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Peter Frick-Wright (Host): This is the ���ϳԹ��� Podcast

Peter: There are two kinds of animals that humans don’t like very much: Animals with too many legs, and animals with too few legs. In the too many category, we have things like spiders and centipedes. In the too few category, we have snakes, worms, and eels. Don’t ask me why, but for some reason fish get a free pass. We like them just fine.

This bias against under- and over-legged creatures turns up everywhere. In our scientific research, which is biased towards mammals and birds. In our endangered species lists, which draw on that research. Even in an old PeeWee Herman movie, where Pee Wee is saving pets from a burning pet store.

Fred Benenson: You see him going through the store that's on fire and it's shot from behind a fish tank,... but the fish tank has a snake in it.

Peter: The person telling this story is named Fred Benenson.

Fred: And every time he goes into the burning building, he goes, grabs another furry animal or something. And you're like, oh, a ferret or whatever. And at the end, he's like looking around and he keeps on looking at the snake and he hates the fact that he's going to have to stick his hand in the snake tank. And he finally does it and he grabs all these snakes and he runs out and he's like, so, so upset that he's like, saved these snakes and he passes out. It's a brilliant scene.

Peter: Fred is not just a Peewee Herman aficionado, he was also briefly internet famous for translating Moby Dick into emojis—the famous first line “Call me Ishmael” translates to a red phone, a man’s face, a sailboat, a spouting whale, and a hand making the “OK” symbol. Anyway, since publishing Emoji Dick, he’s become something of an emoji expert. And we are talking with him because our bias against things with an uncomfortable number of legs shows up in our emojis, too. We have more cute, fluffy, four-legged animals than we do bugs and worms,—even though these kinds of animals actually make up the vast majority of species on the planet.

Fred: we have visceral reactions to these animals for, for reasons. And like, it, it, it makes sense that those reasons kind of manifest themselves in an emoji. And it's like, it's not fair from an ecological standpoint. Um, but it's like, you know, it's like, it's the fact of life. I mean, I'm looking at it now…

Peter: Fred says of course we have more emojis for animals we actually like talking about. Because the point of emojis is talking.

Fred: The reason why emojis evolved and the reason why they’re so popular is that they are a reaction against our lives becoming so heavily mediated by text…it created a vacuum for conveying non literal meanings and emojis kind of filled that.

Peter: In other words, emoji aren’t supposed to represent every single animal in nature like a textbook. They’re supposed to help us communicate. So when a creepy-crawly does get added, it shouldn’t be too hard to at least get the anatomy right. And they don’t always. Like, when the lobster emoji showed up, it didn’t have enough legs. Or the squid emoji—it’s siphon was in the wrong place, and it looked like it had a butt on its face.

Emily Simpson: It was very squidward-esque in the way they have the siphon on top of its face. so this squid just always looked wrong to anyone who was familiar with squid in any way. …once you see it, you can't unsee it.

Peter: That’s Emily Simpson. They work at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Back in 2018, Emily tweeted on behalf of emoji squids.

Emily: You know, something along the lines of, “Not even squidding the siphon should be behind the head. Just looks like a weirdo nose right now.” Um, and it went viral in a way that we weren't really expecting it to go viral.

Peter: The squid emoji eventually got fixed. Google even reached out to the aquarium for advice and ended up making some other changes, too.

Emily: They didn't take all of our suggestions, but they did take some of our suggestions to make some of their ocean emojis, or marine animal emojis, a little bit more scientifically accurate.

Peter: All’s well that ends well. Except recently, reporter Meg Duff dug up yet another emoji indignity. A small thing that became a big thing. Here’s Meg.

Meg Duff: This story starts on a group chat. I don’t remember what we were talking about, but I do remember looking for a specific animal emoji and realizing that it didn’t exist. So I started scrolling through the emojis on my phone keyboard, taking stock.  And what I saw were a lot of invertebrates in what I felt was the wrong place: Lobster, crab, shrimp; oyster. And squid. On my phone, these animal were in the food section of the emoji keyboard. I thought they belonged in the animal section. They had been reduced from members of an ecosystem, to forms of protein. And I wanted to know why. Octopus was an animal. Why was squid a food? Why, for the love of scampi, was the shrimp next to the fried shrimp? That’s like putting the cow emoji next to the steak. We wouldn’t dare! I was just filled with righteous indignation.

Have you ever developed a personal obsession that just completely baffles your family and friends? That even you don’t understand at the time? That was me with these emoji invertebrates.

