The revolution will not be pasteurised

It’s been almost a year since Downtime talked emojis, but from far-right tool bag Jair Bolsonaro seizing power in Brazil to a supermarket magazine editor thinking it’s normal to reply to a freelancer’s pitch by joking about slaughtering all vegans, we don’t know where else to turn for politically correct content. Let’s take a look at our iOS 12.1 emoji additions and see if we can find solace somewhere in their gammon-enraging inclusivity.

Where better to start than the black man with ginger moustache? Now there’s an emoji ready to provoke opponents of “political correctness gone mad” if ever we’ve seen one. These days, anyone can be ginger, which you just know won’t go down well with the kind of people who think anyone can voice a South Asian cartoon character without modern society rejecting it as minstrelsy.

Such emoji newcomers are a small but savourable victory for those of us who just don’t really go in for excluding, marginalising or insulting the socially disadvantaged or discriminated against. We’ll probably never need to call on him, but we’ll love knowing he’s there.

In these scary, reactionary times, may our emojis continue to flourish as our ever-diversifying rhetorical warpaint. The fascists can take as many countries as they like, but as long as those nice hippies are knocking about in that Unicode Consortium office, a resistance will find its home online; and it will be strewn with transgender remoaner nazar amulets, pansexual communist peacocks and avocado-infused, George-Soros-funded, vegan cupcakes.