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I know it's not a big issue, I know I should have expected it and I shouldn't let it get to me, but dammit. It's just so clearly reminiscent of the larger movements in ideology. Today I was asked whether we come with the entire family of four or with less to an event and I wanted to post the family-of-four emoji back. I'm usually not a big emoji poster, so I searched and searched and couldn't find it. Well, as it turns out, ALL family emojis were removed earlier this year and replaced with what looks like bathroom signs (and appropriately moved to the signs section as opposed to people emojis). The reason? Simple:
The Family Emojis Are Now Equally Useless For Everyone, And That's A Good Thing.
Direct quote from the author, who was on relevant committees, for some time even vice chair, for this decision:
First, I want to note how destructive this thinking is. A healthy attitude, upon seeing a sad and a happy person, would be to say: We should try to make the sad happier, even if they might not become as happy as the other person. It leads to more overall happiness, and also to more equality, an unalloyed on-net improvement. By their explicit, stated reasoning these committees would rather make the happy person's live miserable until they are exactly as sad as the other person.
And secondly, I can't help but notice how much this thinking is obviously directly descendend from communist/marxist economic thinking, just applied to cultural topics - i.e. cultural marxism. My wife was born and all her family lived in the DDR (soviet east germany). This is exactly what they reported about how life was structured - every time someone had something that wasn't attainable for everyone, you generally should try to hide it, lest someone might report you or otherwise try to make your life difficult. Exception were, as usual, only for special people. For example, my wife's grandfather was a reasonably well-connected and quite competent car technician working for the military intelligence, members of which were generally left alone by the much more well-known civilian intelligence, the Stasi. Among other things, he had access to a car cemetery, and through this he managed to build is own Wartburg, which was a more expensive car he normally wouldn't have access to, from parts of multiple destroyed Wartburgs. The only reason why he could do this was precisely because of his affiliations - otherwise simply having a better-than-usual car was so suspicious and dangerous that it's better not to try - a car after all you can't easily hide.
So life in the east was in large parts structured around seeming humble and normal and, from the perspective of the higher-ups, only giving people things which you're sure you can give it to everyone. Just like these bathroom sign families, buildings were often literally bleak and grey, which was considered good by the authorities since the alternative was inequality. It seems to me at least some portion of the people who make decisions concerning all our lives start again to think like this.
Third, this is often likened or even explicitly called "tall-poppy-syndrome", the attitude of cutting down the above-average successful. But it's actually worse than that: We steer towards a culture that uses the very least successful/happy as the reference, and that strives to drag the average down until it is exactly as unsuccessful/sad as them. It was trivial to include a bunch of skin colors to accommodate most cases, but since accommodating all possible variations was unfeasible, they decided against it, independent of how ever-rare these variations might be.
The flip side was that if you do have an item not available to everyone else, that was an honest signal of great connections, and connections were the real currency.
Back in USSR, in the eighties, I have known a fashionable young woman who had a Revlon lipstick case. The actual lipstick was long gone, but Margarita "refilled" it by buying whatever lipstick she could get (she bought as many as she could of the same color) and transferring the stick into the Revlon plastic case and then shaping the end of the stick to look more like the original Revlon version. When preparing to go out, she would use the other tube; the Revlon case she kept in her purse together with the powder compact. In public, included the girls-go-to-the-bathroom-together, Margarita would pull out the compact and the Revlon and gently touch up her lips.
(The publicly overt makeup touch-up was pretty common; it's a way of signalling I-act-a-lady-so-treat-me-like-one. Not merely performance of femininity, to use the modern parlance, but also performance of class, even in a supposedly classless society.)
The USSR did not allow imports of Revlon cosmetics (or other Western brands) for general sale. Having a Revlon lipstick case meant that Margarita knew someone who knew someone who could get stuff. In the soviet economy where shortages were the norm and officially unacknowledged, that connection represented a resource far more useful than a stack of cash. Someone who can get a Revlon lipstick case is also someone who may know where to get, e.g., some beef liver for your anemic kid, or insulin for your diabetic father when the apothecaries ran out. Yes, Margarita was a very useful person to have in your network.
