Clippy Campaign

The Clippy Campaign (Author's Note: tentatively named, there seems to be no agreed upon name for this concept yet) is a solidarity visibility campaign where individuals change their profile image to "a Clippy" (officially, the 'Clippit' avatar of Office Assistant as seen in Microsoft Office 2000 through 2003).

The campaign was started by Louis Rossmann in his video Change your profile picture to clippy. I'm serious and further explained in his video You Changed Your Profile to Clippy: Now What? 📎📎📎

How it works

Individuals supporting Right to Repair or generally supporting resistance to anti-ownership activities show their size as a group and solidarity with each other by changing their profile images to a Clippy.

Why

Clippy As a Symbol of Escalating Overreach

As explained by Rossman in Change your profile picture to clippy. I'm serious Clippy, while widely mocked and viewed as an annoyance at the time of its introduction, the level of annoyance, privacy invasion and user hostility pales in comparison to modern practices by corporations, especially Big Tech, that are continually implemented and escalated without resistance.

Change your profile picture to clippy. I'm serious 1:08

Whether or not you like Clippy, [...] the one thing that you could say, unlike Facebook who is trying to profit off of young girls that feel suicidal, Clippy simply wanted to help.

He might have been annoying, but he just wanted to help.

There were no ulterior motives. If you told Clippy 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 to get you to purchase other Microsoft products. He had no ulterior motives, he was simply there to help.

[...]

Clippy wouldn't even read the contents of your letter.

The Impact of Clippy Avatars

Rossman hopes that the group awareness created by the campaign will allow people to take action more quickly, due to already knowing that others around them are in alignment.

You Changed Your Profile to Clippy: Now What? 📎📎📎 4:25

But if all of them know at the same time that we're on the same page:

We are tired of living in an anti-ownership society, check.

We are tired of living in a society where we subscribe to everything and we own nothing, check.

We are tired of being told it cost $8,000 to fix a f[---]ing power button, check.

[...]

If every single one of these people were not only on the same page, but knew they were on the same page, maybe each one in the chain would speak up when they otherwise wouldn't.

And when they're all moving together and all working together, what happens?

They choose a different vendor.

Example Clippy Images