
The Absolute Denial of Shit - thebigship
https://openspace.sfmoma.org/2018/07/the-absolute-denial-of-%F0%9F%92%A9/
======
PowerfulWizard
The bad news:

\- They changed the gun emoji to be a water gun, which has a totally different
meaning. This retroactively changes previous writings, changing their meaning.
What kind of writing system allows people to change your words after you've
written them? Emoji is a trash writing system and an agent of kipplization.

\- Emoji is controlled by corporations that are concerned with maximizing the
value of their platforms which will lead them to a PG13, disneyfied,
milquetoast worldview.

The good news:

\- In the entire human history, it has never been easier to create and publish
text, audio, or video works of any kind. The most popular platforms have
severe limitations, but it only takes the slightest effort to use other
platforms that are uncensored.

\- There is plenty of free software that can give you pixel-level control over
your output, you don't need to rely on the unicode consortium or any other
organization of any kind to determine what you express.

~~~
codingdave
> What kind of writing system allows people to change my words after I've
> written them?

Any kind of writing system allows this. Translation changes the words, and can
change meaning. People can mis-quote. And yes, over time, meanings of words
change, as do the cultural contexts from which they came. None of this is
unique to emojis.

The truth is that all communication has at least two parties, and there is
never a guarantee that the receiver will get the message as intended. Even if
you do craft "pixel-perfect" emojis, people still can (and likely will) mis-
understand the nuances of your intended message.

~~~
paulddraper
When "gay" changed from "happy" to "homosexual", it (1) took many years
(starting over a hundred years ago
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay)) and
(2) happened as hundreds of millions of English speakers came to a consensus
-- or at least an overwhelming acceptance -- about the word.

When "pistol" changed to mean "toy gun", it (1) happened in two years and (2)
was decided by an oligarchy of actors (and not even the Unicode Consortium
oligarchy).

Can you spot the difference?

~~~
xapata
Slang can change rapidly based on current events.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
It doesn't change very often due to top-down orders, though...

~~~
notahacker
It didn't in this case either, it changed because a group of private platform
vendors decided they agreed with the rationale one of the other vendors had
for changing something.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
Why do you not consider that to be "top down orders"? Sure, the orders came
from a few execs at a few companies, rather than from the president, but it
still looks top-down to me. Specifically it looks top-down in contrast to
slang changing rapidly due to current events (which was the original context),
which involves a bunch of people having a new reference point, and choosing to
use that in their speech.

------
vortico
Am I alone in thinking that emoji should be completely removed from the
Unicode standard? The character set is an amazing collaboration between
companies and countries to place all glyphs used by humans in a standardized
collection... And then there's a bunch of smiley faces. Seems like someone at
the Unicode Consortium accidentally downloaded a "free smiley pack" malware
from the 2000's that injected itself into the standard draft. Just deprecate
that garbage. There's already a standard to represent all conceivable
pictograms: <img> tags and PNG.

~~~
cryptonector
You're not alone, but... riddle me this: what's the difference between emoji
and ideographs (e.g., Chinese Han / Japanese Kanji characters)??

I submit that the only difference is... time.

Perhaps a better questions would be: Do you believe that we should close the
set of human language scripts? If so, when?

That's a serious question.

You might say that we should not invent new scripts (there goes Klingon), only
accept new Unicode codepoint assignments for existing scripts. OK, but,
really, you want no evolution of scripts? I don't think the Chinese -for
example- would appreciate that, as Han/Kanji have been added over time, and
even recently[0][1]. So perhaps you might say "just don't invent new _scripts_
". Ok, but, why not? Why should we close one enormous aspect of human culture
to innovation?! And what if some language authority (e.g., the Spanish Royal
Academy) were to decide to incorporate emoji? International politics has had a
definite and substantial effect on Unicode's design and evolution -- do you
think that the Unicode Consortium can somehow start to resist political
pressure where it has not been able to?!

You can see where I'm going with this. Emoji are new ideographs. Love them or
hate them, that's what they are. Me? I like phonetic systems, but I understand
that ideographs add expression dimensions that most of us outside countries
where ideographs prevail... just are not even aware of. There are word games
to be played in, e.g., Japanese, which will just not translate well to English
-- though to be fair the reverse is also true, just in a completely different
way.

I don't think opposition to emoji is politically tenable, not in the long
term, and probably not in the short term either.

[0] [https://www.quora.com/Are-new-Chinese-characters-still-
being...](https://www.quora.com/Are-new-Chinese-characters-still-being-
invented)

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_j%C5%8Dy%C5%8D_kanji](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_j%C5%8Dy%C5%8D_kanji)

