Finally, a way to vote for the hard-earned emoji you want and deserve
Those funny little symbols you innocently share with your friends every day? They mask a totalitarian conspiracy, basically.
The secretive way our emoji are reviewed and chosen by the Unicode Consortium, a non-profit group set up to standardise symbols online (in other words, your standard Illuminati front), is contrary to every democratic value our founding mothers and fathers held dear.
It is the iron fist of Unicode that has kept the "hang 10" emoji from you for so long. Break down emoji-by-committee and let the people decide, dammit. Let the proletariat have the pancake emoji if they want it. Let them have the little UFO!
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In a small but significant development, EmojiRequest has created a compromise. Now the shivering masses can vote for the gold bars emoji and slowly but surely swarm the gates of Unicode and reclaim what is rightfully theirs. Emoji Request, by its own admission, has nothing to do with Unicode, but it does apparently plan to "create well-formed Emoji proposals for the most requested Emojis."
As Mashable has laid out, submitting a new request to Unicode is a belaboured pursuit, and one that can take more than a year to complete. EmojiRequest won't let you bypass the process, but it could help fulfil one of Unicode's important selection factors for new emoji -- how frequently it's requested.
Return the memes of production to the people, one emoji at a time.
Ariel Bogle was an associate editor with Mashable in Australia covering technology. Previously, Ariel was associate editor at Future Tense in Washington DC, an editorial initiative between Slate and New America.
