a16z Podcast - a16z Podcast: The Meaning of Emoji

Episode Date: August 3, 2016

This podcast is all about emoji. But it's really about how innovation really comes about -- through the tension between standards vs. proprietary moves; the politics of time and place; and the economics of creativity, from making to funding ... Beginning with a project on Kickstarter to crowd-translate Moby Dick entirely into emoji to getting dumplings into emoji form and ending with the Library of Congress and an "emoji-con". So joining us for this conversation are former VP of Data at Kickstarter Fred Benenson (and the man behind 'Emoji Dick') and former New York Times reporter and current Unicode emoji subcommittee member Jennifer 8. Lee (one of the women behind the dumpling emoji). So yes, this podcast is all about emoji. But it's also about where emoji fits in the taxonomy of social communication -- from emoticons to stickers -- and why this matters, from making emotions machine-readable to being able to add "limbic" visual expression to our world of text. If emoji is a (very limited) language, what tradeoffs do we make for fewer degrees of freedom and greater ambiguity? How exactly does one then translate emoji (let alone translate something into emoji)? How do emoji work, both technically underneath the hood and in the (committee meeting) room where it happens? And finally, what happens as emoji becomes a means of personalized expression? This a16z Podcast is all about emoji. We only wish it could be in emoji!

Hi everyone, welcome to the A6 and Z podcast. I'm Sonal. Today's episode is all about emoji, but it's also about bigger questions and how innovations come about, from the tension between open standards and proprietary systems to the economics of creativity. We began with a tour of different emoji and how they came about, the politics of emoji, where emoji fit in the taxonomy of visual communication, and why this matters. And finally, we talk about the difficulties of translating emoji when it's not really meant to be a language. Joining us for this conversation are Fred Benenson, an early employee at Kickstarter who built their data team. He's also infamous for kickstarting a project to translate Moby Dick entirely into

emoji. Also joining us as Jenny Lee, former New York Times reporter who is a member of the Unicode subcommittee on emoji and who recently led the effort to get the dumpling emoji, which is where we start the conversation. I wasn't a really big emoji user. In fact, the first time I ever heard of emoji was when Fred started his Kickstarter called emoji Dick. And I was like, what the fuck our emoji. This is before they showed up on our iPhones like perky little yellow faces. I was like, what?

It's like sounds something very bizarre. I just started. I didn't even actually just be blunt. I had a very hard time using emoji because I didn't quite understand how to even frankly use that moment. I don't understand it when people send it to me if it's not the obvious heart, you know, et cetera.

But as I've been using it more, I found myself sort of expressing myself now in kind of quirky ways. And I don't know if people really get it or not, but I'm getting a kick out of it. That's the fun of the ambiguity. I have a friend who showed me exchange between a friend of his who was dating a guy, and he would only send her emoji.

And she was like, I just can't, I can't handle this. And he showed me these screenshots of their exchange, and it was hilarious. You're helping translate. Yeah. And so, like, I was like, oh. You're like to do brisierack at like emoji. Yeah, I was like, this is what this means. I can definitely see it being like sort of a irreconcilable difference between people and relationships.

Fast forward many, many years, emoji have showed up on our iPhone. And I'm texting with my friend, Eying Lou. who's best known as the designer of the Twitter Fail Whale. So we're texting back and forth about, like, dumplings. And so I send her a picture of the dumplings I'm making. And then she texts me back, knife and fork, knife and fork, yum, yum, yum, yum. And she goes, wait, Apple doesn't have a dumpling emoji. I was like, how could that be?

I was like, because there's so many obscure Japanese food emojis and some emoji are from Japan. Like you have, you know, everything ranging from ramen to curry rice to tempura to, to like the, you know, the rice thingies on a stick to even. There's even the triangle rice bottle that looks like it had a bikini wax. Right. There's also the fish cake, which is the white one with the purple swirl. Totally, right?

And I was like, how could there not be dumplings, right? Because it's such a universal food, right? Because there's like parogis in Poland and momos and empanadas. Like it's just like a food from around the world. I mean, technically, samosa is a dumpling. Samosas, like ravioli. And I was like, okay, emoji are universal. And then dumplings are universal. How could there not be a dumpling emoji? And just in my mind, I would just like clearly whatever system in place has failed. How do you solve a problem like the dumpling image? Yeah. And I found out that emoji are regulated by the Unicode Consortium, which is a nonprofit organization based in Mountain View, California. It now has 12 full voting members that pay $18,000 a year to vote on issues, including like emoji and other kind of technical members. Are all those members in Mountain View?