~~~
vortico
The difference is that Han and Kanji are 4000+ years old. When smiley faces
reach han/kanji's level of consistency if humans 20 generations from now speak
in full smiley face syntax, then it's time for Unicode to standardize them.

Anyone from standards committees know that when you attempt to standardize
something early that is in development and still mutating, you either 1)
prevent further change of the development if your standard is widespread
enough, leaving you with an early, not-well-thought-out version that the world
has to live with or 2) your standard must keep up with the changing reality,
making your standard change over time, which is synonymous with "a bad
standard" or "not even a standard".

Unicode has a perfect solution already for glyphs that are currently in
development: unspecified reserved blocks. If a tribe of humans wants to
develop a language around smiley faces, they can use one of these blocks until
Unicode Inc. recognizes that it is consistent enough to standardize. But
instead, Unicode has placed emoji in the mainline standard.

There's only one explanation for Unicode's horrible decision. Ideagraphs are
controversial, and controversy creates votes and attention, which funds their
company. If you think this is the way it should work, emojis are for you.

~~~
cryptonector
As writing systems they are old indeed. Not every character in those systems
is that old, or very old at all.

So what? In a digital world, not having a Unicode codepoint assignment means
not having the character at all, not even with pen and paper. Therefore
rejecting emoji is the same as rejecting new scripts altogether. I don't think
that's wise.

EDIT: Also, regarding private use codepoints, since the desire is to
interoperate, those cannot be used for emoji.

~~~
vortico
Private reserved blocks are perfect for emoji and developling languages. They
can be a time-variable recommendation, not a standard, by Unicode. That's how
_anything_ gets standardized. You don't just put new arbitrary ideas into the
mainline standard. This is like Boost and the C++ standard, or PEP drafts and
the Python standard, or W3 WD and REC, or industry de-facto standards and ISO.
If emoji becomes constant enough (not likely since no language will even be
developed using it), it should then be moved into Unicode Standard.

But accepting emoji to the official standard on the spot? I see they've chosen
my (1) from above.

~~~
cryptonector
PUC are completely non-interoperable.

Apple and Google, and their users, want to interop. PUC is a non-starter.

~~~
vortico
So why don't Apple and Google agree on a standard? Why does Unicode need to do
it?

~~~
cryptonector
Because PUC means _private_ to an organization. Any standard imposed on PUC
would... violate the Unicode standard, and any standard of how to use PUC
would, if accepted by the industry, be indistinguishable from... just the
Unicode Consortium standardizing those characters. Why is the UC doing this
not good for you but some other standards development organization (formal or
informal) OK?

~~~
vortico
In this case, the rules of Unicode has set itself up to be doomed. If the
organization favors commercial votes over common sense, it is no longer an
organization with the purpose of standardizing human glyphs, but a company
that accepts icons from companies for cash.

