the myth of the good tech giant
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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
Link here. Clippy never tried to sell our data. He just wanted to help, even if he was bad at it.
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Generated images don't use "AI". Also, this wasn't generated.
No it was drawn by pmjv author of analog nowhere, who makes content exclusively for lemmy.
Shame it wasn’t credited.
Check out their other work at Unix surrealism
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No it was drawn by pmjv author of analog nowhere, who makes content exclusively for lemmy.
Shame it wasn’t credited.
Check out their other work at Unix surrealism
Their site is linked in the main post.
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Generated images don't use "AI". Also, this wasn't generated.
I am wrong then
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Thank you for sharing analognowhere content
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No it was drawn by pmjv author of analog nowhere, who makes content exclusively for lemmy.
Shame it wasn’t credited.
Check out their other work at Unix surrealism
iirc prahou also posts on mastodon
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I remember Microsoft in the late nineties.
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Using a mascot from big tech to protest against invasive big tech is tad confusing..
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.
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Using a mascot from big tech to protest against invasive big tech is tad confusing..
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.
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I guess not many people remember that Microsoft was convicted of antitrust violations against Netscape (which effectively destroyed that command).
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Using a mascot from big tech to protest against invasive big tech is tad confusing..
Clippy is a symbol of a decent company, pre-enshittification
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Microsoft sees Clippy everywhere: Oh they must really like him, let's make him our new AI mascot!
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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. -
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.
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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
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.
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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.
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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
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Clippy is a symbol of a decent company, pre-enshittification
What timeline is this? xD If anything, Microsoft is less hostile these days than they were in the 90s and early 2000s
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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.”
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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
