Terms like “social media,” “podcast,” and “internet” emerged years ago as ways to talk about the latest advancements in the world of technology. And over the past month, we’ve seen some new terms popping up in the world of tech, from clanker to slopper, even if they seem to be mostly tongue-in-cheek at this point.
What’s a clanker? It’s a derogatory word for a robot, a term coined in 1920 for a Czech play about dangerous mechanical men. And given the fact that humanoid robots are still pretty rare in everyday life, the term clanker has emerged as a way to joke about a future where robots face discrimination in jobs and relationships. That’s what the folks of TikTok have been doing with some frequency since the word started to spread widely online in early July.
As io9 reported Monday, clanker as a slur actually originates from the Star Wars universe, starting with the 2005 video game Republic Commando and becoming more popular with the Clone Wars animated series in 2008. But the term has taken off recently as a way to joke about our uneasiness with new technology in 2025.
Some of the videos currently circulating on social media are just directed at robots that show up in daily life already, like the bots that are sometimes cleaning in supermarkets. But other videos imagine what the future will look like, placing the viewer in an era, maybe 20 or 50 years from now, when robots will presumably be much more common. The jokes often use stereotypes of the 20th century around racial integration, mimicking the bigoted responses white people had reacting to civil rights advancements in the U.S. and repurposing them for this version of a future where humans are uncomfortable with a robotic other.
Obviously, we don’t know how common humanoid robots will be in five, 10, or 20 years. Elon Musk has promised “billions” of robots will be sold around the globe within your lifetime. And while Musk is often far too, let’s say, optimistic about his tech timelines, it seems perfectly reasonable that we will have more humanoid robots walking around in the near future. For his part, Musk has only been showing off teleoperated robots that are closer to a magic trick than visions of the future.
But technological change can be scary. And it’s interesting to see how content creators channel those fears by imagining a new future where robots are oppressed—something that’s incredibly common in science fiction, even before the word clanker was coined. Whatever you think of the term (and there are some people who are uncomfortable with it as coded racism rather than a comment on racism), it’s everywhere on TikTok right now.
“Get to steppin Tin Man”
“Get these off the street”
“Where you off to gear-head?”
“Bought this house that my daughter drags a bucket of bolts into…”
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