In another unsurprising twist, social media users have found a new way to express their obsession with the AI and tech industries with automation – by restoring the old insult: clanker.
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Originally used as a derogatory term for combat robots in Star Wars Prequel, Clanker is a new life of happy insults against the spread of real-world robots and artificial intelligence. The term is popularized by clones and has become a shorthand for ridicule tech elites’ ambitions for an AI-driven future.
Thanks to the lasting influence of these films on meme culture, the term has been withdrawn from a distant galaxy and falls directly into real-world discourse.
Clanker’s popularity is also a response to all the enthusiasm of missionaries such as Elon Musk and Sam Altman. Take musk His humanoid robot Optimus Prime’s ruthless pitch. Just recently, Musk and Tesla opened a retro-style restaurant in California with popcorn provided by Optimus Prime. Musk had previously claimed that the robot would one day “roam around the house and solve the trivial matters from laundry to lawn care.”
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It’s also not to mention a few attempts by tech startups and giants like Amazon to create humanoid robots to replace service workers.
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As Crank spreads on social media, it has become a tool for darker humor. People are laughing at robot racism, promoting exaggerated posts about anti-Bank sentiment, and how they act in a robot-dominated world.
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Of course, some people oppose the use of the “c word”, like a tweet describing the potential shame they will feel 50 years from now if they have to tell the robot “this is a different period.”
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Mostly ironic. But it also reflects a very real cultural sentiment: people face constant threats of being replaced by machines, and the future seems to be increasingly integrated, and they will respond with a little bit of sci-fi measures that are memes, mockery and borrowed.
