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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.
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.
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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