However, going back to my original point, UC's decision to standardize smileys
from Japanese icons was a mistake, and it _can_ be reversed by releasing that
part of the standard into a non-UC-endorsed extension, or by deprecating it
entirely, recommending system-dependent methods for transmitting icons
instead.

~~~
cryptonector
Not commercial votes, _paying members_ 's votes.

I prefer SDOs like the IETF, which are not pay-to-play, but, really, a seat at
the UC is a drop in the bucket for nation states.

------
Animats
The water gun emoji controversy got considerable press coverage and is easy to
find in Google. Apple was behind it.[1] But they were pressured into it by a
New York anti-gun group.[2][3]

The Unicode discussion for the "no" symbol (COMBINING ENCLOSING CIRCLE
BACKSLASH) suggest the use of "No" on the gun glyph for "no guns":

No guns ⃠

That's a combining mark; you can apply it to anything.

[1] [http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-gun-emoji-change-
squirt...](http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-gun-emoji-change-squirt-gun-
has-led-google-samsung-facebook-microsoft-to-follow-suit-2018-4) [2]
[https://metro.co.uk/2015/08/07/activists-want-the-gun-
emoji-...](https://metro.co.uk/2015/08/07/activists-want-the-gun-emoji-
removed-from-iphones-5331721/) [3] [https://www.wired.com/2016/08/apples-new-
squirt-gun-emoji-hi...](https://www.wired.com/2016/08/apples-new-squirt-gun-
emoji-hides-big-political-statement/)

------
Y_Y
Where are the emojis for pain? And why are there so many happy family emojis?
People (and "corporate people") who care enough to get emojis put in by buy
votes at the Unicode Club seem to have super weird values totally detached
from humans who send each other messages.

~~~
detaro
Have any "pain" emojis been rejected, or has merely nobody officially proposed
them? (which anyone can do, no club membership required)

~~~
paulddraper
IDK, but either way the end result is a system which is unuseful for
expressing common ideas.

~~~
cryptonector
In Japanese, ideographs (Kanji) are paired with syllabic characters (Hiragana)
to express things which Kanji alone cannot. Foreign words are spelled in
Katakana (another syllabic script). There's also romaji -- a way of writing
Japanese in the familiar Latin alphabet.

Incompleteness is manifestly _NOT_ a problem for an ideographic script.

------
nabla9
Adding new stuff to Unicode should have a delay, 20-25 years from proposal to
the standard (roughly a generation).

In the meantime it's possible to insert emoji into text as smiley, -smiley-,
:) , smiley.jpg, ::smiley:: or whatever you want and the system you use is
free to change it into a picture.

We end up with standard that is full of ancient symbols from 2000-2025 and new
generations of people will abandon them for something else when the culture
changes.

Emoji from 80s:

    
    
      ________
             /  "Ship Arriving Too Late to    
            /    Save a Drowning Witch"       
           /  /\              F. Zappa

~~~
cryptonector
Users of scripts not currently fully-covered by Unicode would NOT be happy
with this proposal.

------
oldsklgdfth
The best part of this article is discovering "send me sfmoma"

> Text 572-51 with the words “send me” followed by a keyword, a color, or even
> an emoji and you’ll receive a related artwork image and caption via text
> message

Stuff like this makes me happy for technology

------
notahacker
Emojis are ephemeral, imprecise symbols which in the clients discussed are
generally used for short term communication, not persistent information
storage. Like the ASCII art they originated from, their implied meaning often
doesn't survive font changes.

I wonder how many of the people apparently incandescent with rage at the
"authoritarian nature" of vendors changing a gun to a water pistol to bring
into line with other vendors had similar objections back when Microsoft
changed their original scifi toy gun to a pistol back in 2016...

~~~
cryptonector
No more ephemeral than Chinese characters ever were (some were ephemeral, some
durable). For example, the list of Kanji to be taught in Japan is updated
periodically -- some characters are dropped, some are added. New Han/Kanji
characters are invented occasionally -- it can be done because they are
actually simplified drawings with one or more root characters and pen strokes
added to distinguish them from other similar characters.

------
amelius
I basically want this:

\- Emoji decoupled from Unicode, and represented as SVG by chat clients. This
ensures our expression is not limited by the Unicode committee.

\- Any user can upload a new emoji as SVG.

\- Any user can download an emoji that appears in one of their messages, and
place it in their own library.