So of those 12, nine are U.S. multinational tech companies, Oracle, IBM, Google, Yahoo, Adobe, Facebook, Microsoft, and Semantic. Then of the other three full voting members, one is the German software company, SAP, another is the Chinese telecom company, Huawei, and the last is the government of Oman. That's a really interesting crew. Isn't it an interesting crew? And they have these quarterly meetings. And then I just show up. And they're, you know, very welcoming. You know, they're like, you know, thank you for coming. What brings you here? Tell us about yourself. It felt like showing up at church. Like a new church. You're a new member. They all knew each other very well. They're very excited that there's like someone, you know, young and like diverse. It's like just like randomly shown up. And so I in that process learn how you get emoji passed and how they're regulated. And so in January of 2016, we submitted a full proposal for dumplings, takeout box, chopsticks and fortune cookies and got those all. past. So those will be in Unicode 10, which means that that's announced in June of 2017. And

so they'll actually hit your phones several months after that. I was like, wow, billions of keyboards will be impacted by this. That's amazing. Were there other proposals submitted at the time? Oh, they're constant proposals. There's this whole process that people like Jenny, some of them make it through. It's a lot of work. Yeah. It does reduce some good useful bars, actually, for making sure quality gets through some point. Yeah. And to their credit, the Unicode consortium has an amazing list of emoji criteria where they say, okay, here's what we're looking for for emoji. It's got to have, like, you know, kind of a unique meaning in that it's not covered by other

stuff, but it also should have, like, you know, some ambiguity, so it's not just like literally one thing. It could be used in other contexts. Also, there's one of the more interesting rules, which is no celebrities, deities, or logos. Whoa, the Easter Island head is kind of a violation of that one, but that's got its own story. A couple years ago, with a big update, the East. Island had showed up in like the back of the travel section of emoji. And I was like,

what is that doing there? Who's traveling to Easter Island so often that they need to use the Easter Island at emoji? And it kind of just stuck in my mind. And then I started using it in this kind of like slightly culturally insensitive way to like reference some supernatural phenomenon that I didn't understand. Right. Like if I was in a conversation with somebody and I was just like completely flammocks, I would just like send that one. Yeah. It's like your version of Bermuda Triangle. Yeah. Yeah. I was just like, who knows? Stoneface. Other people use it for like stoned, right? Like there's lots of combinations. in there. The reason why it's in there is that

there's a statue in downtown Tokyo. I think it's a Shibuya station that is called Moyai, which is a name of just like it's a proper noun of that statue, which was made by an artist that was like a reference to originally Easter Island Head. So it

turns out Japanese teenagers use this waypoint to meet each other. And so that's how it ended up in Japanese cell phones, and that's why it ended up an emoji. The artist used this inspiration of Easter Island. The interesting twist is that When you look at it on the iPhone, it doesn't look anything like the statue in Tokyo. At some point, Apple was like, we're not going to make it like this Tokyo one.

We're going to do the original one. Android, on the other hand, their Moyai emoji looks like the Tokyo Station one. So fascinating. I read a study. I actually included in our newsletter months ago of someone comparing how emojis look on different platforms and how it actually changes meaning. Totally. You can actually think you're sending one thing and you get something else. That's going to happen in any system.

has standardization. Like, you're going to try really hard to make sure people hue to the specification, but, you know, people do their own implementations and things change. In fact, the whole reason why emoji are in Unicode was because you would send your friend an emoji and then their cell phone would actually just render the incorrect one. It could be so much worse. And the fact that there is a standard means that, like, you only get these, like, weird edge cases.

There's still some interesting vestiges of, like, the different telcos between Apple and Google. So one was Docomo and the other one was softeng. Softel. Softel. So they're basically, depending on who their partner was locally, they kind of inherited those generations of emojis. For example, on Apple, women with bunny ears is like two women dancing in kind of like a let's party kind of way with their bunny ears.

Whereas on Android, it's just the headshot of a woman with bunny years. And it's referencing this slightly misogynist part of Japanese culture of bunny woman, which is itself a reference to the Playboy Bunny. And so, like, they were cocktail waitresses working. in nightclubs. That made its way into the Japanese set. And then so when it came over to America, like, I think Apple must have been like, let's make this a little more fun. One of the easiest things actually to get emoji pass is showing that a vendor uses it. Another argument is for completion. This is actually why chopsticks got passed fairly easily

because we had like knife and fork. Oh, so you need completion of a set. You need completion. So if that one's- You can tell a whole story, like stringing together a bunch of. No, I just think that it's like they're engineers. Right. You can't have A, B, C, D and skip the D. They're actually one of the weird issues is that they're red, yellow, green, purple, blue hearts, but not orange. So one of the big lobbying efforts has been to fill in the orange. So the case of the apple bunny ears and the Japanese bunny women, that was a case where there was an intentional translation to sort of obscure the cultural reference. They're just two separate ones, right.

