When
Elon Musk walked into Twitter headquarters in
late October carrying a sink, it seemed like that image might be the lasting
one to exemplify the unfolding chaos and showmanship of the Musk Twitter era.
In early November, however, as layoffs roiled the company and former employees
announced their departures on Twitter, a new image emerged: the saluting-face
emoji.
اضافة اعلان
Like all emoji, the saluting face looks different on
different platforms. The Apple version has half of the face missing, to fit the
raised hand into the frame. This gives it an unsettling quality, as if it’s in
danger. The Twitter version has two intense eyebrows and a straight mouth,
implying a grim acceptance of fate.
A military salute, of course, implies respect and solemnity,
which is one of the reasons the emoji has worked so well as a gesture made on
Slack to co-workers as the ship goes down. It is also a symbol of dignified
resignation, and a response not only to Twitter’s unpredictable layoffs but
also the tech industry’s other mass firings.
And it has been gaining broader appeal, with the help of
Gen Z’s emoji irony. “emoji of the year I think,” enthused one Twitter user, in a
tweet that has more than 80,000 likes, “genuinely don’t remember how I used to
communicate before it”.
The salutes gained traction on the evening of November 3,
when an unsigned email told Twitter’s 7,500 employees that they would be
learning via email the following day whether or not they had a job. Within a
few hours, employees began seeing their access to company communications
disappearing.
Twitter’s internal Slack went electric with goodbye notes
and heart emoji and an increasing number of saluting hands.
During the first round of cuts “employees were on Slack, and
they would announce that they had lost access to Gmail and salute one last time
in Slack, and everyone was saluting back, and then they would announce on the
private channel that they had lost all access,” said Peter Clowes, an engineer
based in Boulder,
Colorado, who recently left Twitter. “Remember, nobody knew
how big the cuts would be. They just knew that they would happen sometime that
night. It was really eerie, seeing the salutes start to dwindle, and then
disappear.”
From there, the saluting hands migrated to Twitter itself,
and then — as more companies such as Meta and Amazon announced layoffs — it was
used within those companies in much the same way: a long goodbye between
departing employees and their last-standing co-workers. At one point, during an
online exchange between Musk and an engineer, Musk announced that the engineer
had been fired. The engineer’s response? A cheeky salute.
Emoji have a special power to acquire meaning in real time,
as some have theorized. “Unlike words, we know exactly when each individual
emoji came into existence and are pre-warned of new ones,” reads a 2021
academic paper on the evolving meaning of emoji.
Keith Broni, the editor-in-chief of Emojipedia.com, a
reference site and emoji archive, said the “versatile” saluting hands emoji had
not climbed the charts until very recently. As of this writing, it is the fifth
most clicked-on emoji on its site, according to its
Google analytics reporting.
“This is the kind of stuff that happens with emojis all the time,” he said in a
phone call. A symbol can be “sitting on the keyboard for years before its
moment happens,” he said.
Broni says that the surge in saluting hands reminds him of
previous emoji trends, like when people’s use of the scarf emoji quadrupled
after Taylor Swift dropped her 2021 version of the song “All Too Well.” (In it,
she discusses the scarf that she left at then-boyfriend Jake Gyllenhaal’s
house.) Before it officially debuted in 2021, the saluting hands emoji was one
of the “most requested” from Emojipedia users, Broni said.
In the future, Broni said, the emoji’s use will probably ebb
and flow, but he believes it will remain much higher profile than before
Twitter employees deployed it. “It’s certainly going to diminish over the next
month or so,” he said. “But will it return back down to a low level? I would
say no.”
As a symbol, tech company employees seem to use the salute
to loosely identify as service people who are banding together, which can seem
like an overreach to some observers.
“I will go on the record saying that all public behavior
from Silicon Valley is deeply self-aggrandizing and kind of cringe,” said Ryan
Broderick, who covers digital culture in his Substack newsletter, “Garbage
Day”. For Broderick, who, like most tech reporters, has been watching the
changes at Twitter closely, the question is: What happens after the
saluting-face emoji loses steam? He wonders if the small gesture of solidarity
will prompt tech company employees to take up collective labor action and
unionize.
“The saluting emoji is a great first attempt at building
solidarity,” he said. “Everyone watching is saying that this is insane and
horrifying and could happen at any company regardless of your free lunch.”
For those in the center, it achieved that result. According
to Clowes, the former Twitter engineer, the army of saluting emoji was
“probably one of the more tragically beautiful mass people group things” he has
ever seen.
It was a “trivial gesture, but behind it were a lot people
wondering what their life would look like in the morning,” he wrote in a
Twitter direct message. “And they were saluting the others in that boat with
them.”
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