Back to the US present, I notice similar signals among some women who clearly don't have much income but who wear designer clothes and carry brand handbags. Like, someone who has two jobs working as a caterer and a cashier, yet has an Yves Saint Laurent handbag and wears Agolde jeans. I used to think: wow, that woman has some serious credit card debt. But now I consider the possibility that it could be a signal of resourcefulness. Like, she knows where and when some serious sales happen, or where to get barely-used brand stuff at steep discount. Unfortunately (for such a woman), the credit card debt is the more likely explanation, precisely because just about anyone can get a credit card and then buy that brand handbag and jeans.
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A pretty common variant of this philosophy exhibited by the left in the UK is the occasional suggestion to do away with private schools. No one should have something better than anything else, so let's try and destroy some of the nice things some people have.
Even when I was an unabashed liberal I found this sort of thinking unpleasant and off-putting.
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Perhaps they should have gone gray instead.
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This is a much, much less idiotic option than trying to support full customisation of the family. They should've done this ages ago across the board rather than introduce skin colors at all.
Honestly, I would say emojis do not belong in Unicode to begin with. It was a mess from the start, and allowing skin color and gender modifiers made it much much more of a mess. This is by far the sanest decision to make.
Yes. Even if you don't like them, the genie's out of the bottle. They're going to exist no matter what any one person or organization does. Given this, surely it's better for them to be as compatible as possible. It's better for the people who like them and I don't see how it leaves the ones who don't any worse off. (Which in an odd sort of way, ties right back into the theme of the OP.)
The way emojis are encoded is very complex, to allow for all the variations without encoding each possible variation as its own character. This leads to bugs and even security issues in everything that needs to display Unicode text.
Even so, wouldn't you rather have one set of bugs and security issues, or at most one per platform, than as many as there are apps (or worse, as many as there are app/platform combinations)?
In that case, the bugs would be in the social media apps/websites, not in the operating system's text rendering routines. That's a much better place for them to be. Websites are very restricted in what they can do, and on mobile platforms so are applications.
It also would never have gotten anywhere near this situation to begin with. In the olden days, forums displayed emoticons by doing replacements on strings like
:)or:smile:. There's really not that much that can go wrong with a system like that. (Often enough these codes still work in fact, but they are now replaced with Unicode rather than an image.)Unicode emojis have two big problems. The first and biggest is the design, they were made to be composable, as the designers foresaw that it would be extended and apparently considered that a good thing. For example, [woman] + [sunglasses] gets you a woman wearing sunglasses. I remember the reaction when the 'pregnant man' emoji came out, but really, what else should [pregnant] + [male modifier] do? That's not crazy, it isn't even trying.
You can have a cutesy couple, [man] + [heart] + [woman]. Or you can have a cutesy gay couple, one of whom is pregnant, and both are wearing sunglasses, [man] + [sunglasses] + [heart] + [pregnant] + [male modifier] + [sunglasses]. They could each additionally have a hairstyle, hair color and skin color defined. At this point it's becoming a design flaw that they didn't include the equivalent of parentheses to formally specify the order of composition (though let's not give them ideas). And we want to put this all in the operating system's text rendering routines. Define them all in fonts! As ligatures! Madness, I tell you.
The only limit is that unofficial combinations don't need to be supported (though you are certainly welcome to try), as long as you can display the component parts in order. For example, an old enough system is going to render [pregnant] + [male modifier] as a pregnant woman and an Ares symbol.
Which brings me to the second problem, the Unicode Consortium. There's a single body that decides this, and it can be lobbied, and is it ever. Everybody wants their pet issue represented, and they've really got no reason to deny anyone, because the design already allows it. In the olden days this wasn't a thing. You try convincing phpBB to add your thing, and MSN, and AOL, and whatever else there used to be.
This is why I liked this decision, because it means sanity won at least once. Consider the alternative, that you could say "cutesy gay couple, one of whom is pregnant, one is black with curly hair and one is white with short red hair, with a bald Asian boy and a white girl with long, straight dark hair". This kind of composition is already allowed, but could've been made mandatory to support, in the dark mirror universe.
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Yes, the Unicode consortium has no place developing new forms of communication, its job is to categorize existing glyphs into the Unicode format.
