Emoji: A Level-Headed Look

The English language functions identically to a death cult. Most of what you receive from it stems from people with more power than you could hope to achieve, almost everyone that uses it would kill you for their own benefit, and the ideologies it facilitates would destroy human life if left unchecked. The only thing preventing its bloated corpus from appearing like Mayan glyphs foretelling doomsday has been a lack of pictographic symbols and artistic direction, and with the advent of emoji, the former barrier has been shattered. The English language has been subjected to a plethora of changes in its 1300 years of being written down,¹ but the most recent paradigm shift in its written form stand as testament to the awe-inspiring forces that hold the lives of billions in thrall. These symbols represent a completely unprecedented change² in written English that could only have happened in the exact setting they exist in, and are accordingly a product of that environment every step of the way.

There have been similar coups of recently constructed change sweeping through written English. In the USA, the ambitions of Noah Webster stands out. Shortly after the founding of the nation, he codified several spelling reforms in his Blue-Backed Spellers, to create several “Americanized” versions of British English words. These changes include colour to color, plough to plow, and women to wimmen.³ (Not all changes were accepted.) Some version of these books would be used as orthography textbooks in America throughout the 19^th century. 

That movement was able to effect change because it happened at a crucial time period in American history, when the elites of the new country were happy to back Webster in his endeavor to cultivate a keener sense of new national identity among the youth. Similarly, the rise of mobile devices gave rise to an explosion in the development of informal written English, and emoji proved able to capitalize on the formative period of digital communication to stake their claim. For years, informal written English had been confined to the likes of grocery lists and telegrams, as even letters had a degree of formality hammered in during schooling.

Following their invention in Japan in the mid-1990s, the emoji became a fixture on smart phone keyboards in the early 2010s. Since then, they have become commonplace on social media and text messages throughout the world. This in itself is a big development linguistically, since pictographs designed to be understood across the developed world have never been introduced previously. More specifically to English, the emoji represented the first pictographic symbols to have become both standardized and widely implemented (not counting emoticons, which were constrained to being formed from alphabetical and grammatical symbols).

These novel developments in the English language were made possible almost exclusively by the monolithic strength of the corporation over the landscape of modern cultural power. Emoji were made available to the public at the discretion of the tech companies that created their mobile devices, and as such have been controlled by them every step of the way. The profit motive manifests in the choice by Apple to change their gun emoji into a water gun,⁴ as well as testing a version of the peach emoji that looked less like buttocks. Both of these changes to the rendering of the emoji altered the emoji’s meanings in their original writings, as almost all uses of emoji are digital. This did not happen because of anything the authors agreed to, but rather at the whims of corporations.

This symbol of the leverage tech companies have over the ability of common people to express themselves in the modern world came about mostly as a result of performative concern for the populace. Changing the gun emoji to a water gun has done nothing to curb American gun violence, but did give Apple, and later its competitors, the opportunity to garner positive PR without effecting meaningful change. Of course, large swaths of the population did not react well to these changes⁵ (enough people in the case of the peach to reinstate the original design), but the demographics that the tech companies cared about performing their empty gestures for were pleased by the change.⁶ The lasting change of the gun emoji stands as a testament to the cooperation of tech companies in furnishing the illusion that social sentiment is being addressed while exculpating the state from directly addressing policy concerns with legislation.

Moreover, the emoji is another instance of corporations contriving a reason for their product to be preferred over negligibly similar multitudes of products. Because each brand’s devices could render the same emoji differently, a user that prefers one suite of emoji over another would have reason to not only stick to the device they are most accustomed to, but to encourage their associates to use devices from the same company so as to facilitate smoother communication.⁷

More importantly, English does not need emoji. Urban hacks in think pieces have fawned over the ability of written language to finally incorporate elements of body language to convey tone, but they overlook the fact that part of the artistry of writing is that you must be able to convey what you’d like with words alone. The antimetabolic⁸ truth is that emoji are a case of an invention becoming the mother of necessity,⁹ and serve to dampen the appreciation for subtlety of the written word that the average person feels. In that regard they come as just another step in the spiritually bankrupting march of Western civilization.

Put more bluntly, the emoji poses as an exciting development in the English written language, but its benefits belie its role as little more than a spook in the employ of unprecedentedly powerful corporations. Its digital exclusivity will lead their role in English to be lost in time if and when our society collapses, tears in the digital rain. You cannot speak in emoji, or reliably write one down; they’re too detailed, and wouldn’t even look correct without the proper coloring. They are a mirage that could only have formed in modern times, in a society where other sources of language influence have been left desiccated by the growing behemoth of the corporation. Similar profaning of all corners of daily life will likely continue until catastrophically stopped at the source,¹⁰ the rise of emoji just happens to be an innocuous symptom of society’s malignancy.

1. My source is Wikipedia
2. Wingdings Does Not Count.
3. I will provide no source for this information; it is simple to research and dull
4. Felix from Discord, Untitled Night Conversation, (Unpublished, 2020)
5. These individuals are termed a vanguard party
6. These individuals will not last long
7. This is definitely a real thing that happens 💯
8. This word does not exist in the English canon, but the learned reader will be able to discern its meaning intuitively.
9. Paraphrasing Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel, (W.W. Norton, 1997). I can beat him in any form of combat, at any time.
10. It’s true, look around you