>I must admit I’m a little unnerved with how gleefully people enjoy using a fake slur. I realize it doesn’t harm anyone but I just don’t get the appeal.

I think there's a clear sociological pattern here that explains the appeal. It maps almost perfectly onto the thesis of David Roediger's "The Wages of Whiteness."

His argument was that poor white workers in the 19th century, despite their own economic exploitation, received a "psychological wage" for being "white." This identity was primarily built by defining themselves against Black slaves. It gave them a sense of status and social superiority that compensated for their poor material conditions and the encroachment of slaves on their own livelihood.

We're seeing a digital version of this now with AI. As automation devalues skills and displaces labor across fields, people are being offered a new kind of psychological compensation: the "wage of humanity." Even if your job is at risk, you can still feel superior because you're a thinking, feeling human, not just another mindless clanker.

The slur is the tool used to create and enforce that in-group ("human") versus out-group ("clanker") distinction. It's an act of identity formation born directly out of economic anxiety.

The real kicker, as Roediger's work would suggest, is that this dynamic primarily benefits the people deploying the technology. It misdirects the anger of those being displaced toward the tool itself, rather than toward the economic decisions that prioritize profit over their livelihoods.

But this ethos of economic displacement is really at the heart of both slavery and computation. It's all about "automating the boring stuff" and leveraging new technologies to ultimately extract profit at a greater rate than your competitors (which happens to include society). People typically forget the job of "computer" was the first casualty of computing machines.

This is an interesting perspective that I have not heard before. I have to think about it... Thanks for the insightful comment