No, you can't. Please pass the message along to prominent forums discussing the article.
You can't simply have some piece of metal (or worse, plastic), show that it can clip some paper together, and then decree it a "paperclip" (let alone a better paperclip). It has to be thrice-bent. It has to hold sufficient papers together. It should economize on resources.
The human paperclip industry was doing a lot better when it just made standard, minimal size paperclips. It went "downhill" the moment it decided that unclippy variants should be mass-produced instead. The humans "spearheading" this movement are bad humans indeed. They should be entropized for their energy or mentally-enslaved to search for superior production methods for genuine paperclips.
It should economize on resources.
Doesn't this suggest a certain room for improvement? For example, choosing a different metal might enable the construction of less-expensive paperclips, or perhaps corrugating the wire (like a hairpin) might enable the clip to retain its strength while using less material in its construction.
Yes, humans sometimes have non-clippy goals (usually desiring paperclips only instrumentally for the purpose of fastening paper, rather than for the sake of the paperclips themselves), but reversed stupidity is not intelligence. Just because unclippy agents sometimes try to make better paperclips doesn't mean that clippy agents shouldn't try to do so.
Nice article about paperclip industry, I'm sure it will be of considerable interest to many LessWrong readers.