In mid 2025, you might have noticed little Clippy profile pics all over the internet, showing the Microsoft Clippy from the mid 1990s. This protest movement was sparked by the consumer rights activist and YouTuber Louis Rossmann, who wanted people to use it as a sign of protest against how Big Tech uses and abuses users’ data for its own profits and for AI training. His YouTube clip went viral, and the protest with Clippy the paperclip is ongoing.
But why did Clippy become so famous – decades after it’s actually being useful? Clippy (originally called Clippit) used to be Microsoft’s little animated paperclip assistant that helped people in Word and other Office programs in the late 1990s and early 2000s, for instance when composing a letter. While much hated at the time – becau…
In mid 2025, you might have noticed little Clippy profile pics all over the internet, showing the Microsoft Clippy from the mid 1990s. This protest movement was sparked by the consumer rights activist and YouTuber Louis Rossmann, who wanted people to use it as a sign of protest against how Big Tech uses and abuses users’ data for its own profits and for AI training. His YouTube clip went viral, and the protest with Clippy the paperclip is ongoing.
But why did Clippy become so famous – decades after it’s actually being useful? Clippy (originally called Clippit) used to be Microsoft’s little animated paperclip assistant that helped people in Word and other Office programs in the late 1990s and early 2000s, for instance when composing a letter. While much hated at the time – because of it being rather inefficient and unhelpful – it represents something that we lost in our modern online world. This now turned Clippy into a nostalgic icon, which even led to the Clippy meme.
- Clippy never tracked you
- Clippy never collected your data to sell it
- Clippy never used your data to create a profile on you
- Clippy never used your data to train a Big Tech’s AI
- Clippy never locked you out of your own tools for “security”
- Clippy never tried to make you book an additional subscription
Clippy – old, but gold
Clippy the paperclip simply tried to help, and though being inefficient with that, it represents that inefficiency can be something good, at least if you are a consumer and prefer to keep your data to yourself and the advertisements out of the products you use.
So, Clippy may be old, but it’s also gold: It was useful for the user only, not for the provider (in this case Microsoft), which is something you can’t say about today’s AI tools anymore.
Big Tech now uses people’s data to train its AI models without bothering to ask for consent. Just take a look at the recent news about LinkedIn, or how Google tries to push its Gemini AI onto your Android, or how you can’t even turn off Meta AI on WhatsApp. Plus, Microsoft is now asking for more money for its AI – even though it was trained for free with your data, which many find offensive.
New tech, or what Big Tech is now selling us as new tech, is very invasive, tracking you, collecting your data, and using it for its own purposes like showing targeted ads, or training its Large Language Models (LLMs).
In contrast to that: Clippy simply helped, and left you alone. That’s what people are protesting for when changing their profile pic to the Clippy meme.
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Clippy movement
So Clippy is more than just a neat little helper. It’s become a symbol of a movement where people don’t want their data being abused by Big Tech, but to own their data. When YouTuber Louis Rossmann encouraged people to change their social media profile pictures to Clippy, he hit a nerve. During the height of the AI trend, people wanted to say “No”, and finally found a way to do so.
Check out the viral YouTube video by Louis Rossmann here.
In his video Rossmann said:
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 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 try and get you to purchase other Microsoft products. He had no ulterior motives. He was simply there to help.”
Rossmann chose Clippy because Clippy used to be the biggest annoyance that everyone hated, but compared to what companies are doing nowadays - he is almost welcomed. Clippy didn’t gather information on you, didn’t track you, didn’t profile you to sell insights to advertisers, and Clippy didn’t steal your data to train AI with it. Microsfot’s Clippy the paperclip stands for helpfulness without exploitation.
As a result, people across platforms like YouTube, X (Twitter), Instagram, Reddit, and Discord have adopted Clippy avatars as their profile pics and shared posts about it. That’s how the old, but gold little helper Clippy unexpectedly became the number one meme trend of 2025.
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Why Clippy is popular
Everyone knows Clippy, at least everyone older than 25. Clippy, despite being created by one of the biggest Big Techs - Microsoft - can be easily recognized for anti-big-tech sentiment because of its innocence. The character does not mean evil and does not abuse data, which is in contrast to current Big Tech practices.
On top of that, Clippy represents cultural nostalgia. It’s old-school, and many people remember it from when they got in touch with tech and the internet for the first time. So it’s fun to bring Clippy, and all the memories you had with it, back to life.
Taken together, that’s why Clippy is trending: It stands in contrast to Big Tech greed, and it’s a form of protest by humans against invasive, unethical tech.
And that’s also why we at Tuta love our Clippies! ❤️
Clippies in the Tuta office.
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