...asterickrolls...
...or if you are going to like then just lycanthrope...
“Symbols can be so beautiful, sometimes.”
-Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions (a book in which he draws the symbol for a butthole)-
I was reading my colleague Rik’s work the other day, specifically an article about the “like” button, which I recommend you consume here. It is a quick read, and essentially a recommendation to quit pressing the dang “like” button. Rik is a coach, so he takes it one step further and encourages his readers to give feedback, and if you like something take it one step beyond that and give affirmations, which are specific, sparingly given, genuine quality observations.
Inspired, I’d personally LIKE to take the opportunity in this article to take our future commentary commitments one step Beyond…Beyond the like button. Beyond affirmation. Beyond thunderdome. Beyond the pleasure principle and straight to the core of communicable communications.
I want you dear reader to give me incurable, viral, shareable thought disease and to put the like button down.
Like all things sick, depraved, and valueless, the like button began on social platform Facebook. Now an actual facebook is what a serial killer reads before they fall asleep at night. The website Facebook however is how your grandparents cyberstalk the one who got away in between planning a weekend of garage saleing. At its inception the like button was called the awesome button, and it was meant to be a way to tell folks you thought their garage sale post was awesome. Because no word could be more awesome than awesome, and because Mark Zuckerberg is potentially a gen 1.4 bio-androidical-humanoid-replicant, the company decided to make its thumbs up emoji the less awesome, “like” button. Since that point in time the like button has been the internet’s way of saying I like you, I really like you.
Or not.
Like has many meanings. It can express enjoyment, attraction and want. Like when noted sonic criminal Raffi devotes a focused like to a pair of vowel altering fruits…
It can also express similarity, probability, and approximation, as in “this article is like what I don’t want my kids to do with their spare time” or like when I compared Raffi’s diabolical musical fruitfucking to the concept of attraction two sentences ago.
“I'm sick of just liking people. I wish to God I could meet somebody I could respect.”
-J. D. Salinger-
A like can also be a thinking pause, especially if you are like, a valley girl, like, omigosh.
Like is problematic via that association though. According to this wonderful article by Kristen Millares Young, “to associate “like” mostly with young women, rather than recognizing the word’s widespread usage across cultures, continents and centuries, is to undermine their intelligence and observations and to place them at a disadvantage.” So let’s do better and note that according to science men talk like valley girls too.
Like is an old word, stemming from the old English gelic, ylik, and lician. I wanted this to be the part of this article where I digress on how all old english words sound like spitting, but we have already passed the communicable disease beckoning segment in a previous paragraph.
In her 214 page book on the word like, scholar Alexandra D’Arcy notes
What I think she is saying is that Like is like a virus.
If you like something, this builds more likes, and then you are like-liking something and so on and so forth. My first memory of like-liking was paper fortune telling in grade school. The psychic paper folds told me that young Tina Tritty like-liked me, but upon sharing that vision with her, the strong sting of a cold slap informed me otherwise.
According to lawyers “just because you “like” a post it doesn’t mean you “agree” with it. “Liking” a post means something different for everyone. “Likes" are ambiguous- they can mean anything…"likes" can be random”. If like has no ascertainable meaning then by liking something you might be doing nothing at all.
Now I am all for doing absolutely nothing. But I also think we can all do better than that. Throwing a thumbs up symbol as the post perspirant reaction to consuming someone’s content is too simple, old fashioned, problematic and ambiguously random. It doesn’t provide meaningful community, context or support.
I’d like to propose a beyonder way. Don’t like anything. Like nothing. And if you like something, then do that something a favor and do anything other than like it. Mail it a fruit basket, print it and pin it to your neighbor's pole, send it a gift card to applebees, but whatever you do don’t like it.
If we are done with the like button what next? What improved ways can we share our appreciation with others on the web? Perhaps we just need different symbols.
“Each generation wants new symbols, new people, new names. They want to divorce themselves from their predecessors.”
-Jim Morrison-
In an effort to determine what new symbols should grace the bottoms of this and other articles I must first begin with a self reflection. If I were to become a symbol what symbol would I be? What symbols are missing for me communicating to myself? With my therapist? With you, dear reader?
As for me I think I would want to be a werewolf symbol, largely because werewolves are furry and fun (maybe I can be a declawed, defanged werewolf so as to avoid any fees for damages).
As a symbol I awake with each full moon and text myself pictures of me so I know what I look like if I ever shave the wolf off. According to the international wolf center “wolves use their sense of smell to communicate through chemical messages. These chemical messages between members of the same species are known as pheromones. Sources of pheromones in wolves include glands on the toes, tail, eyes, anus, genitalia and skin.” Given that context I think I am safe to use the same symbolism as Kurt Vonnegut at the beginning of this article, and text myself butthole emojis.
As for my therapist I think I need a symbol to communicate help. But if I am now in the form of a werewolf symbol, how best could I symbolize the help that I need? Further, if the symbolism I am seeking to create is that I am a man trapped in a wolf, trapped in the symbol of a man in a wolf, what kind of help could resolve such a predicament? To that logical end if I am able to surmise in this life as a symbol, that I am both man in wolf, and symbol of man in wolf, then by virtue of lycanthrope logic I might not need help anymore. I texted my therapist the hole emoji as a wolfian way to say goodbye and now I am on a watchlist and 30 minutes from lockdown at the home they sent me to.
“The degradation of the sense of symbol in modern society is one of its many signs of spiritual decay.”