\- Emojis can also be downloaded from web-pages etc.

~~~
gojomo
SVG would make a lot of sense here - but could you settle for content-hash-
named transclusion of arbitrary bitmap images as a Unicode escape?

It's been proposed!

[http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2016/16105r-unicode-image-
hash.pd...](http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2016/16105r-unicode-image-hash.pdf)

~~~
Analemma_
Oh god why. This is like the 21th century update to Zawinski's Law: every data
interchange format will eventually expand to encode arbitrary binary data.
Unicode is a text standard and even including wingdings symbols and emoji was
pushing it, please kill this in the cradle.

~~~
oconnore
Think about the 1700s, when printing presses had existed for a few hundred
years (since 1439) to transfer data between people. Books were expensive,
though. Would you have been able to imagine that in 1975, printed paper would
be created each morning, and hauled around to everyone's door step in time for
breakfast?

Now think about us sitting here in 2018. Computer rendered text has been
around for a while (ASCII, UTF, .doc, .html, etc.) In another 200 years, the
way we transfer, encode, and view those formats will be completely perfected
and probably unrecognizable to us. They will probably be ubiquitous in a way
that seems completely alien to us now, and all of the implementation issues we
worry about in 2018 will completely fade away (proprietary vs. open, security
vulnerabilities, compatibility, accessibility, etc.).

With this in mind, being reluctant to add enrichment to how document transfer
works seems like it's obviously on the wrong side of history.

------
laurex
What surprises me is that there isn't any emoji with an unequivocal meaning of
"thanks."

~~~
pphysch
Is that surprising? Is there a unequivocal symbol for Thanks other than the
word itself?

------
otakucode
I had been disturbed by the actions of platforms like Google for awhile,
fearing that their naive efforts at maintaining "mass market appeal" in the
most hamfisted and blind ways possible were going to have unintentional
consequences for global human culture. Then I read Eric Schmidt's book 'The
New Digital Age.' They are not naive. And the effects are not unintentional at
all. Their goal isn't even mass-market appeal. They want to ossify human
culture and lock it in place to what it was in the early 2000s when they first
became successful. As multitudes in the past have done, upon attaining
influence many in the tech crowd have concluded that they know better, and
that the general public (of which they of course never count themselves a
member) is not capable of the task of regulating their own culture. This is a
pretty old viewpoint. It built the pyramids, united Rome, etc. It's old school
Conservative thinking, where the needs of the nation (or cult or tribe or
whatever) come first, and the individual exists solely to serve that. It
requires the presence of 'special' people, typically incarnated gods,
representatives chosen by a god, or somehow otherwise fundamentally 'Better'
people, like a kings lineage.

That brand of thinking ruled the world for a long time, but it got its ass
kicked basically completely around the end of the 18th century. I have no idea
why the rich people at the top of tech companies seem to like it so much. But
it's becoming increasingly clear that these systems of communication are
enabling a greater level of control and there are some sick-minded powerful
folks who will need to be reigned in as they are more than willing to take
those reigns. No one should have those. Global culture can, and eventually
will, guide itself.

Humanity is a wonderful species, but only in its totality. In the cut-down
whitewashed conformal mass that Facebook and Google and others want to
construct and sell to people, then try to force on the rest, it looks more
like a metastatic infection. The tech companies are unquestionably at war with
basic human nature. They do not like humans very much, and they want to change
them. Like their forebearers in the Industrial Revolution, they seek to round
off the rough edges, smooth out the wrinkles, and will wreak any amount of
suffering necessary to do so. Engineers need to think very hard about the
ethics of their work. "Just doing my job" holds exactly as much moral weight
as "I just did it for money", so keep that in mind. It's an empty dodge.

------
jpzisme
Clicked on the article hoping for something substantial about policy to clean
up fecal matter on San Francisco streets. Instead got:

" a distinct work-life balance has been replaced by free food, ping pong, and
services that do your laundry or drive you to work. This puerility is
internalized so profoundly that it extends to corporate hierarchies and the
way essential tasks are discussed. Software engineers are often colloquially
referred to as “rock stars” or “ninjas” in job postings, and childish jargon
is pervasive. "

