The unbearable rudeness of the thumbs up emoji

Years ago, in the midst of a dating spree that involved numerous encounters with erratic and callous young men, I often consulted my cousin. She’s a cool, emotionally controlled New Yorker who seemed to have an innate knowledge of how to seize and maintain power in sexual or would-be sexual entanglements. She often advised me to nix the wordy message I had planned, especially in response to an outrageous slight, like a last-minute cancellation with a crap excuse and an insincere apology, and send a single yellow thumbs up instead. This was the craftier, nastier update on the cumbrous and obscene big blue thumb from Facebook messenger.

Her advice was clever. The thumbs up was clearly cold, oozing with disdain and passive aggression, but was unassailable – you can’t tell someone to calm down, or accuse them of being over the top, or emotionally incontinent if they send a thumbs up. It says: ‘I don’t care because you’re beneath caring’. It says: ‘OK dude, whatever, your actions don’t really matter apart from being mildly annoying’. It is, in short, in human psychological terms, a massive thumbs down: an obliteration, death by apathy and insouciant, carefree dismissal. You don’t matter one bit, it says.

And I felt great after sending it. I felt powerful, like I’d delivered a blow no wordy message could. And it usually worked – either the men were too tone-deaf to suspect I was not literally approving of their message, or they were piqued by its remoteness. Since then, WhatsApp has upped the reactions ante, so that instead of having to occupy a whole message window with a chosen emoji you can now react to a given message. July 2022 saw the first core menu for these ‘quick reactions’, before they were widened out to include all of them – but it’s the thumbs up that seems to be used most.

From here has tumbled the whole of civilisation, inasmuch as civilisation depends on a proper system of language. That yellow thumb that my cousin so craftily recommended is now running rampant throughout private communication of all kinds – among friends, colleagues, even family and romantic relationships. Almost every in-depth WhatsApp conversation I have now is absolutely littered with them, like curses on my earnest chunks of text, tripping me up each time with their rude blankness. 

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Certain friends of mine have always been terser than me, but now they’re allowed to run the show without any pretence at effort. To my heartfelt observations or confidences, some return nothing more than a callous thumbs up that serves to kill dead the flow of words, the sense of communicating with a human, and any confidence in what one has said. I hit my head time and again on the puzzlement – if ‘agree’ or ‘correct’, rendered pictographically, is all the person can think of to respond, who are they, who am I, and why are we bothering to talk?

In one recent interaction, I shared with a friend – in response to her query – some quite stressful updates about when my baby is going to be delivered, namely three weeks earlier than she is due, because of various last-minute complications. Response? The little yellow thumby mcthumb slapped on the bottom right of my dramatic paragraph. Alright then, I thought. Guess I know where to take and shove my baby news! 

Even the father of my child isn’t immune. A fairly eloquent fellow, a few months ago he began making heavy use of the little yellow thumb. Usually he uses it as a substitute for ‘OK’ or ‘yes’ but I can’t help but wonder what else he might say to enrich our communication if only the thumb was off the table. He might say, ‘good point, but perhaps x, y, z,’ or, as I tend to interpret the thumb as an inherently hostile apparatus, ‘OK dummy, tell me something that doesn’t make me fall asleep’.

For a while I protested, saying: ‘so many thumbs!’ But eventually I just gave up and now I sometimes use them as a private form of revenge-taking. Two can play the game of blanks, of non-communication communication. 

It gets worse. The ubiquity of this facile icon is fuelling a growing inability to distinguish between perfunctory (‘meet at 5 p.m. in front of Russell Square Tube’) – which might well not merit much more – and ‘I just had a row with all my loved ones so I am feeling absolutely awful and need a rest’ or ‘I’ve just been sick all night and feel I might die’ or even ‘I hate my boyfriend so much right now I think I’m going to blow everything up’. To a certain kind of modern person, whose language skills are submerged in the hostile robotic affect of our day, even this gets the thumb of bored acknowledgement. 

There is also the minefield around race. The yellow of the standard thumb may be sickly, with lashings of Homer Simpson, but it’s the safe choice for white people. That there is a range of white hues is odd. What are we to make of the person who eschews the standard yellow and, cycling across the list, chooses the paler pinky one? Is it to show that this person’s skin is a fairer shade of white and if so, why? And what if an accidental black thumb (or other person-related emoji) is selected– what then? It could be instant career death. 

En fin, for those of us who depend on acknowledgement and panic at blankness, the thumb is psychological botulism. As a reportedly cheery and charming toddler who thrived on everyone smiling back at me, I allegedly once burst into tears when a man wearing aviators at Pisa airport didn’t smile back. He just looked, and grimaced. It was the thumbs up of its day – and now it’s everywhere.