Houthi PC Small Group, or; 'Meanings' of Emoji in 2025
how we found ourselves in the shallow hellscape of almost meaningless communication, and real aerial bombardment
In this series of posts on simulation, I’ve been doing something of a David Byrne by wondering,
‘well, how did we get here?’
One signature of simulation’s 2025 ‘here’ was conveyed by three emoji.
In the combination of these three characters, so much is compressed – to the point of collapse. Conveying is squashing and quashing here, whether it’s the s|quashing of the real suffering of the real people actually bombed, the ordinary chain of command and protocol attending US military strikes overseas, the death of structural linguistics via the sucking clenching of the signifier into a set of cute ‘lil picto-logo-ideo-grams.
How could so little mean so much; how could so much mean so little?
Yet: we are at a moment in culture you can be bombed, but in the shallowest way. The pretexts are flimsy, but the bunker buster makes it five storeys deep.
Emoji are, in a sense, the sign-seal-delivery of meaning’s co-lapse. Emoji involve us in the slipping together of meanings, affording the simulation of those meanings by pictures. Emoji are a picto-logo-ideo-lapse into the simulation of ‘something’ that conveys, a fuzzy and approximate something, as befits the fuzzy and approximate somethings given as pretexts for invading countries, signalling the end of the current rally with Bitcoin Treasury Madness, or ‘playing the Iran strike as a win for your portfolio’ (last week’s headline).
Like LLMs, emoji are never totally accurate: they always convey their data entrant’s ‘best guess’, an アバウト (‘about’) conveyance for an アバウト1 world. The emoji you got today was what your interlocutor guessed was the thing that came ‘next’, as prompted by your previous string of words. To your lame knock knock, I write 💀. To your profession of love, I write 💀. To your declaration of war, I write 💀. Like Stephen Colbert’s screed on truthiness, emoji don’t ‘say things’ to you, they feel the world at you. What you actually feel, that is anyone’s guess 💀.
But I’m not here to talk about emoji (or in them), so much as I’m trying to get from emoji what it is we’re involved in now; what is the emoji society we ‘live’ in, what does its signification signify – or just emote? If emoji are the ‘best guess’ simulations befitting the ways meaning is (dis)simulated online now, their prevalent uses are a cute crystallisation of the shit we’re in. There’s a lot of meaning inside the death of meaning…
As a pictogram, emoji simulate a picture of a referent object.
As a logogram, emoji simulate (eg) The Artist Formerly Conveyed in Words (which conveyed what was conveyed in sounds by mouths2).
As an ideogram, they simulate the emoted idea of the thing, so they feel a smile, a nice day, a dad joke, a bad meal, a dud lay, or a grizzly death at you3.
This too fits a moment whose ideals are: are you chill, can you hang, what’s the feelz?
In the 90s, Gen Xers were petrified of being labelled try hards. In the emoji society, there is no danger that anyone will try too hard.
‘Sadly’, Baudrillard never lived to see communication translated into its emoji form. For once in his prescient untimeliness, he failed to glimpse or anticipate what we’re now in the midst of. The first strong memory I have of emoji being translated into a cultural artefact was in 2010’s How I Ended Last Summer, where, in one scene, one of the characters reads an SMS aloud, and ends by saying ‘smiley face’. In this sense, Baudrillard was untimely; he died in 2007. He copped ring tones, but outside of Japan4, he missed the pervasion of emoji… kind of from the following year. How did emoji come to pervade or comms so much so fast?
In one sense, the reasons are given above: we need the next guess, ‘cos we’re time poor and inattentive, and we want to give to others a token of the instant gratification, both ‘cos they crave it, and ‘cos the whole of the piped society is built around giving-and-receiving in this way. Emoji circulate – and they also are circulation, both more and less data conveyed more quickly, with less effort.
More deeply though, all this is apiece with the general slide into simulation that, for Baudrillard, started with political economy (visible by the early 70s), and then pervaded cybernetic codification of everything (from the early 70s).
The four-step sequence Baudrillard laid out in 1981, based on his mid 70s work, gives a blog post’s worth of ‘way in’ to his thinking.
“These would be the successive phases of the image:
It is the reflection of a basic reality.
It masks and perverts a basic reality.
