BonziBuddy was a herald of the apocalypse.
this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2025
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I love this!
I wonder if anyone under the age of ~30 would get the meme.
Lol my ex made that YouTube video. Hilarious to see it here
We shouldn't have stopped at punching the monkey. We should have been punching CEOs.
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Embrace, extend, and extinguish
Isn't it about clippy and not microsoft
Yes, the people who are somehow getting the message that Louis Rossmann was praising Microsoft either didn't watch the video or generally struggle with nuance, or both.
It's not irrelevant. Using a corporate mascot as a symbol against another corporate mascot/product isn't going to spread the message Louis intended. You argue the people complaining about it aren't getting his point, but do you really think it will/has survived the word-of-mouth spreading it? The game of telephone that viral trends like this follow is lightning fast and warps messages in extreme ways. And it's not much of a stretch to assume that, if MS churned out a new Clippy chatbot, people would rally around it to spite the others since they have no understanding of why they were doing it in the first place.
*Also, people already mischaracterize the sincerity of early tech giants. I've certainly seen many people lament "the good Internet" of the mid 2000s, as if the very issues we have today weren't percolating back then. None of those companies were ever good or harmless, the idea that them or their products are "different" now is naive, and relying on that naivety to push for change is a mistake.
this! i’m about to create another account just to upvote this again
My take: if Rossman came out swinging as an anti-corporate revolutionary, his ideas wouldn’t have wide appeal right now, since many people still think the problem is just “bad” mega-corporations. So instead, he’s arguing for less-shitty tech corporations as a first step (symbolized by Clippy, of a less-intrusive software age), rather than “destroy all tech corpos now.” No, Microsoft wasn’t good then, but they were less awful.
If his video were starkly anti-capitalist, it would not have reached 2.5 million people, and I’d say getting that many people to start thinking about rejecting invasive software is a great step in the right direction, as opposed to ideological purism that would only resonate with those who already agree. The need for these baby steps is frustrating for those who already see the big picture, but a few chats with my coworkers quickly reveal how shockingly little some people have actually thought about the sins of big tech.
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Perfect is the enemy of good.
I didn't say it wasn't perfect. I said it was a mistake.
It's also not explicitly not about them either. Kinda the problem with symbols is that they're marred by association. This movement is ultimately symbolic and the Clippy people (Microsoft) are at the heart of everything this symbolic gesture goes against.
It would be like me trying to make a symbol of how cars are bad by simply showing an old one.
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Once at the survey page, you just need to enable JavaScript, disable adblocker, accept our cookies and solve a simple CAPTCHA identifying any homeless people. If the UMata app was somehow not able to record you breathing for your biometric signature to our licensing agreement, you will be asked to breathe harder.
We are excited to hear back from you!
I will just as soon my Jack2Head finishes downloading the latest update!
Please drink verification can to continue
'Finally, give your automated friend hand the secret handshake, so we know your privacy is secure for us.
I'm reading 'The Circle' by Dave Eggers right now, and he totally foresaw all knowing corporative control back in the 2010s.
It is a tome at 500 pages, but a great read, so far.
Not gonna shit on Eggers or anything, but I don't think that concept was new in the 2010s.
Snow Crash is one that comes to mind right away, but I haven't read The Circle, so maybe I'm wrong about what you're referring to. I think William Gibson probably wrote about similar themes at some point as well.
If you haven't read Snow Crash, btw, you should. It's fucking awesome
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Holt shit this is so good
One of my favorites of theirs, easily.
I think if Clippy had teeth back in 1997, he might have been remembered a little differently.
This is my new pfp btw
That's allowed!
I love u 😳
They certainly knew how to collect it back then. They just didn't yet have anyone willing to buy it from them.
If it's 97, there's a good chance the computer doesn't even have an internet connection.
My corporation good, my corporation strong... my corporation kicks you corporations ass.
Seeing Boeing bootlickers, apple dickriders, intel nazis do this shit for decades was annoying... At least now they learned STFU for the most part. useful fucking idiots.
If I had known*
Conditionals hard!
People are seriously misremembering Clippy and Microsoft
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
The teeth are terrifying lol
Microshit is the only good tech giant because it’s a company that exclusively employs birdbrains. Anything bad they do as a byproduct of their shit ass work is easily forgivable because they’re literally just doing their damned best
Is this the anti rosman propaganda kicking in
Ofcorse its true. The point is it couldn't and it possed us off enough they removed it
Thanks I hate it
I'm out of the loop on this one, is it related to real events?
It's about Clippit, which was a mascot that notoriously annoyed MS Office users in the 90s and 2000s. It did not yet collect your data the way everything does now.
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Another banger.
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!
Lol... I saw that headline ("Everyone should change their avatar to clippy. Seriously," or something like that), and saw that it linked to a video, and I was just like 'nah'.
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https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/30427558
And so the game of telephone begins.
I have a sudden urge to play Universal Paperclips
I have a sudden urge to play Universal Paperclips
Wonderful game, unironically a masterpiece
If you don't understand why this blank page clicker is amazing; go play, finish it, and you will be enlightened
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Ahh, I thought that there were some recent controversies with it (reading from the other comments), but I didn't understand if there was
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!'
30 years later:
'Everyone hates us. What can we do about this?’
'Make it fashionable for people born in 2003 to pretend to be nostalgic for Clippy?'
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'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...'
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