'Clanker' is social media's new slur for our robot future

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.

This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.

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."

That's also not to mention the several attempts by tech startups and giants like Amazon to create humanoid robots to replace service workers.

This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.

This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.

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.

This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.

This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.

This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.

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."

This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.

This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.

This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.

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.