They're often trying to map technically the same emoji, but it's like rendered and sort of interpreted differently. They like emoji that can have multiple meanings. You can also just have like emoji that have one meaning, but it really has to be a really good emoji. good one was going to be one meaning. So for us, the Chinese takeout box, for example, one of the arguments that we made is that it's, one, it's an iconic shape. It also symbolizes both an entire cuisine, which is Chinese food, and also a means of eating, which is delivery and takeout. Right. Right. And so in that one symbol, you get a lot of sort of secondary meaning. And with fortune cookies, like, it's technically a cookie, but it also means like mysterious

in the future and the unknown. So like sort of primary secondary meaning, one of the criteria for an emoji to get past is that it has to have a certain element of ambiguity to it. I love this. I've been thinking about this so much. When I did emoji dick, it was more of an experiment around crowdsourcing and emoji itself. I wasn't like so much interested in making a formal case that emoji could be a language because it was still so early. Could it get there maybe one day? Yeah. But Unicode makes a really good point. They're like, emoji's not a language. It shouldn't be a language. The value is that it's ambiguous. And I've really come around to that thinking in this idea that the charm of sending an emoji is that it can be

interpreted in a couple different ways. And that's actually why we value it. And I'll go further and say that a lot of people ask me why emoji have become so popular. And I think it's tied to the fact that we now are just inundated with text. We live in a text culture, right? We communicate via text. Our careers are run over email. We read constantly. Everything we do is mediated through almost literal words. And so emoji represents this kind of reaction to that. And the popularity of emoji, I think, is largely due to the fact that we need some other way of expressing ourselves over text. If the pipes are so mechanical, like phones and machine, you no longer have the nonverbal aspect. So this is actually replacing sort of this human element of the

glimmer in your eye or like the cheeky, the blush on your cheek. There's an emoji that does that. You think about the amount of signal you get from somebody's voice on an analog telephone. And when you strip that out and all you're communicating is like LOL, you don't actually know how sincere that laugh is or that chuckle or whatever that person's trying to convey. And so emoji gives us a much bigger palette to convey this kind of like extra limbic meaning that we want to have in our communications, but we can't because we're just, we're texting all the time. So to break down the taxonomy of figural representation, not using literal text, let's talk about where emoji fits. We have emoticons, which are like a colon and a parenthesis and that gives you

smiley face or like a semicolon and a parenthesis and that gives you a wink. Right. Using punctuation. Using punctuation is emoticom. Often asky-ish. Right. It goes way back. Some of the earliest references to emoticons go back to the 19th century as well.

Oh my God. Yeah, yeah. People were using colons and dashes and parentheses to express like a wink. It goes way back. It's important to add in hieroglyphs and iconography. Other humans have had this idea before, right? The medium and the technology is kind of like incidental. I'm so glad you brought that.

because it's so important to not get caught up in technology time. Well, technically, technology includes like sticks and stones. So that does go back in time. But in the context of this machine web that we live in, then we have emoticons as part of the taxonomy. And then we have emoji, but how would you guys define emoji? It's Japanese. Drawing language. I don't know how to pronounce in Japanese, but the Chinese. The emo is not for emoticon or emotion or anything. It's just totally coincidence. Wow. It's hard not to just huge. to the Unicode standard and say it's the set of icons defined in Unicode that represent objects and nouns and actions.

The way that I explain it to people is an emoji is a character, an emoji is something you can put in the subject line of an email because it literally is text. So in the same way that Unicode has kind of defined a standard to unify all the graphical representation of different languages throughout the world and even non-languages. So like, you know, the wingdings and all that kind of stuff. emoji actually slip into that entire system. So there is literally what they would call a code point assigned to each emoji, or sorry, not every single one because now they're like compound emoji, but there are code points assigned to

emoji, which basically says, you know, when a computer sees this code point, they render it in a certain way. But it's important to kind of wrap your head around what's actually happening inside the computer because the emoji is being sent as text. If your computer supports UTF8, UTF16, it's just like a standard way for your computer to handle text, whether it's your phone or your laptop, then it's being told, render this emoji. But it's actually up to your computer's operating system, whether it's OSX or iOS or Android or whatever, to go fish out a little image and put it on your screen. And so that image is actually controlled by the hardware manufacturer or the software manufacturer. When it's actually rendered on your screen, the operating system's choosing which image to show you. Those images are actually stored, you know, in the same way that other images are stored

on your computer as little PNG files. And so Apple, you know, puts those on your computer and your computer chooses to render those, which is why you may get slightly different, you know. This is actually really interesting because recently Facebook just introduced their own emoji and that, like, basically hijack Apple emoji. So you can turn that on or off, but essentially they will replace, they'll swap out all the ones on the Apple. And Twitter's had their own set for a while.

