Mankind (and if that word offends you this is going to be a rough piece), is on the cusp of a great societal breakthrough. Around 3500 BC we built a great tower, and challenged God for control of the heavens. God was not amused, and sentenced us to language diversity. You can read the original story in Genesis 11.

Mankind now has an answer. It took us long enough. Maybe God had a point.

What, you ask, am I talking about? You can now order a pizza by texting an emoji. A *single* emoji. Here is the commercial if you want to waste your bandwidth.

I’ll type slowly now, so my train of thought makes it up Logic Mountain.

Reason is old-fashioned, a product of Victorian Childhood Fantasy: outdated. The new “in thing” is emotion. Nothing is more emotional than outrage. Think of the efficiency gains if twitterers could send a single emoticon instead of a 140 character screed? That would be an increase in productivity of 14000%, according to official government statistical methods. Do I believe that? Let’s just say for auditing purposes, I do.

All of our other needs can be broken into emotional icons as well. Hungry? Thirsty? Need an iPhone? How about a diaper change? Yes, yes, yes, and ew.

Look, the move to icon-based emotional reasoning has been building for a while. It was good enough for the Egyptians, it should be good enough for us, too. We can’t fight it.

Like all new technological changes, there will be winners and losers.

Winners
Twitter users, obviously. We covered that. John Scalzi, who tweets 40-60 times a day, will be able to share his wisdom an additional… 8400 times, best case. I know! Bask!

Women are also big winners. They complained about minor photoshop editing and a Taylor Swift video, they’ll complain about anything. They’ll have thousands of emoticons to express themselves. Tens of thousands.

Losers
Men. Men will need four emoticons:

• Need Food
• Need Booze
• Need Companionship (I know… we’re a family blog!)
• Need Clean Underpants

Let’s face it, with such a limited vocabulary men are doomed. Yay, feministas!

Authors. Come on, you all saw this coming. About 1/3 of high school graduates can read, and only about 10% of those readers can comprehend even the simplest concepts. Take the word slate – a large percentage of the reading population doesn’t even know the correct definition. It will be quite difficult to write meaningful stories using emojis.

So, there you have it. Thanks to a pizza delivery company, we’ll have a true, universal language once again. I’m sure a group of well-meaning Social Justice Warriors will screw it up.

I just hope God is finally over it.

–> Q

Disclaimer: There is a lot of misinformation on the internet. You should probably assume this blog post is doing it’s part to add to it.