Some cartoon animals were being called cartoon food, and I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

And, I knew that this was not the world’s most pressing problem. In fact, it’s actively ridiculous. But for the past two years, I’ve been reporting on climate change pretty much non-stop. You know how every week there’s a new story about oceans heating up or old growth trees dying? Well, my job is writing those stories. And each one rips a hole in my heart. I fall in love with a new creature or ecosystem—and then I have to tell the world they’re dying. There’s not much else I can do. It’s Grief with nowhere to go.

And, OK: In one sense, putting cartoon animals in the food section was not life and death. But in another sense, it was. These emojis went from drawings of something living—an animal—to drawings of something dead. A food. It bothered me. And It also seemed like A case I could solve.

Who “killed” these invertebrate emoji? How did these animals wind up categorized as foods? Was big seafood behind it? Did someone have a vendetta against a lobster gone rogue? Maybe I could figure out how this happened. Maybe, I could do something about it. So, I grabbed my magnifying glass and started sleuthing.

If you wanna figure out who dunnit, you gotta know where to look. And in this case, the obvious place to start is at the beginning. At first, Emojis were just a quirky feature on some Japanese phones. Each phone company had a different set of emojis; mostly smiley faces, plus a handful of quirky ones. One company had a bunch of cats. Another had a series of hatching chicks. When Western companies wanted to start selling phones in Japan more than a decade ago, they wanted these emojis to be compatible across phone companies. Enter the Unicode Foundation. Unicode is the group in charge of text compatibility for the entire internet. Because emojis are technically text, Unicode is in charge of them too. I talked to Fred about this.

Fred: I think of there as being like at least two eras of like Unicode emoji adoption. One is just like, “oh man we gotta standardize these weird images coming out of Japan,” and then there’s the “ok well it’s obviously deficient in terms of the vast variety of things that could be symbolized in the world, like, let’s figure out a process for doing that.”

Meg: Eventually Unicode added animals from the Americas and Australia. It added a few marine invertebrates. And somehow, five of those invertebrates wound up in the food section, not the animal section.

To figure out why, I tracked down Unicode’s online project management tool, where people can point out problems for Unicode to fix. Anyone can submit a ticket, asking them to resolve bugs or add new features. And that’s where I found my first clue. Someone had already submitted a ticket—I couldn’t track them down, but they noticed the same thing I did: that a bunch of marine animals were being categorized as food. So, they asked Unicode to move these animals back to the animal section.

And I could see, in the comments, that Unicode had looked at this. A guy named Mark asks another guy Ned to take a look. And this guy Ned says, basically, yeah, let’s fix it. Mark says this needs to be done in Unicode tools. Then: nothing. The ticket was submitted in 2021. And it’s been three years of radio silence.

So now I had a new mystery. How did this ticket get stuck? Ned, I figured out, is a software engineer; I reached out but didn’t hear back. Mark is one of the founders of Unicode. He’s the mastermind who got emojis added to our phones in the first place. Unicode’s otherwise very helpful press person did not seem to want to put me in touch.

I’d hit a dead end. And the obvious choice at this point was to move on. Because unlike real animals, emojis do not need my help. I was ready to put all this behind me. But then I talked to Emily. Who reminded me how underappreciated these animals really are. Like, take crabs. We see them as bottom-feeding scavengers, when in fact, they are maybe the most evolved creatures in the ocean.

Emily: Uh, yeah. Because a lot of animals in the ocean have developed these crab-like bodies, even though they are not crabs. And it's because like the, I guess the crab shape evolutionarily is like the ultimate form in the ocean.

Meg: Emily taught me the word carcinization: which means to become more crab-like.

Meg Interview: I'm making little crab hands right now. Are, have we also,  I, I, I don't know.

Emily: I am also making little crab hands right now too.

Meg Interview : Have we carcinize,  carcin, carcinizied?

Emily: We are slowly becoming crab.

Meg: Crabs! The pinnacle of evolution! Except on my phone, they were just listed as a food. And we talked about that too.

Emily: I think it kind of ties back to that empathy building…if the only way that you see them or that you think about them in your brain is as food, and then that’s only reinforced when you’re scrolling through your emojis and you only see them in the food section, then you’re going to have this unconscious bias… that oh this is a food source and not something that I should care about.

Meg: Closing this ticket, getting these emoji moved back to the animal section, it doesn’t matter for the emojis. But maybe it matters for us. For how we see the world. And Emily says, how we see the world has an impact. Not for the emoji crab, but for the real crabs and oysters and shrimps and squids, in our very real, struggling oceans. Multiplied by billions of users, even tiny nudges can shape things.