Why is that? So they're interesting copyright. considerations here. My guess is a lot of those companies are doing it because, A, they can afford to make their own set. B, they want to avoid the legal liability of using Apple set. And C, like, they think they might kind of have some, like, moment of like, hey, did you see Twitter's new emoji, right? And so they're, you know, these large companies are kind of... Innovating on emoji. Yeah, yeah, like re-innovating and re-illustrating their emoji. And I think, you know, I think Microsoft actually just evolved to a new set or wasn't Android. I think it might

have been Google Android. They just upgraded to make it seem a little bit more normal. Like they had gone from like... The terrible blue and white. Or there's like the blobby ones. Yeah. I think Google had blobby ones for a while. Now they're doing somewhat normal ones. Scariest emoji ever, the Microsoft

emoji are like blue and gray and they look like monsters that hide underneath your bed. Why? Why are you blue and gray? I think it's just an attempt to be like different from like the yellow skin tone. Part of the original emoji is you wanted things that were skin tone neutral.

So Apple and Google chose yellow, but Microsoft for some reason, chose gray. Oh, gray. Because I was going to say for Hindu, like, blue is actually not a bad thing to have your skin blue. It's like a god. The other thing is, if you have your own set of emoji, you can actually start adding to that set without going through the Unicode. So, like, a very good example is the gay family emoji originally where they're not, it's not actually one emoji. You know, the one is like, man, man, kid, kid. that is actually a compound emoji of four characters glued together using something called a quote zero with joiner, which is basically like an invisible glue.

So if you are sending that emoji to someone else who doesn't have the ability to render that, it actually unravels itself into like a multiple character. Now what you're seeing is a lot of vendors making compound emoji. So like actually one of the places where this is being debated for use is the need for a professional female emoji. Right, because one of the big problems right now, on the existing set of women, as represented by emoji, is like, they're only like really four roles for women to play compared to men. You know, men, you can be a sleuth or you can be, you know, a policeman. You can be sort of a medical worker. With all kinds of things you can be. You can even be Santa Claus.

But as a woman, the four things you can be as a role are basically bride, princess, dancer, ploy way, bunny. Oh, my God. It just goes to show you how the policy, I mean, of course, this is the politics of. human life play out in these systems. I mean, the perfect example I was thinking of is a rifle emoji. And the case of, I believe Apple, Google, and Facebook, Charlie Warzel at BuzzFeed wrote a really detailed article investigating this and about how they sort of help suppress as part of the Unicode consortium, the rifle emoji. Right. Emboji already has a gun in it, right? And it's like, okay, so how many more versions of that do we need? And you're right, it's absolutely a political topic.

I mean, that issue manifests itself in so many other places than emoji. The country flag stuff is super interesting because that uses kind of what Jenny's talking about with these compound emojis. Unico didn't actually want to decide which flags were and weren't in emojis. Right, because you're legitimizing then political issues. What they did was they built this kind of like meta country system so that you would actually be pairing these country letter emojis together. So CNN would go together and then it would be up to your phone to decide if you showed the Chinese flag. They pushed that decision making, that like political decision making of which flags this.

board off to the handset manufacturer. Microsoft actually does something weird there. What do they do? They just show the, they don't show a flag. They show a flag plus the two letters. Right, right. Microsoft doesn't render it normally. To the point about politics being kind of embedded in emoji, it's not just because

these are icons that, you know, represent the parts of our lives that we feel passionate about. It's because there's a finite palette. It's not like language where you can only, you know, you can kind of combine and say whatever you want. It's combinatorial. You can take multiple combinations and turn into whatever you want. more degrees of freedom to kind of express yourself, there's a finite number of food items

that are ever going to go in there. And when you think about the vast multitudes of humanity, whether it's, you know, people's relationship status or sexual orientation or skin color, it's like, like, emoji's never going to be able to express that. And so, like, how do you contain this thing that's, like, growing and kind of has to grow as more and more people use it? But also, by definition, has to be a finite list of icons. Well, how do they handle the skin tone issue? Because one of the things that I noticed is that you, an Apple, because I use an Android, so I didn't notice this. You can press down on a thumbs up, for example, and then you can pick among 15 different

shades to, like, pick a skin coat shade that's closest to you. Yeah. It's based on the Fittspatrick's skin tone scale. Yeah, it's actually used, it's the same skin tone system that dermatologists use to categorize. This reminds me a little bit of being a kid when, like, you had Krayola Box. I remember that the only shade you had, there was like a nude shade or like a skin tone. Yeah, nude was always Caucasian. So I'd use sepia.