They never should have acceded to adding new emojis that weren’t already in the Japanese emoji characterset they were integrating into Unicode. And Apple never should have made the emoji keyboard available on non-Japanese iPhones. It was just a big mistake all around. Emoticons should be native to the messaging platform.
Now you have me imagining an alternate world in which people instead resorted to sending Unicode characters for ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. Squatting man, beetle, eye, eye.
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I was listening to a podcast w/Malcom Collins*, and he said one of things he's afraid of is the rise in anti-human philosophies. People always want to be the hero of their own story, we evolved to be just that.
So, once there's way more resentful people who are angry they made the wrong choice. 'cope' philosophies that help them sanctify their mistakes like anti-natalism or even efilism are going to get more prominent.
To certain people, you being happy while they aren't is emotional violence. And a reaction to emotional violence with actual violence is okay. We've seen this in certain of the less hinged anti-terf activism.
Techies better invent more impressive distractions or maybe even catgirls or catboys to deal with this.
*husband of the 'elite tech couple breeding to save humanity' who got all those hit-pieces on him. I like his enthusiasm tbh, the systematic way he looks at things. Apparently he's enjoyed Fallout Equestria.
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I thought this was a solved problem with the Simpons-style cartoonish yellow skin color that is not within the range of typical human skin tones. Late stage jaundice patients not included.
I take it you missed the dialogue about that solution? If you're wise you'll remain ignorant and stop reading this comment now.
Okay, but don't say I didn't warn you.
Wired tried to explain that although "some white users worry that calling attention to their race by texting a pale high five (or worse, a raised fist) might be construed as celebrating or flaunting it", "The yellow emoji feels almost like claiming, “I don't see race,” that dubious shibboleth of post-racial politics, in which the ostensible desire to transcend racism often conceals a more insidious desire to avoid having to contend with its burdens."
And NPR let you know that, although "some white people may stick with the yellow emoji because they don't want to assert their privilege by adding a light-skinned emoji to a text", "there was a default in society to associate whiteness with being raceless, and the emojis gave white people an option to make their race explicit", so even if you're "just exhausted [from] having to do that. Many people of color have to do that every day and are confronted with race every day" - so is it really fair for you to get to ignore it?
Indeed, "the default yellow is indelibly linked to The Simpsons, which used that tone solely for Caucasian characters (those of other races, like Apu and Dr. Hibbert, were shades of brown)."
(No mention of the other characters who were non-Caucasian and yellow or lighter, for some reason.)
My favorite is when I see people at work using emoji with a shade notably different than their actual shade. I've seen indians using the "nearly translucent" white shade and light skinned arabs using the "nearly pitch black" dark shade.
Tons of the emojis I see used at work are varying shades of brown, completely unlike the actual people who populate the office.
It's an odd choice, because you have to actually select the skin tone modifier. The default is emoji yellow.
Some of the darker-skinned non-white people at my office have made a reasonable attempt to match skin tone. I think all the white people (regardless of actual skin color) are using the default.
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The Indian one at least has an explanation of "Indians idolize white skin and see it as perfect," AIUI.
Reminds me of 4chan joking about Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan
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I mean they're clearly wrong. The yellow smiley face came way before The Simpsons and was the basis for emoticons/smileys before they became emojis.
You mean it dates back to the days when the United States was 90% white? Something tells me activists would spot a problem with that almost immediately.
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Emoticons perfected the usefulness of small image addendums to communication and emojis enshitified them over and over and over until we have have the dumbass garbage we have now where it wants you to put an emoji of groceries after you just wrote groceries. Though there's probably still an argument to be made that emoticons/smilies were not necessary either. There's a part of me that finds anything beyond simple ASCII smiles or winks obnoxious now. I think that stupid clapping shit with emojis between each word pushed me over the edge into hating what they've done to communication.
I mean in exclusively the technical sense, but you're a scrub. Effective emoji use is associated with better social outcomes. (Low quality study but I'm being lazy since I don't think you'll disagree with me.) Emojis are the new midatlantic accent are the new cockney rhyming slang. Their aesthetic qualities are totally irrelevant-- what matters is that their effective use signals charisma and social status.