Which is ridiculous considering the article is about poop and gun cartoon
depictions.

~~~
dec0dedab0de
I have a feeling that by 2016, most people who use emojiis weren't using them
on Windows.

------
ilaksh
Part of the problem is that Google and Apple have a monopoly on this stuff.
Not sure we can do anything about that readily, but we should probably at
least acknowledge that it's a problem.

If we just assume that isn't going to change maybe we could adopt an app that
has its own emoji representations separate from the operating system.

And/or maybe we need to start some political process working on the companies
to improve their representations.

I think this is the tip of the iceberg and is more important than most people
realize. Censorship is no joke.

------
throwvondannen
Designed by the corporate committee of social fads, emoji represent a lot of
things I've come to despise. Overly truncated thoughts, ambiguity, laziness,
sometimes plain disrespect. Sure, you can do all of this without the help of
emoji, but even if the medium isn't the message, it does modify it and I think
it does so for the worse.

What I'm really saying is, I'm angry about the kind of person who tends to
abuse them. Getting angry over little pictographs on the internet is silly
after all, right? :-)

------
mattbierner
While good writing and artwork undoubtably can express a far greater range of
emotions than emoji—and with infinitely more subtlety—if you ask me how I’m
feeling in casual conversation, 90% of the time I’ll reply “fine” or “ok” or
“bad”. Being able to easily reply with one of 50 reaction emojis is a great
improvement in expressiveness here.

Emoji do become problematic when you start asking follow up questions, such as
“what does feeling ‘bad’ feel like?” Since you’ve already expressed your
specific state when you replied with your first emoji, to add more depth you
start having to combine reaction emoji to express something new or repurpose
other emoji as symbols. Which sounds a lot like any language actually

A far more dangerous problem is that emoji can replace the idea of the things
they are intended to represent. For example: the happiness emoji becomes our
idea of what happiness is, instead of merely representing the concept of
happiness. That seems to be what the article is driving at and it clearly
would be bad if this widely happened. The result would be newspeak type
language, incapable of expressing many ideas and that is controlled by these
huge companies. Worse, using such a language, your subjective experience of
life has to fit into the emoji standard because you lack the tools to express
or even conceptualize anything beyond it.

------
princekolt
> queries containing emoji whose colloquial meaning had diverged from their
> objective depiction, such as the infamous [eggplant emoji], left users
> unsatisfied.

Well but how is that different from how words have worked since the dawn of
civilization? If tomorrow the collective society starts using the word
kaleidoscope as an euphemism for penis, then any software that statically maps
words to meanings will also fail. This is not a problem tied to emojis
specifically.

------
phs318u
As a non-American, I find it somewhat ironic that nowhere in this discussion
of the gun emoji change - “The Absolute Denial of Shit” - is there any
discussion of the correlation of gun violence and gun laws.

[http://fortune.com/2018/03/20/gun-laws-gun-crimes-state-
gun-...](http://fortune.com/2018/03/20/gun-laws-gun-crimes-state-gun-
regulations/)

~~~
defined
Although you make a valid point, the article linked to is statistically
questionable, and consequently potentially very misleading.

“Potentially”, because it may (who knows) accidentally have come to the
correct conclusion, notwithstanding its shaky basis, but it could just as
easily be wrong.