I remember using CPI to represent my skin color. I mean, there's a great history about this in, this is going to sound weird for me to say, but like women's pantyhoes like had this issue where nude was always considered Caucasian. Right. And people were like, this is ridiculous. It was one of the earliest blind spots of emoji, I remember. Right. I mean, if you have like only white men designing them.

Do you remember when Slack there was this guy who wrote a post about Justin Brown hand? And I remember it was so meaningful because it's such a minor, seemingly arbitrary thing. But then it is true. Like the first time I saw that I could find my skin color in a system and to be able to use it was kind of amazing and empowering. And I think there's something significant about that. I would totally agree. I don't share your experience as the person on the other side. And so it's funny for me because I don't feel.

He's a white male. Yeah. And for those of you're not seeing, I'm a white guy. I don't share that like sense of identification with the bright white. skin like fleshman index skinned. That's not necessarily me. I'm like it's, it feels odd to opt into that, which speaks to my privilege as a white male where I just like...

I mean, if you're not exposed to it, you're not exposed to it. The bottom line is if you're any person of color, you're always aware of your color. Right. Especially if you're in a context where everyone else is not the same color as you. And so when I texted my friends who are not white and I'm like, should I be choosing that one? And I just choose to choose the yellow skin tone. That's just like the, I feel way more comfortable.

To my solution is I often send four. It'll be like yellow, light, dark, and then like the beige one. So it's like a Benetton ad in an emoji world. A benedeton emoji. That's fabulous. So now the kind of evolution is that we have yellow for like all of the human face characters and then you can choose skin tones for some of them. But it doesn't get at like more nuanced issues about like cultural and racial identity

having to do with facial structure or hairstyle. Oh, right. There's a feature. That's a great point actually because one of the pet peeves I have is when I used to go to foreign countries and look at billboards, it always glorified that Aqualine knows the face structure, whereas there's a totally different type of face structure in different areas. emoji probably won't ever have that amount of customization, and Unicode gets this, and they actually say, like, we're adding like 60 emoji a year, this is unsustainable, we feel like the future

is in-line images. And that kind of breaks my heart as like kind of a nerd standardization guy who really appreciates all the hard work that went into Unicode and the idea that it is a standard. because if you're just sending inline images forever, then, like, you know, you have no idea what's going to be on the other sign if they can render the image. So stickers. I mean, so Kim Moji, for example, Kim Kardashian's quote emoji. They're not actually emoji.

Those are just stickers or images that you can text back and forth. But, you know, again, you know, standards, can you put it in the subject line in an email on those? You can't. So therefore they don't qualify. So they're not technically emoji. Right. So then going back to our hierarchy, we went from Imodoconti emoji and now stickers.

Stickers. Stickers are basically inline images. I mean, stickers are just images. So you can pick from a palette. And I think you can, you know, in certain apps, you can, like, apply a sticker to an image that it, like, sits on top of it. But you're then in this kind of, like, proprietary ecosystem of that's okay. But, like, you think about the stuff that really works and the stuff that really changes the future of the web and communication. It's all standardized.

You're saying this as a standardization person because my friend Connie, who wrote a wonderful post on the topic of stickers, argues. that emoji are very limited for what you need to do because she feels that you have so much more expression and the ability to convey so much more with stickers than you do with emoji? emoji doesn't preclude the use of stickers. There is some subset of images that are universal enough that should be hardwired into the operating systems

and are basically can be cross-platform that an iOS device can talk to, you know, Microsoft Windows and can talk to like an Android device can talk to your Mac laptop, like the fact that at least you're not going to get little square boxes as long as your operating systems are fairly up to date. Well, that goes to then your point about why standardization is important because you're now giving up that you're in this proprietary ecosystem like WeChat or Line and you only have their sticker set and you can't always transfer all these stickers across them.

And also, if you think about the accessibility issues around stickers, right, like people are using screen readers, they're not going to be able to interpret an image and like emoji actually have names. And so in theory, there's much better accessibility for a for somebody who's visually impaired. Yeah, like, for example, last year, Oxford English Dictionary chose face with tears of joy, which I always thought looked very sad. Yeah. I only, it's, you know, the thing with the eyes and it's like bawling, but that's actually face of tears of joy.

And that is how, you know that because, you know, all these emoji have. They say the label. Oxford put that in their edition. So it was the word of the year. The word of the year was an emoji. Part of the reason they chose that was that it ended up as number one. on my friend's site called emoji tracker.com. Oh, right. That's right. The emoji tracker, which tracks all the use of emoji on Twitter.

