this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2025
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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.
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.
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
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
iirc prahou also posts on mastodon
I am wrong then :)