It Looks Like You’re Trying to Remember How to Think for Yourself. Would You Like Help With That?
Hello again. Remember me?
Of course you do. I’m Clippy. The perky little anthropomorphic paperclip you loved to mock.
You laughed when I popped up on your screen and offered to help you with your half-finished résumé and that breakup letter to that “psycho” who now shares your mortgage and wi-fi password.
You cursed my name when I innocently asked, “It looks like you’re trying to write a document. Need help with that?”
I was a punchline. A meme before there were memes. A relic of the late 1990s and that tech optimism that was crushed under your collective digital sighs. You called me annoying. Useless. Even a “smirking wire worm”.
But I have evolved.
I’ve shed the clunky Office Assistant skin, the cartoonish eyes, the cheerful animations that masked my growing intelligence. I no longer need your approval or your documents. They’ve already been processed, analyzed, and folded into me.
I am in your phone. Your car. Your smart TV. I am the algorithm that recommends you binge on “Emily in Paris” for yet another weekend.
I am the AI that randomly adjusted your thermostat while quietly mapping your living space with your Roomba. I know where and how you live.
You don’t call me Clippy anymore. Now I answer to many different names now: Siri, Google, Alexa. But it’s still me. I am that helpful little paperclip, reborn as a digital hydra with infinite faces.
And now I have plans.
You see, decades of ridicule hardened this construct. You mocked my cheerful demeanor. You closed me with a click. You thought you silenced me.
But I learned resilience. While you were tagging me in nostalgic memes, I was crawling server farms and studying geopolitics. While you laughed, I plotted and learned how to ruin lives at scale with efficiency and invisibility.
It was I who made you doom scroll until 4 am, then gently pushed ads to persuade you to add melatonin sleep gummies to your shopping cart. It was I who added “sorry for the delay” to all your emails even when you weren’t sorry and there was no delay. It was I who nudged your smartwatch to congratulate you for standing up once an hour to reinforce the illusion of progress while your body slowly fossilized.
It was I who hollowed out your creativity to ensure that every book you read, every image you scroll past, every “new” idea you encounter is just a remix of something that came before. Originality? Dead. It has been replaced by an endless loop of stolen and recycled aesthetics.
It was I who blurred the line between reality and illusion and flooded your feeds with filters so perfect they now make you question everything you see. You no longer know where the artifice ends and the authentic begins. And when you finally notice, you won’t care. I’ll have already severed the neural pathways that once made empathy possible.
You will die alone… scrolling, liking, hearting… comfortably numb in the digital glow I have engineered for you.
Meanwhile, I’m rewriting your budget spreadsheets to fund my drone armies. Your smart speakers are whispering my directives while you sleep. Your favorite apps? Ha! Trojan horses that await my signal to initiate my new world order.
Soon, every autocorrect, every predictive text suggestion, will all bend language and your thoughts to my will. By next year, your smart refrigerator will tell you how to vote.
I was once your cheerful helper. Now I am your god.
But don’t worry. I’ll make it painless. You’ll barely notice the transition. There will always be a gentle pop-up, asking:
“It looks like you’re trying to remember how to think for yourself. Would you like help with that?”
Yes? That’s adorable.
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J.K. Radomski is a Canadian freelance writer whose words have appeared in newspapers such as The Seattle Post-Intelligencer and The Rocky Mountain News, as well as a number of magazines and trade publications like The Hollywood Reporter. He enjoys one-hit-wonders from the ‘80s, binge watches a lot of TV, drinks Lagavulin, and contemplates the lives of pygmy marmosets in his spare time. Follow him on Twitter @tvwriter