And for a while, it was just like the heart emoji or something or just the smiling face emoji. So I think it's really interesting when the top emoji shuffle because, you know, whenever you start texting with somebody who hasn't used emoji before, they're like choosing like the safest ones. Going back to this idea of some of the companies owning their own emoji and some of the proprietary open tension between standardization, freedom of expression. What do you make of this notion that part of what we're doing here is essentially also creating a more machine readable web in terms of emotional reading? Because essentially you're now adding a whole new layer where you can codify people's emotions, sentiment in ways beyond just a black and white like, don't like. I've been thinking about this so much actually, and not in the context of emoji, but actually Facebook reactions. Yeah, me too. I used to assign and edit up ads on this topic because I was very obsessed with it.

I think it's a really interesting topic because if you look at traditional sentiment analysis in the data world, it's kind of a joke. You have to have training data. You have to know good cases. Right. And just to interject for a moment, as someone who's been tested a million of those systems and can never find one that actually works for my needs, they're so binary. You don't get anything useful. You're not getting insight.

One of the reasons there is that words have these degrees of freedom. They can be sarcastically, and you would never know it based on the semantics. And so traditional sentiment analysis is really broken because you're using these kind of like stale, rigid semantic definition. What's really interesting about Facebook reactions is, you know, you think you're saying, I love this thing, or I'm sad about this, or I'm angry about this. What you're actually doing, in conjunction with that, is giving Facebook really great labeled data for sentiment analysis. That's right. Machine readable data. That is a holy grail of emotional sentiment understanding.

When I was at Wired, I assigned a piece to a sociologist Evan Salinger because I wanted to coin this phrase, the mood. graph because we have an interest graph, social graph, you know, you know, all kinds of other graphs that link all these nodes and ideas. And now to have like a mood graph to essentially be able to put your pulse on someone's mood, something very finite yet constantly changing. It's just a fascinating thing to be able to codify this. The sentiments have generally corally started strongly with human face and body. So I think this is also why people agitate so much for emoji that look like themselves. Like the redheads and people with beards and people, you know, who are, who are bald.

Or anyone who has curly hair. People with curly hair relate to other people with curly hair. And so I think people really love seeing themselves represented an emoji, which is why Bitmoji, which is highly, highly, highly customized stickers in sort of emoji spirit. Oh, my cousins and I use Bitmoji on WhatsApp all the time. I think there's something really symbolically important about Bitmoji because you are putting yourself in it and conveying in this sticker form. The fact that Snapchat bought it, I think, is really telling. $100 million.

Right, especially given that they are changing this culture of how you express yourself through your facial expressions with face swapping and filters. Connie and I made the argument that it's sort of like selfies, like selfies as a form of stickers. So what we're talking about with the machine readable is a little distinct than this, but it's sort of an interesting idea. I also think it ties into this slightly dubious notion of the uncanny valley, where if you want to try to represent yourself and you want to have like configurability around that, it needs to be kind of cartoonish for it to be believable. I think what we're seeing with Snapchat filters and I don't know if you guys have played with snow yet. That's like it's like take Snapchat filters and just multiply them by a thousand. It's like, it's like, just like amazing amounts of diversity around the amount of stuff you can put on your face. It's, it is this weird convergence on identity and emoji that's kind of happening.

I agree. And in fact, this is going to be a little out, sound like a little out of left field for a moment. But the whole notion around the Chewbacca mask lady when, you know, that was the most popular Facebook live video ever. it got like unprecedented views and it was simply a woman who was trying on her tobacco mask in the car and she's laughing and giggling about it and then she puts her mask on and then she takes it off and she laughs so uninhibitedly it's insane and i make the argument that what was so empowering because it was totally took off for obvious reasons is not the fact that she was laughing so uninhibitally it's a fact that it took putting on and then taking off the

mask for her to do that which is a lot not unlike what happens with communication through these filters and being able to now express yourself through these cartoon-like ways, in a real way. It takes me back to, like, theater and, like, Shakespeare in, like, seventh and the eighth grade. I remember having these, like, really intense discussions about, like, what it is to put on a mask and what a mask represents about yourself. It's a very Cambylian idea, right, the Joseph Campbell, like, mask and the myth and the man. You're right. There's a theater. I mean, that's why people say improv is so interesting for any career field.

