A recent NPR article details the rise of the word "clanker" as a robophobic slur that people are using when referring to robo-workers.
(Not joking, NPR actually uses the word "robophobic.")
This is a real article from NPR:
First, some background:
Adam Aleksic, a linguist, author and content creator best known across social media as the @etomologynerd, told NPR it's a derogatory term for robots that stems from the Star Wars universe dating back to 2005. ‘It was referenced in Star Wars and in the Clone Wars series. They would call robots clankers because of the sound they made. It clearly implies clanking. … And then we adopted it because it sounds useful.'
And then, because it's NPR, the article can't help but bring up racism.
Many of the memes circulating now zero in on the xenophobia of it all and what social media users are calling robot racism or robophobia. Using existing stereotypes and tropes, they joke about a not-too-distant future where robots are ubiquitous as second-class citizens, facing discrimination in the same ways that Black people and other racial or ethnic groups in America have historically faced.
NPR interviews a guy who argues that assigning the bots a slur is anthropomorphic. Because people have to see the robots as human to dehumanize them with a slur, right?
Aleksic said the use of the word inherently creates an outgroup. An us vs. them mindset. But the irony, he noted, is that in attaching the word to non-sentient creations (at least for now), it anthropomorphizes robots akin to an ethnic group or a people group. 'And at the same time, it brings them up to the level of humans to even be dehumanized in the first place. So ironically, the people saying clanker are assigning more of a personality to these robots than actually exists.'
So we're doing robots a favor with this robophobic slur? Boy, this is a real deep-dive!
So glad we defunded NPR!
I think we all know it will be leftists like the author of this article who will be out there demanding rights for robots ten years from now.
And can you just imagine our future elections when the electronic voting machines get to vote too??
Hail to the Clanker in Chief!
I'll leave you with some examples of how you're supposed to use this new robophobic slur:
Who would have thought Clone Wars would become part of our national zeitgeist?
And yet here we are!
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