m just talking about the quality of the product, not their shady business practices. By the way, it’s easy for them to appear less hostile now that they almost have the monopoly on pc and office apps
Microsoft, if anything, has become more decent (releasing at least some of their stuff as free and open source software) since the 1990s.
Never read the Halloween Documents, have you?
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.
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.
Generated images don’t use “AI”. Also, this wasn’t generated.
I am wrong then :)
“You criticize society, yet you partake in it. Curious!”
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.
And they have so much processing horsepower anymore, things that weren’t conceivable just happen and there’s no easy way to disable them, like how Macs run
mediaanalysisd(which you can at least see, but disabling will break OS updates) that scrape every image file on your computer and OCR/categorize them and tag them, iPhones/iPads do too, and you can’t even find or see the running process let alone kill it.So every piece of media on your computer/phone just gets analyzed without your consent. Sure, maybe it is neat that you can search for a word that was in an image and that image comes up, but it would be nice if users of devices were allowed to choose what is/is not indexed.
Its like you’re a passenger on your tools anymore, rather than the driver.
And media analysis is like the least creepy shit Apple does. They also analyse your social networks (based on who you interact with using Apple services), and the database where they store that shit has labels for eg. political affiliations etc. (can’t remember off-hand which of the many many Apple spyware dbs it was. One of the sqlite databases under
~/Libraryin any case. Might have been the appropriately namedIntelligencePlatformdatabases, but I’m too lazy to check right now)
Even on Linux where it’s easy to find what any running service does, the are so many
This is why I use a distro that doesn’t add lots of extra bullshit I don’t need
This is why I use Linux
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.
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.
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….
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
Random trivia: you can problematize anything if you’re good enough
Well that just sounds like a motivational quote!
Microsoft sees Clippy everywhere: Oh they must really like him, let’s make him our new AI mascot!
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.
So I suppose you never watched his follow-up video?
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.
Random trivia: The clippy 3D animations were created by Deadpool director Tim Miller (of Blur Studio).
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.
I remember Microsoft in the late nineties.
Random trivia: there was also a dog
And a wizard, genie, cat, robot and more
Clippy would’ve never!
And we, working class traitors that we are, would have helped it.
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?
It’s your system and you agreed to licence your data to them. So technically it’s not theft. But also technically, pirating isn’t theft either, you’re not breaking into microsoft HQ and stealing a product key.
On a practical everyday way, yeah, I would say they are “stealing” your data, since they hide that as a clause in a massive EULA that can be altered at any time, and you either accept it or don’t get to use what you bought.
It’s your system
Evil techcorp’s servers (hosting online services I send requests containing data to) are mine? Cool! How do I sell those?
Or are we referring to local software that gets & sends my data without authorization?
you either accept it or don’t get to use what you bought
Claiming that’s theft seems like (taking artistic license with the word steal to express) wanting an agreement that wasn’t offered. Like
How dare evil techcorp make a service I want to use with voluntary conditions I don’t want? That’s stealing!
I don’t think computer hardware typically has those types of agreements, and I can change the software & choose online services.