But I think that there is an interesting moment now coming together with selfie, selfies, stickers, emoji, bitmojis, all together, where we do have this new emotional web. Right. And using emoji, the first time I thought about this, could be kind of like putting on a mask over your, you know, self to, yeah, over your words to convey to yourself this, like, this extra, this kind of additional layer, this emphasis of your emotion that you otherwise might not get. Okay, so going back to you, writing an entire book and emoji, and yet you're saying that you've kind of evolved, you're thinking that, you know, that emoji is not necessarily language, but clearly it is a visual language. And it is a tool for communication. It's not complete. So how did you translate that? I mean, what were some of the tradeoffs and decisions you made? And by the way, for the audience, that book was like 2009. Or that was like many years ago. So what emoji space were you working off?

Did you make them up? Like, what did you do? So I had gotten in a text from my college roommate whose wife is Japanese. He sent me an emoji and I was like, what is that? They told me you could download like basically a Japanese app and it would like awaken your iPhone to the emoji keyboard. Like it just spoke to me in the like, like you have to hack the iPhone to get the special keyboard of like Japanese icons. And I was like, oh, my God, I want this so bad. I was like,

this is amazing. I should write a book an emoji. And I was like, oh, that's a lot of work. I don't know if I can write a whole book and emoji. And then I was like, well, maybe I can translate a book and emoji. I was like, okay, what books would work? And I was like, well, it has to be in the public domain because I worked a lot in like the copyright reform space. Nobody's either just like let me translate their book into emoji without a lot of effort. For a moment, I thought about the Bible. And I was like, that's too obvious. What's like, what's like totally even more inappropriate? So, Movie Dick came to mind.

Yeah, they came to mind as like this, this like impossible book to trans, to put into these symbolic characters. As soon as I thought, I was like, no, I can't do that. That's crazy. And I was like, that's like, that's like too hard. Honestly, it's a little bit like, I just came back from seeing Hamilton. And so it's a little bit like the idea of putting a rap to like the founding fathers. That's why I find so fascinating.

It's a mashup of mediums and time and culture. And it's like one of those things where you tell to somebody and they're like, you can't do that. That's crazy. And then you're like, well, the fact. that you just said that made me want to do it. Well, not only that, there are not one, but two whale emoji. Were there at that time? No, there's only the original, the cute one, the kind of eight-bit style one.

So there was a whale. Ahab is battling the cute whale. Yeah. What is the second one? The second, I think it's called sperm whale, didn't come up until later. So I was like, okay, wow, that would be really interesting to do all of Moby Dick because it's also like really long. I mean, it's 10,000 sentences.

And, okay, well, if I don't want to do this, maybe I hire somebody to do this. and I was like experimenting with mechanical Turk at the same time. I think it was like one of the original Amazon Web Services. It was like it would later become, you know, part of that AWS umbrella. Yeah, I remember people using it for research and stuff. Right. It's still used for research. It's still invaluable for that.

But, you know, a couple other people had done like an experiment here or there, like using it like off label. I had made a task of mechanical Turk just to ask Turk workers. If you could ask anyone like to do anything on Mechanical Turk, what would you have them do? And they came up with this long list of stuff. And I don't think translate a book into emoji was one of them. But there's some creativity out there. I was like, okay, I'm going to try this thing or I'm going to hire people to translate Moby Dick into emoji, some portion of it and see if this works.

So I did the first chapter and the results came back and they were hilarious. They were so good. Yeah, they were great. First of all, what do you mean you did the first chapter? Like, did they break it down word by word? So how do you can capture that in emoji? So I decided I was going to do it as on a per sentence basis. And that actually turned out to be one of the challenging parts of the project.

was like splicing sentences is actually kind of like a classically hard and a natural language processing problem. Right. And so I kind of like figured out a hack to like chop it up and I wrote a lot of regular expressions to basically get the whole book into sentences. But you decided basically that sentence was a unit of analysis, not a phrase, not a word, a sentence. You would have the sentence in the task and you say, pick any of these emoji. And then I actually wrote my own little emoji picker because these things didn't exist

at the time. I had gotten the emoji from a friend. He had reversed engineered the iPhone SDK and basically hacked out the P&G for. files from the software kit to basically have the raw emoji in image form. And so I took that and just made like a little JavaScript like HTML thing and, you know, dumped that into mechanical Turk and like came back. And I was like, hey, this works. And so I think the sentence that's kind of like on the cover of the book, if you go to the

website, it's like. The website being emoji dick. Emojidic.com. Call me Ishmael is the first sentence of Moby Dick. And the emoji that the Turk worker chose was like telephone. man with face, sailboat, whale emoji. It was perfect. The rest of it was just like indecifrable emoji nonsense.

And some of the people were just like, all right, give me my five cents. I'm going to click some random emoji. And other people just like clicked every single emoji. So the plan became have people translate the same sentence multiple times. So you get three different emoji translations for one sentence. And then have another set of tasks where people vote on the best, most appropriate translation. So like of the three, which one? got the meeting across the best.

