Why are People Changing Their Profile Picture to Clippy the Nostalgic Paperclip?

If you feel like you're losing your mind because it seems like you've fallen back into the early days of the internet, you're not alone. All over the internet, people are changing their profile pictures to Clippy, the friendly and nostalgic paperclip character who characterized the early Windows experience, with his disembodied eyes and big smile.

So why exactly are people making this seemingly random choice? Surprisingly, the decision to use Clippy as a profile picture goes more deeply than you might guess. Here's what we know about the trend and the movement that has arisen around the nostalgic little cartoon paperclip.

As it turns out, the corporations that run the internet don't have the best interests of the people in mind. Who would have guessed? But now, people are banding together to fight back, and to use what they can of their online presence to strike back at the big corporations using an unlikely sign of protest: Clippy.

The movement was started by YouTuber Louis Rossman, and we'll explain his thought processes behind the trend in a moment. But the movement quickly grew beyond Louis, and became a social media sensation, with people of all ages and from all walks of life becoming Clippy.

The trend comes as a middle finger to the big tech companies that take user data to use for AI learning models and for marketing, essentially making money off the tidbits of your own private information that gets compiled online.

And people are saying, "I've had enough." In solidarity with the movement, they're changing their profile pictures to Clippy and encouraging others to do the same.

Of course, it's not just traditional Clippy who's making the rounds. According to Know Your Meme, editors and artists have turned Clippy into a whole host of unusual and customized versions of himself, making their profile pictures more than a statement: they're an artistic expression of the movement.

At the heart of the movement is an encouragement to reclaim the humanity in our social media presence and to stop letting corporations glut off of our data.

In a video explaining the idea behind the movement, Louis specifically highlights something that was discussed during the Facebook whistleblower conference, and it was disturbing.

Louis claims that companies like Meta, which runs Facebook, Threads, and Instagram, are tracking so closely that they note if a young girl deletes a selfie. Why might this matter? According to Louis, they assume that she may be feeling insecure and suffering from low self-esteem if she's deleting selfies. So their solution? Try marketing beauty products to that vulnerable young girl.

Clippy, Louis explains, is reminiscent of a time when companies used tech to be helpful and enrich human lives, rather than mining our data for profit. It hearkens back to a simpler time when information exchange and connection was the primary use of the internet, and people still had a right to privacy and control over their own data.

People are gleefully joining the movement, feeling encouraged to fight back against the demoralizing trudge into a near-constant world of data mining.