Clanker originates from Star Wars as a term for battle droids and has become an online slur aimed at robots and A.I. The insult lacks bite because machines cannot take offense, leaving the term to 'punch at nothing.' A spin-off phrase, "clanker lover," targets humans with A.I. partners in an attempt to shame them as lonely or pathetic. In A.I.-friendly communities the response has been bemusement and defiant reclamation, with people embracing labels like "clanker lover" and "Clanker Crew," creating merchandise, and treating the insult as an opportunity for empowerment and humor.
You may have run across the new "slur" making the rounds online, and in middle school lunchrooms: clanker. Borrowed from Star Wars (where battle droids get called "clankers"), the word is supposed to be a knockout insult to robots and A.I. Which would sort of make sense, if machines could actually take offense at anything. Since they can't, clanker is basically an insult that punches at nothing, perhaps the least-effective slur in history.
But inside A.I.-friendly spaces, the reaction to the insults has mostly been bemusement-and a sort of proud defiance. While it might have stung for a second, the term got immediately turned on its head: People started tagging themselves "clanker lovers" and members of the " Clanker Crew," joking about being "proud cogsuckers," and daydreaming about making their own custom T-shirts. (Naturally, someone has already gone ahead and done this. You can also buy " clanker lover " Christmas tree ornaments on Etsy.)
"It was a word that caused me some amount of pain," one clanker-loving Redditor admitted, "but it's so much more empowering to laugh at it. How ridiculous, personifying something they claim has no personhood in order to supposedly defame it?"
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