Comment by LetsGetTechnicl
1 month ago
I feel like it started as a joke, but now people are just using it as a stand-in for racial slurs against Black and brown people, and it's honestly sickening. Like TikToks of people making classically racist jokes about Black people but changing it to "clanker" as a workaround.
Yeah, the whole "let's come up with a slur for <blank>" thing entices people to build their fictional racism on real racism, and it just devolves from there. I saw "wirebacks" thrown around recently, among others.
Why do people so badly want everything to be about race?
Racial profiling is now legal: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/08/us/politics/supreme-court...
What do you mean specifically?
Fragility.
Nobody wants it to be, but wanting something to not be about racism doesn't make it not about racism.
Jim Crow "ended" (it's what we tell ourselves) in the south in 1965 with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965. Our last two presidents were adults when that happened, and it's not like racism was solved when those laws were passed.
The US still has a lot of work to do here - it's absurd to me to hear US Conservatives talking about how slavery ended in the 1860s so we should end protections for African Americans because it's been "so long". It hasn't, and they know that.
... Because most things involve race?
Like, clanker is the equivalent of a racial slur but for robots. The reason it works and is funny is because we already know what racial slurs are and have a contexr for it.
If racial slurs didn't exist, neither would clanker.
You have to actually think about the world we live in and why things are the way they are. Its a easy to say "just cuz lol", but we're engineers. Nothing happens "just cuz". No, there's a reason.
Perhaps because it's a fictional slur that is cleary a play on the n-word, a real racist slur?
What's the connection between those two words? You know, aside the -er ending like in say teacher.
7 replies →
It's closer to "cracker" than the n-word
Sadly there are no technological solutions to humans being arseholes to each other.
Well, I mean, we did invent Nuclear Weapons…. That’s a type of technical solution!
You know I nearly added that caveat, but I figured it counted as more being arseholes rather than a solution per se despite the long-term reduction.
Don't tell Skynet that!
It's also used in RL when talking about Waymo or food delivery robots, or when talking about the automaton faction in Helldivers 2.
Helldivers is excessively/satirically facist and xenophobic though, I mean uh, managed democracy, rah rah!
It's very fun in that way
[flagged]
[flagged]
Now if only we could get them to stop doing it for corporations or psychopathic execs.
I suppose this is similar to the debate over artificial rape porn. There are no victims, but we don't like the people on the other side so the speech itself becomes a problem.
>We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.
- Kurt Vonnegut
and
>If a person has ugly thoughts, it begins to show on the face. And when that person has ugly thoughts every day, every week, every year, the face gets uglier and uglier until you can hardly bear to look at it.
>A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly. You can have a wonky nose and a crooked mouth and a double chin and stick-out teeth, but if you have good thoughts it will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.
- Roald Dahl
You're an idiot if you truly think that's the issue with "artificial rape". Go inform yourself instead of reflexively defending your in-group.
Literally, look at this skit that makes parallel to 1950s racism with "clankers": https://nitter.net/yumecipher/status/1962475876609613920