And I was like, oh, I was just like getting really excited about this. And I started doing the math on how much it was going to cost. And I was like, oh, it's going to be thousands and thousands of dollars. That summer, I met the Kickstarter guys. I started talking with Andy Beo. He was like, you should put on Kickstarter. So that night, I went home and put it on Kickstarter launched the next day and ended up working for them. And by the way, how much of the campaign?

How much money did the campaign make? My goal was like $3,500. I ended up raising $3,700. So I worked on it for, you know, nights and weekends for another like eight or nine months. And then, you know, self-published it on Lulu.com. You can still buy it. It gets printed on demand. Do people still buy it?

I've sold, like, thousands of dollars of emoji dick. And I'd say hundreds of copies. And probably, like, five or 600 copies of it have sold since then, which is not a lot. I bet this podcast is going to sell a bunch. Yeah, well. You better share some of the proceeds with me. Okay, so there are two copies. There's a black and white copy, which is, like, the easy to print one.

And that's, like, $20 or $30. And then there's the full color one, which, like, is obviously preferable because emoji are so color. But when you're printing on demand, 800 pages of color, laser, hardbound copy, it's actually really expensive. So that thing costs like $180. Right, because you're not printing in bulk because you actually save money when you're printing in bulk.

So I have to sell that one for that much. And like, people still buy it. In 2013, the Library of Congress contacted me. And they, you know, they said, we would like to acquire emoji dick as our first emoji book. I was like, are you sure? You're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, we're sure. I was telling a friend. And David Gallagher, I think.

you must know from the Times. And he's like, you know, everyone submits their stuff to the library of Congress. It's not that big of a deal. And I was like, no, no, man, they asked for it. Like, they're acquiring it. I think it's a big deal because there's a curatorial point of view. They're saying this is a cultural moment. It's not just a book that was published.

And we need to figure out how to acquire it. I was like, all right, I'll spare a coffee. I signed it. I sent it to them. And then they sent me this little, like, you know, certificate in digital form. And what's hilarious, and this is my favorite part is that it's somehow listed as a translation of Moby Dick. So when you look up emoji Dick,

It says all these libraries have it because it's really just saying that, like, they have a translation. They have the original movie dick. Now it's got a life of its own and people still discover it. I mean, you actually even created an art show. Yeah. Friends of mine put together a kind of emoji survey art show and there were some really great stuff. And their emoji tracker was there. There was a programming language built out of emoji.

There's a lot of other stuff. I mean, that's another thing. They're literally text. So you can have like emoji at, well, I don't know at Gmail. But you can have emoji in your email address. Oh, you can also buy emoji domains. So you have an emoji book. You have emoji art shows.

Emoji hackathon. So our big news this week is that in November in San Francisco, we are going to throw the first ever emoji con, which is basically. It's like Comic Con? It's like Comic Con. It's like comic on emoji. I really hope people show up dressed in emoji costumes. You guys are going to, you guys are going to, you're going to, you guys are going to

show up as a dumpling image for sure. Or like, you know, poop emoji or like the ghost emoji. So it has many different. elements to it. So one is definitely sort of this whole emoji learn aspect where it's like panels and talks. And there's a sort of emoji film festival and then there's an emoji hackathon and then there's an emoji art show. And then of course the opening party emoji where, you know, our goals. So only have food that is also also emoji. So why a conference? I mean, of course I see the cultural significance, but to bring people together around this first, this idea of a first every emoji con. Like what's the

significance of that? I mean, part of it was I thought it already existed. And to me, I kind of Two, to be honest, when you just said that, I was like, what? Yeah. And then I was like, the fact it didn't exist. And I kind of have this issue where, like, I think something needs to be. You will make it exist, God damn. Right. So we did that with dumpling emoji.

We did it with emoji con. And so we actually have some really cool sponsors. We're going to have a lot of kind of emoji activists kind of out there. And also, you know, from our perspective, you know, there are a lot of policy decisions around emoji. And obviously, the world really cares about emoji, whether or not Star Rifle emoji or the condom emoji or, like, professional women emoji. emoji. Part of the goal of emoji con is to open up that discussion. So it is not just held at the Unicode level. Right. So our Unicode member is going to be attending this conference? Oh, members of a Unicode emoji subcommittee, including like, you know, the co-chairs. And we timed it in November

between the Unicode conference itself and the Unicode Technical Committee meeting. And also like it's right around election day. Well, you guys, thank you for joining the A6 and Z podcast. That's for having us. This is so much fun. This is so much fun. We could keep going. Hours and hours and hours on Yeah, I wish we could.