-Thomas Merton-
What symbols can we best use to communicate with each other, writer and reader, creator and consumer? In my most recent career supporting the audio/visual needs of chatty comedians I was tasked day one with buying tomatoes to throw at them. What kind of tomatoes are best to throw at someone? A fresh tomato is too hard. A canned tomato is too sloppy. The actual tomato can is too criminal. A bunch of tomatoes is too much. Cherry tomatoes are too sweet. And heirloom tomatoes are too expensive.
According to the web, a rotting tomato is the ideal food to express displeasure with someone’s performance. Cream pies, eggs, bread and oatmeal are good alternatives. On searching the emojiguide though we only have one type of tomato emoji. So my first ask of the emoji council is for a rotten tomato emoji so that my readers can use to express disgust or servitude in equal measure.
Now in reality there is no emoji council, there is however a unicode consortium which sounds altogether more sinister and dangerous. While 74% of Americans use emojis every day to communicate, this consortium has gatekept our communicative capabilities to just 1,624 emojis. Now I probably have less words than that in my vocabulary, but I won’t stand for a world where the endless bounty of creativity isn’t mimicked within the hallowed halls of emoji. To that end I am recommending the consortium add also a killer tomato emoji so that I may taunt them with it after my dinnertime lockdown hours.
“We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.”
-Ralph Waldo Emerson-
To be accepted as an emoji you have many rules to follow. You must be compatible, of high usage, distinct and complete. You have no chance at approved emote existence if you are overly specific, open-ended, already represented, exact or transient. It is here in the article I request the sequel to The Emoji Movie be about a ragtag crew of trainjumping hobo transient emojis who couldn’t make the great 1624 club.
I feel like I have gotten really off the tracks but what I am trying to point out is it is impossible to communicate accurately and appreciably by simply using one or even 1624 different symbols owned by a ruthless consortium. If your emojical feeling doesn’t produce hundreds of millions of google results it doesn’t pass muster for the unicode mafia.
If you didn’t understand it already, you should be able to see clearly now that big tech is trying to limit and control how we communicate (with emojis).
This is why we need more variety.
I need to see a puka shell emoji so you can remind me you were on season 4 of Bachelor in Paradise. I need a despise button, and a burn it down with multiple fires emoji so you can track my arsons and properly charge me for pyromaniacal excursions. I need a sentient AI emoji to remind me of the machines that destroyed my job. I need an emoji emoji for when I want to write articles and moan on and on about emojis, their history, meaning and value. Old people need multi-coloured loofah emojis so they can end up at the right swinging sex party.
The kids have taken it upon themselves to defy the consortium and add new meanings to existing emojis. As Dr. Ian Malcom says in the documentary Jurassic Park…”Life, uh, finds a way”...
The eggplant emoji, which signified luck in Japan, and the coming of a delicious dip at my falafel hut, now represents a phallus. The high five emoji means to stop, the peach is an ass, and an octopus means let’s snuggle. Based on this article I’m not sure there isn’t an emoji we won’t pervert into some literally graphic attempt at sexual relations.
Now imagine the chaos if we let words transmute over time. The word word could mean wolf, and when my therapist tells me to use my words, I insteads use my wolves and I howl in the pack and we all hungrily and awkwardly have a group session with the possibly terrified shrink. I mean look at that it has already happened (when I said look I mean read!!). Shrink means doctor, doctoring means fixing, fixing means cheating and cheating means success depending on your profession. This is a problem. Time could mean nothing and we would have nothing but time. Let that sink in!
“Words are but symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch upon absolute truth.”
-Friedrich Nietzsche-
Communication is difficult. What we think we are saying one day might mean something completely different the next day, and that completely different thing will likely be sexual in nature because we are all dirty rotten imps. Gen Z has declared war on the awesome-thumbs-up-like emoji as a passive aggressive way of showing you are an old fogey. They find it to be rude and hostile.
Thumbs up kids…thumbs all the way up…
So whether you are using words, buttons, symbols or holograms to express your reactions to the things you interact with I encourage you to pause for a moment and then go beyond whatever your instinctual reply is. Do you really like something, or perhaps it meant something far more or less to you. Find that something and then find the best way to express it and then wait ten years until what you just said means “I gave you my disease for free and achoo.”
If you are reading this on substack you have one of five ways to communicate with me after finishing this article. You can like it, add a heart and walk away. The meaning of this action is at bare minimum “you pressed a button”. You can take your button clicking one step further, touch the arrow pointing right and share me. Sharing is caring but be careful because someday sharing might mean Karen, and given the current climate around that nomiker, you might be caring a bit too much about the wrong things.
There are buttons to save me or cross-post me but none to pat me on the head and say good boy. The final button available is a cartoon caption bubble which lets you leave comments. Given those options I think that is your best course of action. Click the bubble and please leave me your thoughts, feelings, and hard to comprehend emojis about this and any other articles you might take in…
…now we’re talking…
Wow, writing this 'like' article really backfired. Touché. I mean, how can I not leave a comment now… Apart from sharing my grievance about that whole situation, let me just say that the quality of the quotes that are sprinkled throughout your articles is always top-notch. I find myself noting them down often. Further, the balance of humor and lightness with an actual point we can take home, is rare and unique. Especially this time. I'm also kind of jealous of the speed at which you bang out these mammoths.
Ha! I had completely forgotten about the butthole symbol in Breakfast of Champions, thanks for that reminder and the rest of this ride.