The author of that article even goes as far as writing “Correlation does not
equal causation“ and in the same sentence goes on to call it a trend, which I
find contradictory.

~~~
phs318u
The linked article doesn’t in fact draw a conclusion - it is simply drawing
attention to the correlation - which is quite striking. And while it would
have been equally correct (if not drawing a conclusion) to state that the
“trend” (poor choice of word) indicates that states with fewer shooting deaths
enact more gun laws (ie. not assuming cause and effect), to do so would have
been disingenuous. IF the effect is not the obvious one, then there is
possibly a hidden variable driving fewer gun deaths that is associated with
populations that prefer more gun laws (even if the laws themselves don’t drive
the reduction).

At the very least it’s worth further study. And yet here we are discussing the
corporate control of emojis on freedom of speech. And while that’s worthy of
discussion- we are all still free to use English (or <insert your language
here>) instead of a language that is unfree.

To the best of my knowledge no one has yet died as a result of
misinterpretation of the gun emoji.

------
thaumasiotes
> The argument for the mosquito emoji, made by the Johns Hopkins Center for
> Communication Programs and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, was firmly
> rooted in public health. The proposal states, “For many parts of the world,
> the mosquito is more than a nuisance — it is also a danger. Mosquitoes are
> the world’s deadliest animal ​— outpacing sharks, snakes and all others by a
> wide margin.” A mosquito emoji will allow people to easily communicate about
> the deadly insect to populations of varying languages and literacy levels.
> This usefulness serves as a kind of inversion of the ways in which other
> serious or controversial issues are mitigated. Why try to cover up or deny
> the existence of “real” guns, which are as rampant (at least in the US) as
> other “object” emoji?

This highlights a YouTube policy that I found very disturbing. YouTube judged
that graphic violence, defined somehow, was unacceptable and couldn't be shown
on their platform. In particular, they didn't allow the posting of beheading
videos featuring South American gangs beheading people who they thought
deserved it. The reasoning was that allowing people to watch those videos
served the gangs' purposes by inspiring fear.

But, YouTube made a special exception to their policy to allow beheading
videos of ISIS beheading people who _they_ thought deserved it. The reasoning
was that allowing people to watch those videos carried the message "look how
bad things are in Syria", a message that Google endorsed.

I can't for the life of me understand why the reason any particular person
uploaded a video to YouTube should determine what I get out of the video. In
my eyes, if YouTube was full of videos of gangs beheading informers, cops, and
guys who slept with the boss's daughter, _uploaded by the gangs themselves_ ,
that would be newsworthy and probably draw a lot of attention to the message
"look how bad things are in South America". It's not like ISIS was ashamed of
the beheading videos _they_ filmed and released for propaganda purposes.

Unfortunately, I can't provide a link to substantiate my characterization of
Google's policies; my source is an English-language interview between a former
YouTube executive and a Chinese consultancy, which I was asked to help
transcribe.

~~~
mcantelon
Bogus moral considerations are a great rationalization for censorship,
charging Marie Le Pen for sharing photos of reality being a good example.

[https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/mar/01/marine-le-
pen-...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/mar/01/marine-le-pen-charged-
for-posting-violent-isis-images-on-twitter)

------
peterwwillis
I think the solution is a universal standard for multimodal interfaces that
allows external and attached content.

An example of this already exists: in a Facebook comment, you can reply with
an arbitrary meme, and I believe Slack lets you define emojis as well. We
could extend this to include sound, or even modes for haptic or braille
feedback. If there isn't space to attach the mode you could simply provide a
URL.

This could be turned into a standard, and apps could implement the standard,
allowing people to communicate with richer content across a wide array of
technology.

~~~
christophclarke
But in slack emoji, you have to modify the universal standard for the
workspace in order to add those emoji, and now you're back to where you
started.

The whole benefit of Unicode is that anyone anywhere can see Unicode on any
device that supports it, without introducing added complexity of sending the
actual image over the message.

~~~
peterwwillis
IIRC Unicode was intended to encode and represent text for writing systems. I
get that the purpose of emoji in Unicode is to provide a universal way to
represent certain pictures, but it's clear that we also don't want to be
limited by the set of pictures we can send.

It seems a lot more sensible to actually send the picture you want to send, or
a link to that picture, because that doesn't need to be interpreted
differently by each client... just rendered. Sending the actual image might
take more space in, say, a text message, but its actual encoded size should be
pretty trivial. For example, one of Twitter's 16x16 color emoji is a 400 byte
SVG file. Base64-encoded that would be about 533 bytes. The standard could
define the image formats accepted, with probably one ideal format for emoji
(SVG) and another for memes (JPEG).

Here's another way to think of how you could implement this in a standard.
Each message is multipart. The text body is the first message by default. That
text can contain references to other parts. That reference could be the name
of the part you want to reference in that message, and that name would only
need to be unique to that message. But that name could also be, for example, a
SHA hash. When you accept messages, you could store the message parts in a
database with their SHA hash. When someone sends the same part again in a new
message, you can just retrieve that part from your database, rather than
storing the same part multiple times. This could allow you to send messages
referencing the same gigantic meme file 50 times, but you only ever store it
the one time, and after that you just store references to it. The standard
would allow you to simply say "please reference part X in this part of the
message text, and if you don't have that part yet, here it is, base64-encoded
or linked via URL".

