Do androids dream of electric slurs?

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At its heart, it's a ridiculous image.

A battle droid from "Star Wars" sits on the ground, clutching its aluminum knees (hinges?) to its chest. The droid doesn't have a face, just that George Lucas-designed chrome head that looks like a drawing of a Borzoi from memory. Still, it's obviously dejected. The air around the droid is bullying it with colorful insults: tin skin, sparky, oil slurper, and, the lone jeer that's canon, clanker.

The drawing was posted on X over the weekend by a user claiming their son was the original artist. They couldn't have known that their post would kick off a debate about racial slurs and the rush to adopt new epithets for outgroups.

Many social media users accused the slang term, which has grown in popularity on apps like TikTok, of being thinly veiled racism and an opportunity to say slurs without consequences. 

"The 'clanker' meme is really weird and feels like an excuse for white people to almost say slurs with plausible deniability," one user wrote.

"The clanker jokes are funny until you clock that white people are itching to call ANYTHING a slur," wrote another.

In the manner of online discourse, that backlash was soon met with backlash to the backlash, as everyone yelled past each other about being "too woke" or not woke enough. Normally, these internet tiffs can be banished to the netherrealm with a quick flick of the thumb, but automation and the anger around it aren't going away any time soon. It’s worth meeting both sides where they are to better understand the argument.

First, where did “clanker” come from?

The term started as an in-universe insult from “Star Wars” meant to make fun of the omnipresent droids of the galaxy far, far away. Many of the robots in the prequels of the aughts show off that lived-in and war-torn design aesthetic that first made these space operas so captivating. These beaten-down bots literally clank when they walk.

The term remained an in-joke for fans of the series for well over a decade, only spreading outside of dedicated “Star Wars” fans with the rise of artificial intelligence and the widespread adoption of delivery robots. Staring down the terrifying future envisioned by Silicon Valley and Boston Dynamics, in which one robot would take your job and another robot would arrest you for sleeping on the street, social media users made a habit of calling out robots wherever they found them with the insult du jour.

Of course, it wouldn’t be the first time that economic anxieties were used as a smokescreen for racial animus. There’s no denying that the term shares a sort of syllabic resonance with a slur for Black people. Iterations of the meme that joke about fears of a future daughter bringing home a “clanker boyfriend” certainly don’t help the case that it’s merely a harmless insult hurled at something that can’t actually feel.

AI chatbots and faceless bots aren’t easy to sympathize with, especially when several of them have proven to be racist, but it’s not hard to see why the gleeful pile-on might make some people uneasy. You don’t even have to wade too deep into the waters of online discourse to find concerning examples. The very drawing that set off this round of internet discussion includes several terms that are clear analogues for epithets used against Black and Hispanic Americans.

“When I say that I hate the “clanker” meme please understand I’m not worried about you hurting ChatGPT’s feelings,” one social media user explained. “I just think it’s really gross how eager some people are to try to recreate racism from first principles.”

What do you think? Is the term “clanker” here to stay, or will we one day be embarrassed by its usage? Is there a right or wrong way to feel about a word that primarily exists on the internet? Click the speech bubble icon at the top of this email and let us know how you feel in the comments.

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