All the Feels

The tiny cartoon characters in your pocket have been quietly marching into the future. In many cases, you’d have to look closely to notice. Did you see when the syringe emoji, ordinarily red with blood, turned a whitish vaccine-coloured blue? Or when the face-with-mask emoji, ordinarily with eyes angled downward in unwell distress, suddenly smiled behind the security of its PPE? Like so many others in an expanding palette of icons, emoji have been metamorphosing as they keep up with the times.

Not long after the murder of George Floyd in May 2020, something changed on Twitter. Three fists appeared together — tan, brown, black — as a visual sign‑off to the Black Lives Matter hashtag. You couldn’t access the emoji directly on your phone’s keyboard; it was a unique way for the company to show solidarity through automated political punctuation. Months before, Unicode — the international body for information technology standards and the effective governing council of all...