(What I just described is MIME, but you could reinvent it if you wanted people
to adopt it, because people don't like adopting things that aren't new and
cool)

~~~
masklinn
> IIRC Unicode was intended to encode and represent text for writing systems.

Nonsensical garbage. The Arrows, Technical, Box Drawing, Block Elements,
Geometric Shapes and Miscellaneous Symbols blocks were all part of Unicode
1.0.

> It seems a lot more sensible to actually send the picture you want to send,
> or a link to that picture, because that doesn't need to be interpreted
> differently by each client... just rendered.

1\. Except now you need to design a way to design and render mixed content.

2\. If that's your argument, why even have letters and fonts? Just send the
right images.

~~~
peterwwillis
Uh, it's not nonsense or garbage, for multiple reasons. The first and foremost
is that just because the first version supported arrows and geometric shapes
does not mean it couldn't have been invented as an encoding for writing
systems. The second reason is that I actually read what it was created for.
[https://www.unicode.org/history/summary.html](https://www.unicode.org/history/summary.html)
The purpose was to encode the characters used by written languages for
expressing language in a legible form. This includes multiple forms of
graphemes.

Apps already have ways to render mixed content. How do you think you can see
both text and pictures next to each other? E-mail has supported this for
decades. The linked article even explicitly mentions how different apps render
different image sets for the same emojis.

We have different fonts for several reasons, and sometimes we do send entire
fonts in order to render our messages correctly. What font you use, and how
you choose to render graphemes, is completely up to the application. What I'm
proposing is a more interoperable way of sharing mixed content, which people
clearly already want to do.

------
mannykannot
Given the formation of an international committee and - most significantly -
their adoption by parents, we can hope that we have reached peak emoji, and
their decline will be rapid.

~~~
21
Kids haven't stopped using words just because the parents use them too. Or
iPhones.

Some things are too essential to discard for this reason.

What will change is what emojis are used and how. The rare ones which are not
used by parents will become used by kids. I already see this.

------
TranceMan
:-)

:-(

;-)

Did I miss any?

Edit:
[https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sef/sefSmiley.htm](https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sef/sefSmiley.htm)

------
alex_young
Hmm. I still see a pistol[0] on my Android 8.1.0 messages app. Is this even
correct?

[0]
[https://photos.app.goo.gl/w9kPRwUr2UHNQoKa8](https://photos.app.goo.gl/w9kPRwUr2UHNQoKa8)

~~~
skiman10
The pistol was changed to a squirt gun in the Android P (Android 9) Previews
and betas.

------
slavik81
The mspaint Fu Manchu mustache drawn on the photo of the execution of Nguyễn
Văn Lém really bothers me. There's a lot of power in graffiti, but it's
labeled as being Eddie Adam's original photo.

------
exabrial
"When language is subjugated to corporate interests, we lose our ability to
talk honestly and openly about the world, and some uncomfortable and
disturbing juxtapositions emerge"

Great quote

------
the_zisko
Every single comment in here thinks this article is about watergun/poop emoji,
which is why we have the problems that the article touches on.

~~~
typon
It's a bunch of programmers arguing about art...

------
a3n
"He brought a pistol to the birthday party."

"He brought a squirt gun to the birthday party."

Clear enough?

------
throw7
Add the "rifle" emoji/codepoint. it's not even shown.

------
chasing
You should google how language has always been affected and mutated by
capitalism. You'd cry so hard you'd use enough kleenex to fill a dumpster. You
might even have to take a break and go play frisbee or ping-pong or spend some
time in a jacuzzi.

------
draw_down
The bit dissusing kitsch was really interesting, thanks for posting!

