***Sad music playing***
A speaker stands before the people.
“Born in 1990 and added to the Unicode 6.0 in 2010 the once inspring sparkles emoji has lost it’s meaning and value. And so we lay it to rest. Family and friends are gathered here today to celebrate the fond memories we have and to mourn the end of an era.
Because once -now forgotten- the sparkles emoji brought beauty, happiness or awe to any little text we would write. Tapping in to manga and anime culture we used the mysterious emoji to give our messages this little poetic extra. It brought depth, energy and joy.
This ended abruptly in de 2020’s when the Sparkles emoji started being used as an icon to represent (generative) artificial intelligence by Google, OpenAI, Samsung, Microsoft, Adobe, Spotify, Zoom and the rest of the pack. And even though these tech bros might actually believe their technology is magical, the magic is mostly in environmental destruction, misinformation, creating bias, abuse of cheap labor, limiting access to knowledge and killing creativity. And thus sparkles, you lost your shine. Adding you to a text doesn’t show joy, it shows fake.
This magic-technology link is not a new phenomenon. A lot of tech we do not understand feels magical, because we regard the outcome as high when a human would have produced it. GenAI can write a book in 20 second while it takes a human 10 years! That has to be magic. By now we know it is not, and those books are not really books.
Sadly the tech bros will not surrender our beloved sparkles emoji back to us. They just love abusing culture to sell their toxic view of the world. Remember the stupid Tesla in space, for ever ruining both the The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and the songs of David Bowie in one grand gesture. Just bros legitimising their enterprises by annexing the great ideas that could never have come out of their machines in the first place.
Back to our dear sparkly friend: we hate to see you go. You are tiny, but you represent something big. We promise to look for and create new and real magic in the barren world we find ourselves in today. May the *real* magic never die.
We look at you one last time and return you to the stars.”
***More sad music playing***