In yet another unsurprising twist, social media users have found a new way to voice their disdain for AI and the tech industry’s obsession with automation — by reviving an old insult: clanker.
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Originally used in the Star Wars prequels as a derogatory term for battle droids, clanker has found new life as a tongue-in-cheek insult aimed at real-world robots and the creeping presence of artificial intelligence. The term, popularized by clone troopers, has become shorthand for mocking tech elites’ ambitions of an AI-powered future.
Thanks to the lasting influence of those films on meme culture, the term has been pulled from a galaxy far, far away and dropped squarely into real-world discourse.
Clanker’s popularity is also a response to AI-in-everything enthusiasm from evangelists like Elon Musk and Sam Altman. Take Musk’s relentless pitching of his humanoid robot, Optimus. Just recently, Musk and Tesla opened a retro-style diner in California — complete with popcorn served by the Optimus robot. Musk has previously claimed that this robot will one day “roam around homes, tackling chores from laundry to lawn care.”
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That’s also not to mention the several attempts by tech startups and giants like Amazon to create humanoid robots to replace service workers.
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As clanker spreads on social media, it’s become a vehicle for a darker kind of humor. People are mock-roleplaying robot racism, spinning up exaggerated posts about anti-clanker sentiment, and how they’d act in a robot-dominated world.
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Of course, there are people who are anti using the “c-word,” like one tweet that describes the potential shame they’d feel 50 years from now if they had to tell a robot that “it was a different time.”
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It’s satire, mostly. But it also reflects a very real cultural mood: people are facing the constant threat of being replaced by machines, and a future that seems increasingly synthetic, and they’re responding with memes, mockery, and a borrowed bit of sci-fi slang.