Both the things I'm about to describe—a brand aversion and a software project—come from the same place: feeling unsafe. This isn't a choice. It's incidental to life. When I feel less safe, I act like an animal. One cannot control this directly. One can only influence whether they feel safe.
I've been in love with my wife since I met her in middle school. We've been head over heels in love since, and I'm utterly charmed by everything she does. Everyone who has met me knows it almost instantly. I'm an utter devotee, and I don't mind admitting it.
I mention this because I'm about to tell you that I don't like being charmed. That sounds cold. It's not. I'm selective. I don't like when brands, companies, or strangers try to perform emotional appeals at me. It doesn't work. I'm only negatively affected by it. I have no idea what it would be like to be charmed by a logo.
I have a complicated relationship with emoji. I like the idea of characters that are cute faces. But I don't enjoy when people use emoji as emotional appeals, as substitutes for language, or as attempts to charm.
And then there's the brand with the hugging face. I had a grudge against them for years. The emoji brand felt like an attempt to work on me. It didn't work—it just made me uncomfortable.
Writing this out has cleared the block. I don't have the grudge anymore. But the discomfort with emoji-as-manipulation remains.
People tend to imagine things happening in order, then construct a narrative, then infer cause and effect, then branch into a cascade of incorrect assumptions built on those initially incorrect ones. This is the gateway drug to all manner of fallacies.
Here's the thing about time and space: if you and I are separated by time, we must also be separated by space. If we are separated by space, we must also be separated by time—unless we can travel faster than light.
People treat temporal proximity as meaningful while ignoring spatial proximity. Things far away, or long ago, or which haven't happened, tend to be less able to affect you than things which are here and now.
(The pedant will note exceptions: constitutions, nuclear wars, climate change. Fine. These are edge cases—the 1%. They only matter when ordinary life has already broken down. In the overwhelming majority of moments, distant things stay distant. This post is about the 99%.)
I'm not telling you this in chronological order. That's deliberate. The sequence doesn't imply causation. Rob Pike didn't cause emoji manipulation. Democracy didn't cause brand discomfort. These things happened. They're connected by proximity, not by purpose.
I don't want to abolish emoji. I don't mind that other people enjoy them. I just wish I could devise a way to never experience emoji-as-emotional-appeal.
So I'm building something: a browser extension combined with llama.cpp that can remove ontologically offensive artifacts from content automatically. Emoji-as-emotional-appeal is the starting use case.
Yes, I'm building myself an echo chamber. I'm aware. I'm building it anyway.
When I feel unsafe, I act to create safety. The brand aversion, the browser extension—these are animal responses. I'm not defending them as rational. I'm explaining them as real.
TODO: this is just the intro to the post. the post is shows how we build the extension, and includes the extension code and dev process, and retrospective/feedback on using the extension, and a link to download the extension. Also, the above intro needs to be expanded b probably 4x with just more prose and treatment.