Emily: Social media platforms tend to be very visual mediums. …when we have to use text, having emojis in the text really does change the way that our audience engages

Meg: There is some of evidence that emojis matter in the real world. When the lobster emoji was announced, google searches skyrocketed for “red lobster near me”. And Ford ran a whole stealth campaign to get the pickup truck emoji added. They obviously thought it would help sell trucks. Maybe you don’t look at the emoji keyboard much. Maybe you just start typing to find the one you want. But even if you only glance at the keyboard occasionally, those impressions add up. The same way that seeing an ad when you scroll might help you remember a brand—even if you never click.

Fred: Like, if we think about the number of people who have smartphones, it's like in the billions and most of them are up to date now. So this is actually like. Probably some of the highest in demand real estate on digital screens in the history of ever.

Meg: So, I kept at it, trying to figure out how these emoji got added in the first place, so that I might figure out how to get them back where they belong. In theory anyone can submit a proposal for a new emoji to Unicode. That’s how the lobster emoji got in.

When the lobster was added, back in 2018, Unicode did put it in the animals section. By that time, crab and shrimp, the other crustaceans, were already around, and they were animals too. So was the squid. Up to this point, new animals were going in the animals section.

The oyster came next. And as far as I can tell, it was the oyster that broke things. On iphones, it wound up in the food section. And on my phone, it dragged a whole bunch of other animals with it.

[Audio of Fred Benenson’s oyster night]

Meg: Fred has a monthly oyster night.

[Audio of Fred Benenson’s oyster night]

Meg: He really likes oysters. In fact, Fred is the person who got the oyster emoji added.

Fred: One of my favorite facts about oysters are that they represent, um, the  earliest evidence we have for humans like living near waterways because they would eat them and toss the shells and then oyster middens became very good evidence for humans being there. To me, that's such an awesome transcendental food fact. It's like, there's no domestication, right? People enjoyed it in exactly the same way that we're enjoying it. And it's like this throughline of sustainable aqua agriculture.

Meg: Fred actually proposed the oyster emoji twice. The first time, he said they should go in the animal section of the emoji keyboard, and his proposal was rejected. The second time, he said the oysters should be listed as food.

Fred: 99% of people, when you say oyster, are going to be like, ok, like, half a dozen or a dozen, right?

Meg: The fact that the oyster-as-food emoji is the one that got accepted highlights an age-old problem in computing. How do you decide what goes where?

Fred: ordering things has a degree of bias inherently, right? This is the story of the internet right now, the algorithmic feed versus timeline. What does Google show you at the top? Like, how do you organize information? …And there’s a lot of like choice in that for a long time Google was like, ‘well, we just want to make sure you get the information you're looking for.’ And that’s actually a very hard problem. They used to call it the Paris Hilton problem. When you type Paris Hilton are you looking for Paris Hilton the person, or the Hilton in Paris the Hotel? And it really matters.

Meg: When Unicode added the oyster, it had a Paris Hilton problem. Were people using the oyster emoji to talk about marine ecosystems, or about cocktail hour?

They wound up putting the oyster in the food section and moved the lobster, crab, shrimp, and squid with it. Two years later, someone opened a ticket asking to have them all moved back—that’s the ticket I found. And Fred, whose oyster proposal may have sparked all this, didn’t know anything about that.

So, I looked up who was in charge of emojis at the time. Turns out? it was Mark. The guy who commented on the ticket. The founder of Unicode. The person who got Unicode to encode these animals in the first place.

To figure out how these emoji got here and how to get this ticket closed, I needed to talk with Mark. So, I did some more sleuthing.

I eventually found his email address, buried in an email thread, that had been published on a listserv in 2008.

And, I was too nervous to reach out. The mastermind behind the emojis we use today had to be too busy to talk to me. But when I finally emailed him, he responded immediately. And that conversation changed the way I looked at this whole mystery. That’s after the break.

[Ad Break]

Meg: To recap–I’ve been on the case of a very important mystery, on behalf of animals that don’t look like us, and that we don’t tend to like. In particular, I’m investigating on behalf of emoji invertebrates: the squid, crab, lobster, oyster, and shrimp, which all show up in my phone’s emoij keyboard as foods, not as animals. Someone submitted a ticket to Unicode asking for this to get fixed, and I want to get that ticket closed. Because maybe moving these emoji can help us see these creatures as worthy of care.

So, I reached out to the mastermind responsible for bringing us emojis in the first place. Mark Davis is a founder of Unicode and currently the board chair. Sometimes people call him the “shadowy emoji overlord” but that’s mostly cause his daughter put that on a t-shirt.