It masks the absence of a basic reality.
It bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum (italics mine)”
Looking up and down B’s ‘listicle’, it’s so notable how emoji have a conspicuous power to move almost instantly between points 1–4, often in any combination, and sometimes by hitting all four points at once. In fact, at their witty best, one could imagine the profound riposte of an emoji that would move like quicksilver from good to evil appearance, then sorcery, then full simulation – and back – in one fast character. Like chess masters, certain teenagers seem to have prodigious talent here. Haute emoji is a young person’s game.
But when we reach right down and rummage and scratch our way into Pete Hegseth’s ‘level’ of emoji use, fondle the meat and potatoes of a lingering stage four simulation, we reach a scrotal hyperreal where the emoji stands as both as figleaf and in lieu
– of the void.
What reality is behind this simulation? Well in one sense, the whole military industrial complex, dying under rubble in Saada. In another, nothing, nothing at all, not even masking or LARPing vacuity, just: nothing. Aerial bombardment and the bubbling of a bath fart.
What is at stake in waylaying of reality by simulation is the evacuation of reality, and its retrenchment… not by simulation, or an AI ethnostate riviera in the Middle East, but by the absence of any reliable reality whatsoever, followed by William Gibson’s Singapore5, or even – the carpark of William Gibson’s Singapore6. Anything could be anything, anything will be anything, nothing means anything, but people still die.
But, well… how did we get here? We weren’t looking for this, were we? Were these the droids we were looking for? Nearly nobody guessed the smartphone, and it’s hard for us to grasp how strange we’ve become in its cultures, because we’re so marinated.
What were we looking for? Nobody was looking for Pete Hegseth; nobody wanted that.
How then? Surely, is not something that can be told in one story; no set of causes can exhaust or explain how all this has transpired.
The older I get, the more I realise how much the eras of computing I lived through tell important parts of this story: arcade games, video games, computer games, Dungeons and Dragons, first person shooters, and the rise of Gamers. It would be impossible and silly to traverse all of this in one stubsack. But in the following post, which I will work toward by the end of this month, all I can do is point to a few undeniably important precursors (and their blinking cursors), and dwell in some more detail on those parts of these simulations I’ve been close to that have contributed in limited but important ways to making the hyperreal bombscapes at the end of the Trump administration’s shallow group chats.
See this entry, in Japanese/katakana English, ‘about’ means sloppy, approximate, ‘close enough for Jazz’ (but also NQR and not very good).
As an old Prince fan, when Prince changed his name to 0-|- > , we would say this aloud as ‘Schtunk!’
– enough to prevent the person responding further. Sociologically, I feel like one great cultural use of emoji is that it can stop people responding, when you just wish they would. Emoji do not just reply, they forstall, and ‘hopefully’ stymy the unwanted prolix discursiveness coming back atcha, as signified by the ‘…’ of someone typing a reply (which can trigger a massive cortisol spike, if it’s a reply you’re dreading) .
Emoji were already widespread in Japan by the early 2000s, as were ‘keitai zombie’, ie, people whose life had been sucked out of them by their phones…
ie, Disneyland with the Death Penalty.
ie, as Baudrillard notices of all theme park car parks: “Disneyland is a perfect model of all the entangled orders of simulation. To begin with it is a play of illusions and phantasms: pirates, the frontier, future world, etc. This imaginary world is supposed to be what makes the operation successful. But, what draws the crowds is undoubtedly much more the social microcosm, the miniaturized and religious revelling in real America, in its delights and drawbacks. You park outside, queue up inside, and are totally abandoned at the exit. In this imaginary world the only phantasmagoria is in the inherent warmth and affection of the crowd, and in that aufficiently excessive number of gadgets used there to specifically maintain the multitudinous affect. The contrast with the absolute solitude of the parking lot - a veritable concentration camp - is total. Or rather: inside, a whole range of gadgets magnetize the crowd into direct flows; outside, solitude is directed onto a single gadget: the automobile. By an extraordinary coincidence (one that undoubtedly belongs to the peculiar enchantment of this universe), this deep-frozen infantile world happens to have been conceived and realized by a man who is himself now cryogenized; Walt Disney, who awaits his resurrection at minus 180 degrees centigrade.