Remember when Apple was cool?
“Think Different,” they used to say—and they meant it. Black-and-white commercials, copywriting that gave even seasoned Wieden+Kennedy creatives chills, and that thrilling sense that the world was truly changing. I still have an original campaign poster with Kermit and Jim Henson. I’ll never sell it.
Fast forward to 2025. Geneva Airport. I turn around and BAM! A billboard.
“One idea. One Genmoji.”
A hipster raccoon. An anthropomorphic hot dog in a double-breasted suit. A pigeon dressed like a burnout trapper. Here’s the thing: this isn’t language. It’s noise. Visual spam disguised as branding. It’s the aesthetic of hollow signs—where, to quote Barthes, the author is dead, and meaning has been replaced by trend.
Peirce warned us: signs (yes, even emojis) are never neutral. They’re conventions, symbols, icons, indexes. And when all three are generated in batches by an algorithm, you’re no longer communicating—you’re performing.
Wittgenstein wrote, “The limits of my language are the limits of my world.”
If that’s true, then today our world is made of suit-wearing emojis dancing for likes.
Apple no longer thinks different. Apple mimics difference.
It formats it. Encodes it.
What happened to Jobs? No, not Steve—the mindset. The iconoclasm. The man who wanted silence at his funeral as the message, and handed out copies of Autobiography of a Yogi.
Or maybe I’m just turning into one of those old men who stares at construction sites and complains about everything.
At least I don’t draw Genmojis of them.
See you next week,
Simone Puorto