I wanted to ask the shadowy emoji overlord why this ticket still hadn’t been closed. But first, I wanted to know why he cared about emojis. Why did emojis matter?

Mark Davis: What most people don’t realize is that languages and the rendering of texts in different languages, different scripts is very complex. But emoji have their own complexities, and those exercise some of the same issues that languages do. And so by having emoji, we’ve actually improved language support around the world. Because implementations have stepped up to support emoji, and at the same time have stepped up to support characters.

Meg: Mark told me that supporting emojis also prepared companies to support alphabets with thousands of characters, like Chinese. And under the hood, emojis can be joined together to make different emojis; that wound up enabling scripts like Arabic, where letters change depending on the letter they are next to. So emoji have pushed our tech to become more inclusive. Anyway, Back to the oysters.

Meg Interview: In 2019 the oyster gets added, and that feels like the one that maybe just broke someone’s brain, where somebody said like, no that’s a food. In fact. Let’s make all of these foods. Is that what happened? Do you know how they got here in the first place?

Mark: That would have been when I was heading the Emoji subcommittee. I can’t remember the exact instance, but there were many times when we would look at the categories and decide, well, it’s really the number of emoji in that category have really outgrown the category, And we can look at splitting the category in another sensible way in order to make it easier for people to find things. So I suspect that’s what happened in that case.

Meg: So when emojis outgrow their categories, Mark says, they sometimes get put in new ones. And sometimes they don’t. But as for what happened to the ticket asking to move those animals back to the animal category, that was more straightforward. It got lost. Mark’s committee is also in charge of things like making sure country names and time zones show up correctly across platforms. That committee has a lot of tickets.

Mark: And so this one kind of got lost in that big pool of tickets. It was not marked as a priority ticket.

Meg: Essentially, my mystery wasn’t important enough to get solved. The good news is, it is an easy fix. It just needed to get reassigned.

Mark: In this particular case, it’s actually just moving inside of a text fine and verifying that all the tests work and that everything continues to work properly.

Meg: But as to whether or not these animals should be moved back to the animal section, Mark was neutral. He’s no longer in charge of emojis. The ball is in someone else’s court. And that someone is Jennifer Daniel.

Meg Interview: I really appreciate you taking the time.

Jennifer Daniel: Are you kidding me? All my friends are like, ‘you want to talk to me?” because they are so tired of hearing me talk about emoji all the time.

Meg: Jennifer said she hadn’t been aware that this ticket even existed. And she couldn’t tell me exactly when this ticket would get fixed.

Jennifer: because the person who I think is in that bug that you referenced has been on vacation.

Meg: But she did say that she’d try to get it resolved. When I followed up with Unicode, they said that they are prioritizing this ticket. All of these animals, lobster crab shrimp squid and oyster are moving back to the animal section. So. Case closed. Or so I thought. Because this is the part of the story where the plot twists, and your detective suddenly looks at her mystery as a completely different thing.

Jennifer: Yeah no um I actually, how old is your Samsung?

Meg: Oh, Jennifer, it’s OLD. I think it’s

Jennifer: It’s older than 2019?

Meg: Yeah it’s an S9. I think it’s like 2018 maybe.

Jennifer: Yeah. I think if you update it you will be pleasantly surprised.

Meg: This ticket I’ve been trying to close—it may not actually be impacting that many people. Because while Unicode can suggest an emoji sort order, Apple and Google don’t have to listen. They can sort their emoji keyboard however they want. Jennifer is in charge of emojis for Unicode, but she also works for Google. And she is actually one of the people  who helped re-organize Google’s emoji keyboard.

Jennifer: In 2019 or 2018 I did a big audit of how the emojis are ordered. I did a bunch of research around where people expect to find them and reordered the entire emoji keyboard, based on what you’re observing.

Meg: Google made a bunch of changes. Within categories, they put some emojis in order of color, to make them easier to find. They ran global surveys to figure out where people expected to find things. Most people surveyed saw the lobster as an animal, so that’s where it went.

Jennifer: So I think the issue you’re describing is very unique to certain environments but at least in the areas that I work in, all the animals that are not cooked are in the animal and nature section, and all the animals that are prepared are in the food section with the exception of lobster because it’s red and lobsters are only red when they’re cooked. So as a compromise, I slipped it into both.

Meg: I was wondering about this! OK because I was looking on Google and I was like, wait a minute, there is a double here.

Jennifer: Very few are in both because then the keyboard would be crazy.