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Gen Z is speedrunning the history of written language, starting from hieroglyphics
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Hang on a sec, didn't Unicode introduce skin tone modifiers a few years ago? What was the point of that if they were going to replace them all with generic human beings?
EDIT: This is why
I also found this amusing piece from a month ago. Apparently Elon Musk reintroduced the pistol emoji (it had previously been replaced on Twitter by a water pistol, in line with Android and iOS). In response, a former Twitter employee said that:
Racialism good, Family bad.
Despite the large veneer of text, the justification is really not anymore complex than that.
Alternative sexual identities good. Guns bad. Etc.
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godwin's law is measured in picoseconds now.
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What would Jorge Luis Borges recommend in this situation?
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This is a good thing. The emoji set is too bloated with these "but I have mid length hair, freckles, and stud earrings, not hoops!" inclusions. A simple 2+2 pictogram is perfectly sufficient. The point of the yellow happy face is that it's happy, not that it's a yellow face.
I (half-jokingly) lean the other way: a picture is supposedly worth a thousand words, so let's make it earn it. "Face With Stuck-Out Tongue And Tightly-Closed Eyes, Medium Brown Skin Tone" is only 1/77th of the specificity that should be possible.
Instead of maximizing paperclips, the brightest minds of our generation have been working to apply the power of AI to solve this problem.
Everytime someone uses an AI generated custom emoji in a groupchat I weep for the continued straying away from the fuckbot future. I want my robot waifu to do my laundry and indulge in degenerate cosplay on appropriate demand, not drool out inconsequential slop. We could be solving for a pseudodynamic social management agent, and instead the best minds want to make AI bark in 16 vs 15 registers at once.
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Nintendo Miis have good customizability without being infinitely granular. Inserting Miis into emojis might be an attainable goal.
Emoji + Mii = Emiiji ?
Reinventing vector graphics one stupid committee decision at a time.
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Miimoji
Close, but not quite.
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But the pictogram isn't happy. It's grey and joyless.
Edit: It seems I misunderstood you, but for a family emoji I want it to look nice & happy, and that goes for pretty much all families. I haven't seen anyone use the pictogram so far, and imo you might as well remove it altogether.
Well, I think that it is unfair that happy families were represented and joyless cohabitation projects doomed to end in divorce, trauma and drug abuse were not adequately represented in unicode. I mean, these kids have it hard enough, the least we can do for them is having an emotionally adequate representation of their childhood.
I jest.
What I really think is that rather than trying to enumerate all possible family situations, it might be better to just compose families out of emoticons for individual family members.
Representing 'formerly three adults: an adult of indeterminate gender who left (red X superimposed), a blonde woman and a bearded man who died (bearded ghost icon), as well as a toddler, an female elementary student and dog and formerly a cat (which also left, red X)' in a single character is probably not feasible.
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I think this is the end game of our modern equity and hedonism mania. Unless everyone is exactly equal and exactly the same and has access to the same luxuries, remove the luxuries until everyone is miserable. For whatever reason Americans just cannot accept that some people have what others don’t. Most often it’s at least partly by choice— you’re not getting into college on merit because you didn’t actually do the work and now you can’t have the nice things that getting into a good school means. Or you chose not to have a traditional family. Fine, you do you. But that also means that you’re not going to easily find representation of whatever you chose to do instead because most people get married and have kids and businesses cater to the majority. Or maybe you want to Quiet Quit. Okay, but if I work and start doing better than you, you chose that.
I think the opposite needs to happen. Rewards should go to people making and doing useful things. More inventors more great students, more scholarship, more opportunities. And I think it will encourage more people to put in the effort to accomplish something meaningful and useful.
And the job of someone who is doing something unconventional is to not resent that fact, and not resent people who want that.
You're already blessed to not have to suffer from what most of the population suffers from (i.e. that condition where traditional ways are actually best for them); so that population is naturally going to be jealous and resentful. The assurance they're normal is all they have left, and it's wrong to insist it be taken from them.
(Correspondingly, it's the job of the traditionalist to understand that people who aren't them actually exist and aren't just lying to get out of the obligations traditionalism demands, which is their theory of mind for liberals.)
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