~~~
sithadmin
It's worth noting that Kundera's interpretation of kitsch (as a socio-
political phenomena rather than an aesthetic quality) is pretty fringe and
generally not recognized outside the lit crit community. You won't find it
being taken seriously in academic circles focused on sociology, politics,
etc., mostly because there are far more elegant and explanatory frames of
reference for discussing the phenomenon Kundera describes (mostly drawn from
psychology).

~~~
mcantelon
>there are far more elegant and explanatory frames of reference for discussing
the phenomenon Kundera describes (mostly drawn from psychology).

Such as? I thought "kitsch" perfectly summed up the essence of a restricted,
infantilized worldview.

------
sudosteph
Just realized that this is the first time I've seen emoji from a URL render in
my browser's address bar. That really surprised me for a second.

~~~
rzzzt
Some domains use emojis as well:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji_domain](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji_domain)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2035572](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2035572)

------
tzahola
This was more profound for me than the whole emoji issue:

“What the tech industry can’t obfuscate behind algorithms is often relegated
to some form of infantilization, in which a distinct work-life balance has
been replaced by free food, ping pong, and services that do your laundry or
drive you to work. This puerility is internalized so profoundly that it
extends to corporate hierarchies and the way essential tasks are discussed.
Software engineers are often colloquially referred to as “rock stars” or
“ninjas” in job postings, and childish jargon is pervasive.”

------
hsienmaneja
Wouldn’t two half votes for $15k be cheaper than the one vote for $18k? Are
two half votes the same as a full vote?

------
megaman22
This is all over the road, but that's not out of the ordinary when it features
"The Unbearable Lightness of Being" being name-dropped in the middle of it. I
don't really get the axe-grinding about stereotypical nerdboys having some
nefarious influence on expression through control of emoji fontsets.

Emojis are silly little pictograms. If you want something more varied, send an
image or a gif or a meme. Or settle down and type out a few of these things we
call words, that have the capability to be very expressive and unambiguous.

~~~
rafael859
I think that the article makes a pretty good point that emoji are increasingly
important in communication -- referencing the suggestion of the mosquito emoji
that was supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in order to
facilitate communication and discussion about the malaria-spreading insects.
Even though I don't completely agree with the importance of emoji in modern
communication, apparently a lot of people (especially some of those who vote
on the Unicode Standard Consortium) do.

If you were to accept that emoji are an important part of modern
communication, would you not agree that censoring certain images is akin to
censoring words? Then, the reference to "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" is
very apt.

I didn't get the impression that the article was suggesting that the people
who vote in the Consortium have any sort of nefarious intensions -- and I
don't think that there is much to be gained by a fascist government by
censoring the word "shit". The decision to do stems from personal taste,
prudence, or social pressure. It is not the intention behind it that we should
be afraid of, but the power of some organizations to form our means of
communication, independent on how "good" they are, as there are many
unpredictable factors that can shape their decisions.

------
throwawayjava
This article is a perfect example of how the crit lit genre often analyzes the
shit out of a stool sample while ignoring the patient's sawed-off arm.
(Usually missing the real point because an auxiliary one makes for a much
cuter reference to some piece of literature authored c. 1800-1990.)

A set of images designed by advertising and consumer goods companies are not
optimized for expressing the full range of the human experience? I'm shocked!
/s

The real critique: we've had <img> since the 1990s, and plenty of more than
usable chat systems/protocols/markup languages that allow inline images for
about that long as well. Why are standardized emojis so popular, and why do
people even give a fuck about them when there are obvious workable
alternatives?

Emojis are not "radical" or "new", as the author puts it. They are a crippled
instantiation of an old and obvious idea, an idea that has itself been
implemented in better ways thousands of times prior to the rise of emojis.

------
excalibur
> Mosquitoes are the world’s deadliest animal ​— outpacing sharks, snakes and
> all others by a wide margin.

I do believe you have to specifically except humans from "animals", unless it
was your intention to include us, in which case I do believe you are mistaken.

~~~
verall
This is needlessly pedantic, and I think a good proofreader would have cut a
"besides humans" aside, did it exist in the original.

