The Upside-Down Smiley Is The Breezy, Nihilist Face Of 2019

You’ve probably seen this 🙃 emoji attached to a piece of political or tech or culture news in a tweet or a text, in the last few months. Like this:

You often see the 🙃 atop the sort of news that might normally be accompanied by a skull, so as to say, my head has exploded and I am dead now. But the 🙃 carries a more chill, medicated, c’est la vie vibe, because only a fool could be shocked these days.

“Emoji nihilism?” a colleague replied, when I asked how he would define the exact emotion being conveyed here. It’s not like there’s a correct usage answer; the 🙃 doesn’t capture some real-life physical expression. Still, when asked conversationally, people generally described an inverted smiley face in similar ways. Someone compared the tone to Russian fatalism (more Gogol or Pushkin than Dostoyevsky; “hiding a deeper cut,” as this person put it in a now-deleted tweet). A survey of Slack and Twitter produced this tour through a breezy darkness:

“Wow things are kind of fucked up, but here I am living my life”

“This sucks, but what can you do”

“It’s like, ‘I’ve been inconvenienced but this is fine, nothing matters’”

“A shrug so powerful it inverts you”

In 2015, Max Read argued the use of emoji — at that point, the thinking-face emoji had become popular for politics commentary — served as a Jim Halpert-style, straight man’s reaction shot, in a medium that demands reaction. “But why insist that the reaction be despondent, terrified, or sarcastic?” he wrote. “Why can’t it be affirmative, as all proper fatalism should be? 🙃 knows people are weird and stupid and crazy — and it knows there’s nothing to be done so you might as well enjoy it.”

Take a smiley face, roll it over SOS-style, and you end up with a cool distance between you and the great sadness.

An emoji can come into vogue without an exact tonal or substantive meaning, instead defined through some silent collective at work. And even though it might sound stupid to devote this much energy to what an inverted smiley face means, this is how people talk all day. Football players announce their commitments via emoji. An ongoing subplot of Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s new novel involves expansive use of emojis in divorcee sexting, and what any particular one might mean. (“Does [purple devil emoji] mean Third? Or Lex?”) For all the concern about artificial intelligence creeping into our homes or whatever, consider that we are not ourselves static robots at the mercy of algorithms, but in fact respond to them and constantly change the way we write. Every day, we pour thousands of words and images into machines. Twitter, Instagram, and texting are (hungry) machines that constantly demand new words and formats, which rise, fade or fall, and sometimes reemerge, with or without irony.

Source: Buzzfeednews.com

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