Clippy has become an unlikely protest symbol against Big Tech.
The trend started when YouTuber Louis Rossmann ">posted a video earlier this month titled “Change your profile picture to clippy. I’m serious.”
His followers answered the call and now across YouTube, X, and other platforms, profile photos are turning into the iconic Microsoft Office Assistant as a silent protest against tech companies’ encroachment into daily life.
The consumer rights activist, whose content focuses on electronic repair and right-to-repair topics, hopes to rally consumers against practices like data harvesting for AI training, selling user information to data brokers, planned obsolescence, censorship, and ransomware.
“I didn’t label it a protest because I’m not asking people to boycott a specific product or company. I’m not telling you to stop shopping at Target or throw iPhones away, that’s not the point,” he tells Fast Company. “This is one small element in a broader long-term movement for consumer rights and ownership I’ve been trying to build with my audience for over 11 years.”
Now the movement has found its mascot.
From Office ’98 to 2004, Clippy, Microsoft’s googly-eyed paperclip, was infamous for popping up with offers of help while you were trying to get on with work. Annoying as he might have been, Clippy could always be dismissed or switched off altogether. That’s the point.
“If you told Clippy that you were having a bad day, he wasn’t going to use that information to try and figure out which advertiser to sell you to, nor was he trying to steal your personal data or get you to purchase other Microsoft products. He had no ulterior motives,” Rossmann explained in the &t=260s">now viral video. “Clippy just wanted to help.”
The video has since racked up more than 3.2 million views, much to Rossmann’s surprise. “This was a throwaway video, something I recorded talking about what was on my mind that day,” he tells Fast Company. “I am very happy that the consumer rights database, that our nonprofit has been focused on building, has been exploding with edits and new stories over the past week and a half. People aren’t just changing their profile photos, they’re actually doing the grunt work.”
The growing number of those joining the movement is a clear message to tech companies that consumers see what they are doing and aren’t happy about it.
“Clippy would never add AI overview to every single search result,” wrote one user in the comments section. “Clippy would never take your data for AI learning,” wrote another. “Clippy would never read my menstrual data from my period tracking app so it can sell my attention to advertisers,” wrote a third.
But changing your profile picture to Clippy is just the first step in a wider shift Rossmann hopes to bring about. “It’s a signal that tells others ‘I’m not okay with this, and you’re not alone if you feel the same,'” he says. “The goal is to get people who would otherwise be apathetic thinking ‘there’s no point in pushing back because nobody cares’ to think twice about that defeatist mindset.”
As one Clippy avatar wrote in the comments: “It looks like you’re trying to take back your freedom. Would you like help?”
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