Meg: The oyster is the other emoji she put both places. Apple took a different approach. It has lobster, squid, shrimp and crab in the animal section. But it lists oyster as a food. Even if I succeed in getting Unicode to close their ticket, it’s not clear if that would change. And actually: that might be OK.

Because not only does my emoji mystery mostly only affect older phones, it turns out that looking at oysters as food, and eating them, could actually be a good thing. Because unlike raising cows, which release methane and destroy habitats, farming oysters actually benefits the planet.

Fred: They’re really important for ecosystems, but they’re like, passive filter feeders. And so the thing that they do is like, not visible, right? It’s the lack of the pollution, or its the lack of bacteria in the water that oysters contribute.

Meg: It’s possible that an oyster emoji that pops up in the “food” section would help push people to eat more oysters.

Fred: Like if your friend sends you an oyster emoji and it’s more fun than saying “getting oysters” does it just marginally increase your chance of eating oyster? And if it increases your chance of eating the oyster, does it marginally increase the demand for oysters and thereby help a sustainable aquaculture? Yeah, Like probably it stands to reason that it made an impact, I think its existence probably has increased the number of oysters that have been consumed in the world.

Meg Interview: Have you ever sat down and thought about that? Like, what is my personal impact on global oyster demand?

Fred: No! No no no, I did not at all until this very moment.

Fred: Then there’s the fact that Apple, Google, and Unicode all put oysters towards the end of the food section. Steak is closer to the top. Things higher in lists often get more clicks, so moving oysters up in the sort order might also make a tiny difference. I asked Jennifer about that, right as we were wrapping up.

Meg Interview: If we assume that sort order does have some influence on consumer choice and consumer behavior, what responsibility do companies like Google, like Apple or organizations like Unicode have in terms of the decisions, the consumer behavior that you're shaping. So for, for example, if we should be eating more oyster as a society and less beef, if we want to help the planet, um, is there a responsibility to take that into consideration?

Jennifer: I think we're out of time. (both laugh) I'm kidding! You know, it's, um, the question is a provocative one, right?  I am not aware of any research that indicates or alludes to what you're poking at. If there was, I would certainly be looking into it, right?

Jennifer has had her hands full dealing with other excellent emoji updates, like making skin tones easier to adjust, and updating emojis that reflect outdated gender norms. But Google, Apple, and Unicode could probably do this research themselves, if they wanted to. If emoji sort order doesn’t actually impact our food choices, which it might not, They could also find other ways to use emoji to normalize environmentally friendly choices. Like, changing which emojis pop up in predictive text when you type in the word “meat.” Or re-designing the lobster to look alive instead of dead. But changes like that are not currently on the agenda.

And fine, maybe they don’t need to be. Maybe this is and has always been a ridiculous quest. But it made me notice other people on their own side quests, all trying to get tech companies to do much more to slow climate change. Like a asking Google to stop profiting from climate disinformation. Or the one their company to divest from fossil fuels.

And then there’s the whole reason I discovered this ticket in the first place: because I was trying to make the environmentally friendly choice by waiting as long as possible to get a new phone. My six-year-old Samsung was literally falling apart—by the time I talked to Jennifer, the power button had fallen out. But it was also no longer getting updates. My best guess is that It didn’t have the newest emoji keyboard because Samsung chose not to provide that software to older phones.

This is another place where people have been pushing tech companies to do better. And there’s actually progress happening. As of this year, Samsung will for 7 years instead of 4. And a number of states have started passing right-to-repair laws, requiring tech companies to make their phones easier to fix when they break.

I wanted Google and Apple and Unicode to use emojis to nudge their users. But users can also nudge tech companies. That may wind up being an even more effective way to achieve the goal that I think I was really trying to achieve all along: To make climate change a little less bad. To save what we can, while we can.

So. Did my emoji quest matter, for the planet? I have no idea. Maybe I would have been better off doing anything else. But my quest did take me from a place of feeling stuck, to a place of action. It got me laughing with my friends and reminded me that I was not alone in my grief, or my fear, or my determination.

And throwing weird emoji spaghetti at the wall helped me notice some other ideas that just might stick.

So when you get lost in grief, don’t try to think your way out. Just act. The world is still your oyster.

Peter Host Outro: Meg Duff is a reporter and producer in Brooklyn.

This episode was written and produced by Meg, with editing by me, Peter Frick-Wright, and Robbie Carver. Music and sound design by Robbie as well.

The ���ϳԹ��� Podcast is made possible by our ���ϳԹ��� Plus members. Learn more about all the benefits of membership at outsideonline.com/podplus.